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THE BIRTHPLACE OF ANCIENT RELIGIONS AND 

 CIVILIZATION. 



BY THE REV. J. CAMPBELL, M. A. 



The important discoveries which, in recent years, have rewarded 

 antiquarian research among the monuments, and especially among the 

 written monuments, of the ancient world, have greatly tended to confirm 

 an intelligent belief in the unity of the human race. Links, similar ia 

 character to those which the physical ethnologist finds between organ- 

 isms differing in form and feature, bind in one the speakers of different 

 languages and the inhabitants of widely separated regions. These 

 links may be termed historical, and are found in the religions and 

 mythologies of the nations of the earth. It is iqipossible to take up 

 any work on Comparative Mythology, or treatise upon the religious 

 systems of different peoples, and not find one's self involuntarily 

 attempting to answer the question, " Whence comes this marvellous 

 agreement ? " 



The learned Faber, who, in the early part of the present century, 

 gave to the world, in three quarto volumes, a dissertation on the Origin 

 of Pagan Idolatry, framed the following disjunctive judgment, which 

 exhausts the whole field of hypothesis, and shuts the enquirer up into 

 a definite conclusion, after a brief investigation of the subject : 



1. Either all nations agreed peaceably to borrow from one, subsequent 

 to their several settlements ; 



2. Or all nations, subsequent to their several settlements, were com- 

 pelled by arms to adopt the superstition of one ; 



3. Or all nations were once assembled together in a single place and 

 in a single community, where they adopted a corrupt form of religion, 

 which they afterwards respectively carried with them into the lands that 

 they colonized. 



The first and second of these hypotheses carry absurdity upon their 

 face. Is there any escape from the conclusion, which is the third? 

 An attempt has been made to escape in two ways. The first denies 

 that the disjunctive proposition is exhaustive of the subject; and the 

 second calls in question the truth of the premise on which the propo- 

 sition is based. Those who deny that the proposition of Faber is 

 exhaustive, add to it a fourth hypothesis, and, showing the third to be 



