ing for the faiths of men? That knowledge of the divine which is inlaid with experience is less likely to be mixed with error than any supposed information which comes instantly out of the sky, and which the modern mind at least is inclined to dodge, as it would a meteoric stone. The permanent religious values of the world are not disparaged when their root ideas are found among backward peoples, who do not grasp the conception of a beneficence worthy of worship, or who are strangers to the finer ethical distinctions of the advanced races.

Nature manifests to the low man an inscrutable power, and he goes about to get some practical understanding of it-he becomes a perplexed questioner of his surroundings-as the animals do; and above them he undertakes to know whether things are cruel or good-a friend or an enemy. "As soon as a man becomes conscious of himself, as soon as he perceives himself as distinct from the persons and things about him, he at the same time becomes conscious of a higher self-a higher power-without which he feels that neither he nor anything else would have any life or reality." (Muller.)

Man's estimates of life's values approach ab

soluteness as he believes he approaches the ultimate reality; and the ultimate reality always engages his religious feelings. Value in the human mind is so related to reality, and reality to worship, that the religious question has always been very tense and vital. It is a breeder of fanatics and flagellants and self-torturing ascetics and masterful hotheads who do the world damage. The deeps of the human spirit are always stirred when it approaches what it feels to be the last things. Whenever the mind reaches the shore line of an immensity, beyond which it can not go, both the solemnity of its own limitations and the silences of a great mystery bend it down in submission and expectancy. And the natural inclination with the undeveloped mind is to personate the power which it does not understand. An image is the translation of the invisible into the self-understanding. Idolatry is the beginning articulation of the mind of man with the universe. The worshiper, at first a low, unreflecting sufferer, looks out to the end of his vision; but in any direction he sees enough to dwarf him. The days and the years glide by in monotonous regularity-the sun rises and sets, and the stars keep their places at night; storm and tempest beat

about him and drive him to shelter; hunger gnaws at his vitals-and he finally goes from the end of his vision to the end of his life. Then his generations follow, and a thousand years go by; and at last the universe appears.

The human mind, lifted to a conception of the universe, is differentiated instantly. It is the crisis time of the soul. Consciousness breaks in to make a creature of the simple reflexes a thinker. The unity of creation soon appears to a thinker. Causation is the background of a thinker's life. He has, then, a place to put his findings. He has the same place to file his mysteries. He is then under the sway of a new set of tendencies. He has come to his own. Monotheism begins where the mind first apprehends the unitary nature of existence.

"The idea of God is revealed to man in the natural and spontaneous development of his intelligence, and the existence of a supreme reality, corresponding to and represented by this idea, is rationally and logically demonstrable, and therefore justly entitled to take rank as a part of our legitimate, valid, and positive knowledge.” (Cocker.)

CHAPTER XIII.

THE EASTERN MIND.

The Divine Unity.

We do not detect among primitive people any attempt to disseminate by special effort, or by formal organized understandings, the primary ideas which they are known to have held. They do not show the missionary spirit. Nevertheless, it is certain that at any early time the unity of the divine nature was widely accepted by them, especially by dwellers in the extreme East. A thousand years before Christ, Zoroaster proclaimed to the Persians the doctrine of a Supreme Being. India was deistic before Buddha's day. Babylon and Assyria gave Asshur a first place among the gods. The germinal religious conceptions of Arabia were monotheistic from the earliest known records of that region. Dr. Livingstone says of the South African tribes, "There is no necessity for beginning to tell the most degraded of these people of the existence of God." The Book of Job is an interpretation of ancient Oriental

thought from the Mediterranean to the banks of the Indus. The idea of the unity of the divine nature could not have been taken to such different and diverse peoples through a dissemination of the doctrine. It must have come up indigenously. Wherever the mind of man was able to break through the incrustation of his sensations the unitary Cause appeared.

The dogma of Mohammed, "There is one God," was a common belief, which he wrought into a fanaticism; and only after it was heralded by the sword did its religious truth become hardened into a vast political idea. Vast numbers of people have since bowed to its intolerances and despotisms and to its values. When a modern Bedouin of the Sahara climbs down from his camel and turns his face towards Mecca and the palms of his hands towards the sky, and cries out, "Allah il Allah," he is at that moment about the greatest and most uncompromising religious figure on the earth.

That type of man might as well be let alone until he can be lifted by the acceptance with him of whatever is true of his beliefs. The appeal of Paul on Mars' Hill was first to the truths of Greek philosophy. The appeal of Mohammed was to a