Lennep by the side of Bopp's Comparative Grammar. . . . The study of the ancient religions of mankind, if carried on in a bold but scholarlike, careful, and reverent spirit, will remove many doubts and difficulties which are due entirely to the narrowness of our religious horizon; it will enlarge our sympathies, it will raise our thoughts above the small controversies of the day, and at no distant future evoke in the heart of Christianity a fresh spirit and a new life.'* (P. ix.)

Quite recently Professor Müller has found a fresh opportunity of repeating these assurances and explaining the nature of his subject. In a Lecture on Missions, which he was invited to deliver on Dec. 3, 1873, in the Nave of Westminster Abbey, the following passage occurs :

'After a careful study of the origin and growth of these (historical) religions, and after a critical examination of the sacred books on which all of them profess to be founded, it has become possible to subject them all to a scientific classification in the same manner as languages, apparently unconnected and mutually unintelligible, have been scientifically arranged and classified; and by a comparison of those points which all of them share in common, as well as by a determination of those which are peculiar to each, a new science has been called into life, a science which concerns us all, and in which all who truly care for religion must sooner or later take their part-the Science of Religion.' (P. 26.)

It will be seen from these extracts that while the result aimed at by Mr. Müller is a scientific analysis of religion, and the method he employs for this end is comparative, it does not by any means consist in a simple enumeration of individual religions, of their tenets, rites, and ceremonial observances. Such an inquiry, though inductive in its bearings and full of interest, is too obvious to be novel, and has not hitherto proved fertile in results. The contradictory character of the notices as to religious belief to be gleaned from books of travel among savage races has often been remarked.† A deeper scientific conception is required before a comparative study of religion can be achieved.

In his Lectures on the Science of Language' Professor Müller has clearly made out the foundations of the study of Comparative Philology to have been first laid as early as the close of the sixteenth century. The glimmer of its dawn

*Luther displayed a similar enthusiasm when he compared the advancement of learning and its position towards revealed truth to that of John the Baptist as the precursor of the Gospel. (See Briefe, vol. ii. p. 313, ed. De Wette.)

On this point there are some good observations in this work (p. 57). It is more fully pursued by Mr. Tylor in his admirable "History of Primitive Culture' (vol. i. ch. xi.).

may faintly be perceived in the appreciation of the similarities between Sanskrit and the languages of Europe shown by Filippo Sassetti, an Italian resident at Goa, about 1588. In later times Hegel called the discovery of the common origin of Greek and Sanskrit the discovery of a new world. The same resemblances had previously surprised the companions of Xavier, and seem to have led on in the course of little more than a century to the proposals of Leibnitz* and Berkeley to register comparative tables of words in different dialects, as also probably to the independent speculations of Dalgarno, Wilkins, and Jacob Bohm on the possibility of a universal language. It is observable that the desire for an acquaintance with the various religions existing in the world showed itself about the same time with the earliest observations on the similarities of remote languages; somewhat later perhaps, but it ran the same course. Some indeed have traced back a comparison of Christianity with the religions of the East as far as the thirteenth century. In the present work Professor Müller furnishes an interesting account of the Indian Emperor Akbar (1542-1605), who invited to his court Jews, Christians, Mohammedans, Brahmans, and Zoroastrians, and had as many of their sacred books as he could get access to translated for his own study. The result of the experiment, it may be added, was decidedly unfavourable to Mohammedanism. No doubt, as regards the scholars of Europe, the discovery of the New World, and the increased intercourse with India and the East after doubling the Cape of Good Hope, had a share in promoting such inquiries. For in recounting the habits and manners of strange and savage peoples, their religious customs would be the first to gain notice. In this manner these researches coincided with the inductive turn of thought and observation which marks the age of Bacon and Montaigne. In our own country the history of religions seems to have been first touched by Alexander Ross,† an obscure but pains

How far the genius of Leibnitz had anticipated the method and results of comparative philology may be seen in the 'Nouveaux Essais,' L. III. ch. ii. Leibnitz, and it may be said, Plato, showed the possibility of a philosophical language, i.e. of one which should not grow but exist à priori. See Max Müller, 'Stratification of Language,' p. 3.

†The title of his work was 'flavoέßeta: a View of all Religions in 'the World.' It was published at London in 1653, and was translated into Dutch, French, and German. Ross had previously brought out The Alcoran of Mahomet, translated out of Arabique into French, and newly Englished, &c. by A. R. 1649.' He also edited and continued Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World.'

taking compiler, whose voluminous commentaries gave point to the lines which Addison thought to be the best known in Hudibras:

'There was an ancient sage philosopher

That had read Alexander Ross over.'

