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Zeus with Dyaws and the Sanserié root Dyw is based philologically on such 
ample facts, and by such close reasoning, that it is very difficult to escape 
his conclusion. 
On another point I should hardly agree with Mr. James in his exact 
statement of the case, as between the Jewish and Christian religions and 
those of. heathendom. Is it strictly correct to speak of an utter want of 
homogeneity between heathen systems of religion and that which we know 
through the inspired pages of the Holy Scripture? to say, that the “com- 
parison between them is simply like one between animals and crystals 
between which there are no points incommon”? Is it not just the comparison 
of what is homogeneous between them that has led us to the conviction, 
that that homogeneity is due to a divine origin inthe remote past? I do not 
believe, any more than Mr. James does, in the “Science of Comparative 
Religion”; but I should explain my disbelief on somewhat different grounds, 
namely, that I am convinced that none of those laws of the development of 
the religious idea, which are expected to be discoverable in human nature, 
and on which only a true science must be based, can ever be discovered, 
simply because they are non-existent. The science, as it is’ already pre- 
maturely called, is only as yet in its nascent state of comparison and classi- 
fication: and comparison is certainly possible; the real discovery by 
comparison appearing to be, that the heathen religions, so far from being 
developments of human reason, are degradations of what was once equally 
divine with the revelation of the Bible. 
I have been much interested by, and am very grateful for Canon Saumarez 
Smith’s remarks on my paper. He accepts the general drift of my essay, 
but takes exception to two points, on which I venture to add a word. 
Canon Saumarez Smith hardly thinks I am warranted in stating that men 
“began their religion in the full blaze of what is now the brightest hope of the 
Christian.” The reference is to “‘a primitive belief in the immortality of the 
soul,” which I have described as being the basis of ancestral worship. 
My contention is against the theory that man has worked out his own religious 
convictions. Canon Saumarez Smith seems to regard man’s early conviction 
of immortality as only “the reflex” in himself of his knowledge “of God’s 
eternal Being”—in short, that he believed in the immortality of the soul 
only as an inference. He believed in God’s eternal Being, and as a 
correlative to this, without any revelation on the subject, himself drew the 
conclusion of his own immortality. I am disposed to go much further than 
this, and to claim the knowledge of the immortality of the soul as part of 
God’s first revelation to man. 
In the first place, I believe it impossible that early man could have worked 
out the idea of an eternal, personal God, with a character and attributes, 
such as we find described in the earliest known records of man’s history, and 
identical with those of the God we Christians worship. Such a God could 
only have been known by His own revelation of Himself. And next, if God 
did reveal Himself to the early families of man, it is difficult to believe that, 
notwithstanding His revelation of His own Divine Being and character, and 
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