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The Chairman. — I have to return the thanks of the meeting to Mr. 
Brown for his very interesting paper. It is now open for any member to 
make remarks thereon. 
Mr. J. E. Howard, F.R.S. — I am sure we are all very much indebted to 
the author of this learned and admirable paper. As far as I am qualified to 
appreciate it, I consider it to be a great addition to our knowledge on the 
subject. I could, however, have wished, in reference to the original belief 
of the Aryan race, that the writer had referred to some passages in the 
Ilig- Veda, which express in admirable language exactly the same truths 
which we find stated on p. 323 of the paper. 
Mr. D. Howard. — The subject of Mr. Brown's paper is one of special 
interest to us all ; because, after all, it is to the Teutonic branch of the 
Aryan race that we owe our origin, and it is interesting to find that the 
Aryan mythology has preserved a state of comparative purity. There can 
be no doubt that the power of the Teutonic races against the Roman Empire 
was owing to the comparative strength of their religious belief ; for, poor as 
it was, it was comparatively valid as contrasted with the utter degradation 
of the Roman belief. If we compare the state to which religion had fallen 
among the Romans with that of our Teutonic ancestors at the time when 
the Eddas were written, it will at once be admitted that, although the 
religion of our forefathers was crude and barbarous beyond description, 
especially from our modern point of view, there was a magnificent force 
about it, as shown in the worship of Thor and Odin, which was great when 
contrasted with the no-belief of the Greeks and Romans ; for, low as those 
forefathers of ours had fallen, when we compare their later belief with the 
original faith, they still occupied a higher position than the people of Greece 
and Rome. I may also say that I think the Mahommedan invasion is a just 
exemplification of the immense power of an imperfect over an utterly fallen, 
or no-belief. (Hear, hear.) I think, therefore, that the study of such a 
subject is one of peculiar interest. There is another thing which, I think, 
rather illustrates one point connected with this subject, and that is the 
practical difficulty which has confronted many of our missionaries — a diffi- 
culty on which one hears a good many opinions expressed — of knowing 
what to call God in a heathen nation. The mere philologist runs the risk of 
making exactly the same mistake as he might have made in regard to the 
two branches of the Germanic race in Europe — he might call God by the 
wrong name, he might use a word which means, as Deva does, either god 
or devil, just as “ Deus ” and “Deuce” are identically the same word, 
and just as the Sclavonic “ Bogu ” is our “ Bogey.” And this points to 
another curious thing. The Greeks and Romans assumed the identity of 
the persons they worshipped — they assumed that Zeus was Jupiter, that 
Heracles was Hercules, that Hermes was Mercurius, and so forth ; so that 
we have been brought up to confuse them entirely, and to believe that the 
religion of the Greeks and the Romans was the same. There must have 
been some origin for this identification, and I believe that it arose from the 
