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where, cannot be clues to us in any degree as to the method 
of its initiation. The only rational explanation of this sacri- 
ficial system is that it was originally appointed by God himself, 
in the same manner and for the same purpose for which the 
Hebrew system was appointed. 
I know that it may be said that the evolutionists claim the 
details of the Mosaic Dispensation as being only corroborations 
of their theory. But against this I may place the fact, that 
that Dispensation, in its later exponents at least, claims to 
have been a lesson to the old world of the coming sacrifice of 
Christ; and, if that sacrifice be not historical, we may as well 
shut up history altogether. Nay, the very sacrifice of Christ, 
or the belief in it, is also claimed by the evolutionists as the 
last illustration of their doctrine. On that aspect of the 
subject, however, we should join issue with them on altogether 
different grounds, and such as cannot be touched in the 
present paper. 
Other monuments and observances of religion can also be 
traced back to a very great antiquity, thus confirming what 
has been said. ‘The tracing back of the Sabbath to the times 
of the Accadians, a subject ‘well understood in this room, and 
evidences, apparently unquestionable, of its observance m 
China in extremely remote times,* connected with its name as 
the * Day of the Sun,” which comes to us from an antiquity 
we cannot at present fathom (except, indeed, by the word of 
Scripture), are a further indication of a unity in primitive 
religious teaching, and a beginning from the very principles to 
which some affirm we have been only gradually approaching 
by the light of nature. 
The same may be said of the character of another class of 
monuments, the temples built for the worship of Deity and 
for the due performance of various religious rites. Were a 
person of perfectly unbiassed mind to be asked why a 
building existing, probably, at least 2000 B.C., another 
known to have been constructed 1400 B.C., another known 
to have been built 1000 B.C., and others of unknown date, all 
of peculiar character, and known to be for the same purpose, 
namely, the worship of the Deity, happen to be of precisely 
similar construction, he would, no doubt, unhesitatingly say 
that they must all have been constructed upon some model 
which existed in the extreme past, at least as old as, and 
probably older than, the earliest known building of the kind, 
and that, therefore, ‘the presumption is that they are, practi- 
* See The Primitive Sabbath, by the Rev. James Johnston. 
