702 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM. vou, xxxwv. 
to deal only with the religious practices and ideas of the semi- 
civilized or barbarous nations, and to treat but sparingly those: of 
the more civilized and cultivated nations of the earth. It was deter- 
mined, in taking up the subject here, to adopt. a course contrary to 
that hitherto followed, and to endeavor, from the educational point 
of view, to interest the people in the history of religion by leading 
them to the unknown, as it were, in the terms of the known. Accord- 
ingly the first three religions to which attention was given were 
Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism, in the order of their 
respective establishments. A partial illustration of all three was set 
up by the National Museum in the Chicago Exposition, the Christian 
religion being represented by objects illustrating the ceremonies of 
_ the Greek Catholic and Armenian churches, and there were added 
Kegyptian, Assyro-Babylonian, and Greek and Roman casts, thus giv- 
ing a conspectus of some of the features of religious life which have 
grown up about the Mediterranean Sea. Other religions were later 
illustrated, especially Brahmanism and Buddhism, and an exhibit of 
some of these was sent to the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in 
Nashville in the year 1897. — : 
At. these expositions, and in the Museum itself, the interest of the 
public was plainly evinced in this section of its work, and gifts and 
deposits of value were added, representing Ancient Kgypt, Shintoism, 
the Parsee religion, and other of the great cults. 
No attempt has thus far been made to bring these collections into 
relation with the prehistoric cults or with those of semicivilized or 
barbarous tribes, although the Museum is very rich in such collections, 
and the section is in fact and by its organization limited to the historic 
religions. In dealing with this difficult subject a rigorous historical 
and scientific method has been followed. The religious ideas have 
been described through objects or examples of ceremony. The pro- 
fessors of each creed have received full faith and their own explana- 
tions of the ideas involved in a given ceremony have been adopted. 
It ought to be said that the difficulty of adequately portraying the 
religion of a people has been fully recognized; that of the two great 
divisions, creed and cult, it 1s the cult which most readily lends itself 
to museum exhibition; that, except where worship has been affected 
by geographical considerations, cults are best shown in groups by 
themselves and not in their geographical relations, that the subject 
of religious belief and cults is susceptible of arrangement under cer- 
tain well-recognized heads: Public worship, its furniture and appoint- 
ments; the sacerdotal person, his costume and implements; sacred 
writings, the altar or its equivalent; public religious ceremonies on 
special occasions, ete. Another, and indeed larger, class of objects 
have to do with the relation of the individual to cult in such matters 
as marriage, birth, and in some cases betrothal, and the secret and 
ai Sr al 
