tellectual and "spiritual" can be compared to material things, that some of the early great thinkers on religion conceived of the functions of the Life of the Universe. As the heat and light of the sun re-appear in the motion and circulation of the smallest plant or insect, in each tiny spark of candle-flame, secluded hearth, or lonely watchfire, so, they thought, the Life of the Universe, homogeneous and identical everywhere, is dispersed in the innumerable lives of living creatures, great and small, but is concentrated, as are light and heat in the sun, in one great, omnipresent, and supreme Being, the source and ruler of all.

I

This Being, they thought, lives in each one of us, and in the smallest insect life as well, but gives a larger portion of his spiritual life to his intelligent children, our own race. The universe, they believed, lives and moves by his life and his laws; as the body of man lives by the life which is man's portion, and according to the laws of that life. The material universe is to him, they taught, as the bodily envelope is to man's spirit: the life of each living thing was originally emanated from him, they maintained, as each light-spark is derived ultimately from the central sun; and, at "death," these emanated and temporarily independent portions of Life are, they said, either resumed into his essence, or transposed into other forms.

These doctrines are not, strictly speaking, Pantheism; for Pantheism, properly so called, is, as already observed, a deification of the material universe as we see it, composed in part of lifeless matter and in part of living beings (portions of embodied life, inhabiting and vivifying material bodies). These doctrines, on the contrary,

"Whatever lives and walks and flies, or (whatever) is immovable, as herbs and trees, all that is the eye of intelligence. On intellect every thing is founded: the world is the eye of intellect, and intellect is its foundation. Intelligence is Brahm, the great One." (Veda, trans.: Colebrooke, Religion of the Hindus, p. 29.)

The "world" must here be understood as the world of life, as distinct from dead matter: this live world is declared to stand to the all-pervading, all-supporting Intelligence, in the relation of the bodily eye to the mind, in man.

fully recognize the inferior character of the matter of the universe - even when vivified - -to the life inhabiting it, regarding it merely as the habitation and the instrument of the Universe-Spirit, as the body of man is the dwelling and instrument of man's spirit.

While agreeing in the main in their conception of the character and functions of God in the universe, the duty and the future of man, two of the leading doctrines above referred to, that originated by Manu, as perfected in the Vedanta, and that taught by Gautama, contained views as to animals which were not shared by the founders of Western belief. The former held that the identity of the Life in animals and man enabled the lower creation to share in our responsibilities and in our destinies and while agreeing with the great Western teachers in regarding reunion with God, the Universe-Spirit, as the true aim and end of man, they held that before this re-union the human spirit is to pass through many "transmigrations" into other forms, of animals as well as men; and that, according to the goodness or the evil of the lives led in these transmigrations, the ultimate re-union is to be hastened or delayed. From these views respecting the status of animals, their relation to God, and their correlation to man in the great scheme of progress and of spiritual development, they naturally drew the inference, which they carried perhaps to excess, of the sanctity of all life, both animal and human. These doctrines had a sort of foreshadowing in the metempsychosis of Egypt.'

Egyptian thought, in the domain of religion, must, in the early ages, have possessed much depth and subtlety.

1 For further remarks on the esoteric teaching of the Egyptians, the "mysteries," with which only the "initiated priests" were conversant, and which, under the cloak of polytheism, maintained a monotheism or Pantheism, see chapters on "Moshai and the Hebrews."

As their metempsychosis was a foreshadowing of the doctrine of transmigration, which was, nevertheless, an original one with the great Indians, so the "union with Osiris" was strikingly similar, in some respects, to the "Nirvâna," and "absorption in Brahma," of the latter. (The "Boodh" in "Nirvâna" was virtually one with the Universe-Spirit. See chap. iii.)

The primitive philosophers of Greece were proud to study in her schools. But clogged by the extraordinary stiffness and unprogressiveness which very early stamped the national character, and stifled by the ponderous incubus of a splendid and powerful priestly organization, whatever acuteness, depth, and breadth of speculative insight and philosophy may have gone toward the original formation of the religion of Egypt, were erelong buried from sight under the mountain of observances, mythologies, superstitions, animal-worships, and I might almost say fetichisms, that crystallized slowly over it. From this, the most ancient recorded religion, we can glean but little to aid us in forming a conception of the ultimate form of religious belief, the religion of the future.

The schools of Greece, whose lamp of learning was lit at that of Egypt, produced no religion. The subtle speculations of a Demokritos, of an Epikouros, the practical lessons of a Sokrates,' the profound philosophy, the ex

Sokrates had indeed a belief, peculiar to himself (or shared, as is probable, by his great interpreter), that a saipur, or divine spirit, dwelt within him, and spoke to him in his heart, guiding him to right, and warning him against wrong, actions. This belief seems to have constituted a sort of private religion of his own, independent of the popular one: but I know not that Sokrates directed others to a similar daiμov in each of their hearts as an infallible guide; he rather regarded the phenomenon as something peculiar to himself than made its existence and government in the heart a doctrine for general acceptance as a religion. Doubtless most of the philosophers named had their private beliefs and esoteric teachings and theories in religion; but their public teachings were chiefly those of metaphysical and of natural philosophy, the practical lessons and rules of morality in private and public conduct, rather than those of a dogmatic or formulated religion; and the boldest of them dared not publicly disavow the mythical "gods of Greece," - indeed, were not, in their own minds, fully emancipated from belief in them. (Plato was, to some extent, an exception. See hereafter.)

