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lowest type of humanity. In order to see how rapid human degeneration 
may be, we have only to go into our own prisons to find people existing in 
the depths of a barbarism quite equal to that which you find in any other 
part of the world. This degeneration is not merely a historical thing ; it is 
a fact within our own experience. On the other hand, we find, without the 
existence of a spiritual religion — without the existence of a highly spiritual 
form of the Christian religion — how difficult it is to raise those people who 
are in a state of degradation, up to a high point of civilization ; but when 
those same men, barbarians of our own country, are brought under such an 
influence, we see how rapidly even the most degraded and degenerate of our 
race may be raised to a pitch of intellectual superiority, I may say ; for we 
may go into the poorest cottage, inhabited by men or women exceedingly 
unlearned in everything but their Bible, and yet find them able to teach us 
certain things which we knew not before — far higher truths than were taught 
by the sages of Greece and Rome, and rising to a far higher appreciation of 
the Deity than you find in ancient documents or in the books of the Vedas. 
It is all very well for Max Midler and others to pick out certain gems from 
the old oriental literature ; but they are but a few seeds of grain winnowed 
from an extensive amount of chaff. I was recently speaking to an eminent 
professor of Cambridge, well acquainted with modern Hebrew literature, the 
literature of the Talmud, the more recent, the post-Christian literature 
of the Jews. We were speaking of that recent article on the Talmud, in 
the Quarterly Review, which is extremely popular just now, and contains a 
number of magnificent passages from Jewish writings, collected together for 
the purpose of showing us that the Jews before our Saviour had as high 
an appreciation of morality as the writers of the New Testament. But 
most of the gems there given us are from a literature written many years after 
the promulgation of Christianity, and after the Jews had had the advantage 
of the teaching of the New Testament ; and yet it is taken as a proof that 
all we have in the New Testament was derived from ancient Jewish tradi- 
tion ! I said to my friend, that I did not pretend to be a Hebrew scholar, 
and that my knowledge of Jewish literature had been altogether derived 
from translations, but I have waded through translations of the Talmud and 
other specimens of Jewish writing, and I found it the most uninteresting 
and absurd stuff imaginable. I asked my friend’s opinion as to the article 
upon the Talmud, and he said it consisted of a very little wheat taken out of 
a vast quantity of chaff, but when winnowed and collected together in that 
way, it appears very wonderful indeed. — One of the main things upon which 
we pride ourselves in the present day, is the great and rapid advance we have 
made in science and civilization. But so far as metaphysics and the know- 
ledge of mental philosophy are concerned, I think the ancient Greeks were 
quite equal as sophists and reasoners to any of the men of the present 
generation. Since the days of Bacon, however, we have had a new mode of 
investigating science. We have investigated the facts of nature, and paid 
attention to them, rather than to the theories to be deduced from them. Take 
an instance in point. Without knowing anything of electricity or magnetism 
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