In Germany Hofmann followed with his Umbra in luce: sive consensus et dissensus religionum profanarum,' published in 1680. In 1704 Jurieu brought out his 'Histoire critique des 'Dogmes et des Cultes depuis Adam jusqu'à Jésus Christ.' The religion or Theology of the Gentiles' had during the same period been variously treated by G. I. Voss, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Witsius, and Van Dale. Grotius, Puffendorf, and in our own country Selden and Wollaston, were similarly engaged in tracing the principles of morality, jurisprudence, and natural religion inductively from the ideas and practices of heathen nations. The earlier half of the eighteenth century witnessed the production of Picart's curious and costly work on the Ceremonies and Customs of all nations, as well as Broughton's Dictionary of all Religions.' Out of such materials Bayle, Volney, Voltaire,* and Hume generalised a system of the origin and development of Religion, professedly based on observation, yet in its results answering to nothing historically true, and identifying all positive forms of faith with priestcraft. Such a method could only prove as sterile as the attempt again and again made by philosophers to determine à priori the possible limits of our knowledge of Divine things anterior to Revelation; or to demonstrate by abstract reasoning the articles of the Christian faith. The true track was once more struck, however vaguely and æstheti cally, by Lessing in his well-known Education of Mankind,' and by Herder in his celebrated Ideen zur Philosophie der 'Geschichte der Menschheit.'† Lessing, it is true, really pursues an à priori view of the historical development of revealed and pagan religion; while Herder, preoccupied with a large idea, inclines to make the forms of humanity' results of

* Voltaire became in this matter the victim of a fraud. A forged Veda, the work of a Jesuit missionary, found its way to Europe from Pondicherry, and was used by him to extol the wisdom of the East at the expense of Christianity. See Von Bohlen, Das Alte Indien,' vol. i. p. 136.

†The History of the World,' says Prof. Müller in his Essay on Comparative Mythology,'' has laid open new avenues of thought, and it has enriched our language with a word, which never passed the lips of Sccrates, or Plato, or Aristotle-mankind.'

climate, race, and association. These works appeared respectively in 1780 and 1784. Thirty years later Meiners produced his Allgemeine kritische Geschichte aller Religionen,' a work of much labour and research. But the investigation now entered on a new phase: and in the hands of Creuzer, F. Baur, C. O. Müller, Grimm, Buttmann, and Vatke, the mythologies and nature-religions of antiquity were for the first time critically examined, compared, and distinguished. The rapid advance in the study of Sanskrit, and by its means of comparative philology at large, and in the knowledge of the ancient religious books of the Hindus, Buddhists, and Parsis, which has marked the last fifty years, reflecting equal lustre on the scholars of France, Germany, and England, has finally made possible a scientific handling of the whole subject of Comparative Theology, such as at an earlier stage could not have been anticipated.

The conception, then, which has led to the colligation of the varying phenomena presented in a comparison of existing and extinct religions, is found to be in the Science of Language. Its relation to a scientific study of the whole subject of religion may be developed in a twofold manner. For the language of a race may be regarded either as the actual mode of expression of its religious sentiments; or, from a philosophical point of view, as their necessary exponent. This distinction we shall endeavour to explain more fully. In the present work Mr. Max Müller has carried on and applied to the subject of Religion an argument already familiar to the readers of his 'Lectures on the Science of Language.' Comparative philology has now succeeded in assigning the dialects of mankind, with more or less precision to three families of speech, the Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan. Taking these separately it is possible, as for example with the Aryan branch of human speech, to abstract the words exhibiting a radical identity throughout the several members of the class, and thus to show that they must have existed in that previous stratum of language from which the several tongues or dialects have taken rise. In this manner the Professor has proved that a thousand years at least before Agamemnon and before Manu, the ancestors of the Aryan tribes were no longer dwellers in tents, but builders of durable houses. They had in fact ceased to be nomads. As we find the name for town the same in Sanskrit and in Greek, we may conclude with equal certainty that towns were known to the Aryans before Greek and before Sanskrit was spoken. The same observation, applied relatively to Latin, Celtic, Teu

tonic, and Sanskrit, determines the fact that kingly government was established and recognised by the Aryans at an equally prehistoric period. This reasoning, it is evident, might, with sufficient means of induction, be extended to a yet earlier period by taking the three families of speech themselves for the members of the comparison.* There is no ground to think that there was not a time, a moment, perhaps, in the long career of Man upon the earth, when the representatives of the Semitic, Aryan, and Turanian divisions of the human family were as yet unsevered and at one; dwellers in the same land, bound by the same laws or customs, heirs of the same mother tongue. It is true that this ulterior comparison is as yet far from realisation even in its subordinate stages. Professor Müller expresses his surprise that no Semitic scholar should have been at the pains of collecting from the various Semitic dialects those common words which must have existed before Hebrew was Hebrew, Syriac Syriac, and Arabic Arabic. In this way some kind of idea might be arrived at as to the principal thoughts and occupations of the Semitic race in its earliest undivided state. For this he considers there is no lack of material easily accessible. In respect of the Turanian world, indeed, the case is different. Not only is the character of the languages which compose it shifting and unstable, continually defying subordination and arrangement, but the history also and relative position of the tribes which it includes are so little known that in most instances they can only be surmised. What is prehistoric in language among the Aryan nations is found still historic among Turanian races. And this applies equally with regard to religions, myths, legends, and customs. If in Chinese we are to recognise the earliest linguistic settlement of this section of human speech, the coincidences which unite it to the scattered members of this group of languages in North and South Asia, as also in Europe, are confessedly vague and general. Still enough, it is considered by competent scholars, has been established in the way of agreements and relationships to attest a former community of these divergent streams of language. How much, however, of the main outline of this picture still remains unfilled, will be apparent when we take

Nothing, as Mr. Max Müller has elsewhere remarked, necessitates the admission of different independent beginnings for the material elements of these three branches of speech. It is possible even now to point out radicals which, under various changes and disguises, have 'been current in these three branches ever since their first separation.' (Science of Language, p. 346, 3rd ed.)