The Daimon of Sokrates reminds one of the "inward monitor," or "light within," of George Fox, with which it was doubtless identical, and which Fox, to the scandal of the orthodox of his generation, and from his own interpretations of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, proclaimed to be no less than God himself within the human soul,”- -a portion of the Divine Nature congenitally communicated to man, independently of priestly or episcopal manipulations, a doctrine now partially understood and accepted by the majority of Protestants.

The sacrifice of a cock to Asklepios, ordered by Sokrates in his last moments, was not merely a concession to popular belief: it was the result of a certain degree of belief still lingering in his own mind, and reminds one of the careful observance

quisite morality, of a Platōn, of an Aristoteles, left Greece only her old semi-barbarous and puerile, though graceful, mythology, as a religion. These great men were philosophers and moralists, not religious teachers.

The four great religious philosophers and founders of religions, who still exercise, and probably will ever exercise, consummate influence over the minds of men, were, in the order of their appearance in history, Manu (or the author of the earlier Vedas), Moshai ("Moses," the Hebrew law-giver), Gautama (called the Booddha, or "The Wise "), and Yaishooa ("Jesus," called Messiah or Christos, "The Anointed," or "The King"). It must always remain uncertain who were the real authors of the earlier Vedas, .whose doctrines were expounded and expanded in the Upanishads into what is known as the Vedânta or Brahmanical system of religious philosophy. Some authors attribute them to Vasishtha and Visvamitra, but I think the evidence very strong that these famous characters and later Vedic authors lived much later than the date of the earliest hymns. Still less can Vyasa, the Veda compiler, have been their author. In some of the later hymns the earlier ones are attributed to Manu, who is also said to have been the first Man and the son of God (Brahmā). I use the name Manu here to stand for the originator of the Vedantic system, without intending to commit myself on

of ordinances, justified by the "for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness," of the Judæan days of Yaishooa.

The teachings of Platōn, or "Plato," which he, with his grand modesty, placed in the mouth of his master Sokrates, ought almost to be excepted from the general statement that the Greek philosophers originated no religion; for these teachings have constituted an esoteric religion to men of the highest thought from Plato's day to the present. It is, however, not with the esoteric beliefs of men of culture, but with the exoteric religions of mankind at large, that our present inquiry is concerned. Platonism may be called a religion, but it has never publicly asserted itself as other than a philosophy; and to place it in the same category with Christianity and Booddhism would be manifestly absurd, how important soever may have been its contributions to the fundamental ideas of the former. (See further remarks on Plato and Pythagoras in chapters on Moshai and the Hebrews.)

Or, "the Good," if, as Justin Martyr seems plainly to indicate, the name was originally Chrestos. The Hebrew name Messiah signifies (nearly) "The Anointed One," or King, anointed of God. The Greek & Xploròs is its equivalent.

the question of the actual authorship of those earliest hymns which form the foundation of that system.

The names of Moshai (or Mōshěh, Mōshä, Moses) and Yaishooa (or Yeshua, Yäshua, Jesus) I have given in the spelling, which, to the ordinary English reader, unfamiliar with Hebrew sounds, most correctly represents the original Hebrew names in the Hebrew, or Hebrew-Aramaic, pronunciation. In regard to the name of Yaishooa in particular, nothing could well be more unlike this — the name by which that most lovely and reverend character was known in his lifetime than the name under which he is now known and worshipped in Anglo-Saxon countries.'

It is really curious, since the one name is derived from the other, that not a single consonantal or vowel sound of the original name should remain in the derivative. The name Jesus, as we have it, is an Anglo-Saxon corruption of a NormanFrench mutilation of a Greek alteration of the Hebrew name. The initial letter, the Hebrew Yod, or Yodh, had exactly the sound of the English Y,- in fact, is the Y or double i. This the Greeks represented by their single i or 'Iora, which has the same sound before a vowel. The second letter (represented in the Hebrew by "vowelpoints" merely), the Greek 'Hra, has the sound of the English diphthong æ or ai, but shorter in the Hebrew than in the Greek pronunciation. The thira letter was the Hebrew, shin, whose sound was exactly the English sh. The Greeks not having this sound in their language, took as nearest to it their aiyua, the English s. The fourth letter, the Hebrew 1, vav, has the sound which the Greeks correctly represented by their diphthong ov, the English oo. The final letter was the Hebrew, Ayin, ain, sounded (nearly) a (the Greek áλpa), a vowel which the Greek ear and idiom could not tolerate as a masculine termination, and for which, therefore, they substituted their masculine final oiyua. The name, thus Hellenized, became 'Inσous, pronounced Yaizoos; and this name, Yaizoos, would be that he would be known by among his Greek-speaking acquaintances, if he had any. The Roman alterations were literal only, not sonal. For the 'Iora they substituted their J, which was the same letter as double 'Ira, y, or ii, only with a different form for an initial. The ou they replaced with their u, which had the same sound; and the pronunciation remained Yaizoos. The Teutons preserved both the Roman spelling and the pronunciation Yaizoos. The Gaulish French took the spelling as they found it; but the French J being sounded as our zh, and the final consonant being mute, their pronunciation was and is Zhaizyoo. After the conquest of England by the Norman-French, our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, in imitating the French pronunciation, gave, firstly, the J the harder sound, as we now have it; the two vowel-sounds were then both of them altered; the final s was sounded, the pronunciation becoming, first, Jayzu, then Jayzus, then Jeezus; and the result is a name utterly different in every particular from the original, having no sound in common with it.

ου

There is something rather sad in the fact, that the tender and reverent associations which belong to one who was emphatically, and more than all others, the hero of humanity, should cluster about a name which he never bore, which was first heard in a foreign country more than a thousand years after his death, and which has lost all the soft melody of the original tri-syllable in a harsh dis-syllable.