elaborate, the functions and character of the officiating ministers more strictly defined, the accessories of worship more complicated. This corresponds to the enrichment and elevation of the ideas and emotions that animate the act, as that which is at first performed as part of tribal usage and ancestral custom acquires the force of divine institution and personal duty.

Behind the external act lies the internal world of thought and feeling. The social sanction may invest the ceremony itself with so much force that the worshipper's interest may lie rather in the due performance of the rite than in the deity to whom it is addressed. The element of belief may be relatively vague and indefinite. But in the more highly organised religions belief also may externalise itself through hymn and prayer, through myth and history and prophecy. When a religion is strong enough to create a literature, a fresh object of comparison is presented. The utterances of poet and sage, of lawgiver and seer, can be set side by side. Their conceptions of the Powers towards which worship is directed can be studied; the characters and functions of the several deities can be determined. This is the intellectual element in religion. It has often been regarded as the element of most importance, because it seemed most readily to admit of the test of truth. It finds its most formal expression in the articles of a creed, and has sometimes been erected into the chief ground of the supreme arbitrament of heaven and hell.

There remains the element of feeling. This also may be so entangled in tradition, so enveloped in the pressure of surrounding influences, that it is at first obscure and indistinct. But its importance was early recognised when the origin of religion was ascribed to fear, in the oft-quoted line of the Roman Satirist Petronius Arbiter at the court of Nero (who committed suicide A.D. 66)—

"Primus in orbe deos fecit timor.

In the eighteenth century the genius of Lessing (1729-1781) fastened on the feeling of the heart as the essential foundation of religion. No written record, no historical event, could guarantee its truth; that lay in the constitution of the human spirit in its interpretation of its experience. In his famous drama of "Nathan the Sage" he applied this to the representatives of three great historical religions which were thus brought together for comparison: the Christian Templar, the Mohammedan Saladin, and the Jew Nathan. Herder (1744-1803) endeavoured with the materials then at command to trace the origin and development of religion, starting from the primitive impressions made upon the mind by the world without, and sought to interpret mythology as the imaginative utterance of man's consciousness of the power, light, and life in Nature. In the next generation Schleiermacher (1767-1834) placed the essence of religion in the feeling of absolute dependence, without attempting to define the object towards which it was directed. The study of origins has passed out of the hands of the philosophers and the theologians. But it cannot dispense with psychology; and among the factors of early religious life will be found the beginnings of wonder, reverence and awe. And this element, often cruelly twisted into false and degraded forms, and sometimes refined in the higher types of mysticism into the loftiest spirituality, inheres in all practice and belief.

What, then, is the basis of comparison among different faiths? The student who is engaged in tracing the life-history of any one religion will naturally start from the field of investigation thus selected. As he widens his outlook he will find that a number of illustrative instances force themselves upon his view. The people whose institutions and ideas he is examining are members of a given ethnic group. The ancient Hebrews, for instance, belong on the one side to the life of the desert, and are kin with the nomad Arabs, on the other they are related to the authors of Babylonian culture. Or in the course of events a new religion is brought by missionary impulse into a less-developed civilisation, as when Buddhism passed from China through Corea into Japan, and was planted in the midst of a cruder faith. Widely different modes of thought are thus brought into close juxtaposition, their relation and interaction can be examined, and the inner forces of each compared.

That such inquiries must be conducted without prejudice need not now be enforced. An eighteenth-century writer might lay it down that "the first general division of Religion is into True and False," and might draw the conclusion that "the chapter of False Religions is by much the longest in the History of the religious opinions and practices of mankind."[3] Dr. Johnson could sententiously declare that "there are two objects of curiosity, the Christian world and the Mohammedan world—all the rest may be considered as barbarous." A learned Oxford scholar of the last generation could speak of the "three chief false religions," Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism. Missionaries and travellers of an elder day, who took some form of Christianity as their foundation, sometimes found the savages among whom they laboured destitute of religion because they had no Father in heaven and no everlasting hell. These attitudes, it is now freely recognised, are not scientific. For purposes of comparison no single religion can be selected as a standard for the whole human race. Particular products may be set side by side. The asceticism of India may be compared with that of early Christianity. The ritual of sacrifice may be studied in the book of Leviticus or the Hindu Brāhmanas. What are sometimes called "Ethnic Trinities" may be examined in the light of Alexandrian theology. The suras of the Koran may be read after the prophecies of Isaiah. The various phases of the Buddhist Order, with its missionary zeal, its power of adaptability to different cultures, its readiness to accept new teaching, may be contrasted with the wonderful cohesiveness and expansion of the Roman Catholic Church. The ideas of the Hellenic mystery-religions may be found to throw light on the language of St. Paul. Out of the multitudinous phases of human experience all the world over innumerable resemblances will be discovered. Each is a fact for the student, and must be treated on equal terms in the field of science. But they will have more or less intrinsic significance in the scale of values. Philosophy may attempt to range them in gradations of worth, in nobility of form, in dignity of expression, in moral purity, in social effectiveness. Beneath infinite diversity the mystic will affirm the unity of the whole, with the poet of the Masnavi, Jalálu-'d-Dïn of Balkh (A.D. 1207-1273)—

"Because He that is praised is, in fact, only One,
In this respect all religions are only one religion."

[3] Broughton, Dictionary of all Religions, 1745.

The materials of comparison are, of course, of the most varied kind. The interest of the ancient Greeks was early roused in the diverse practices which they saw around them, and the observations of Herodotus concerning the Egyptians, the Persians, the Scythians, and many another tribe upon the fringe of barbarism, have earned for him the modern title of the "Father of Anthropology." Travellers, missionaries, government officers, men