value. Each race has given its wealth and learning to the work of preserving and popularising its own records and traditions to an extent which could only have resulted from a belief that the whole of truth was with them. They builded better then they knew. They have each brought their little block of stone, under impression that it was the whole temple, to a point where comparative study may take it up and fit it to every other block, that the sacred edifice of Humanity may arise.

Already we have discovered signs of the universality of the great Teachers with which the sects of the world label themselves so exclusively. One sign is the moral names they bear. It is rare that any great religious founder bears the name given him by his family, or a name distinctive of his tribe or nation. Their names are titles conferred by the moral sense and enthusiasm of mankind. Sakya Muni lives in the ages as Buddha,—the enlightened. The great Hindoo law-giver bears the Vedic name Manu, signifying the Father of Mankind. The family name Ahmed becomes Mohammed, "the praised." We do not know the original names of some great religious teachers,-Zoroaster, for instance, a title variously interpreted. Nor do we know the name first given to Christ. Jesus (meaning Saviour) and Christ (the anointed) are manifestly titles bestowed after his work had ended and his greatness been recognised. Thus in their very names these men are signed with their relation to the moral consciousness of man, and raised out of the national into the universal spirit.

Another notable fact is this. The influence of the greatest religious Teachers has been felt mainly in other countries than their own. Not in India, Buddha's native land, does Buddhism flourish; the religion of Zoroaster is almost unknown in Persia, where it originated; neither Moses nor Christ is the chosen prophet of Palestine. This rule, like the other, is not invariable, but it is general enough to verify the ancient proverb that a prophet is not without honour save in his own country. Nor is the reason far to seek. Partly, no doubt, it is because no mass of people have the culture required to recognise greatness in guise of the familiar; but mainly it is because the great man always comes as a reformer, and is brought into immédiate collision with the prejudices, priesthoods, powers of his own locality. His local warfare is left behind when his words travel to other regions. The Pharisees of England never dream that Christ meant them when he rebuked their class in Jerusalem. Garibaldi was welcomed by lords in England, but many an English Garibaldi has been despised and rejected. The facts show that all men hunger and thirst for truth, and always welcome it when permitted to receive it; and their rulers more readily permit it when it comes as foreign learning than when it involves internal reform and schism. They also show that the power by which the great prevail is a pure human power, detached from local complications, freed from tribal and sectarian paltriness. Thus the teacher whom Judea crucified triumphed in Greece and Rome under the Græco-Roman name of Christ; and he did so through the force of

another great man who cast aside his provincialism even to his name, Saul,* and went forth to translate Jesus from a person to a spirit and restate his doctrine so that it might become, in a high sense, all things to all men. That was the culmination of Christ's true influence: it has been already related how his spirit passed away and his lifeless form was entombed in Christianity.

But behold a third badge of the great religious Teachers. Each nation preserves the legends and marvels connected with the founder of its own religion, because it thinks that these give him an authority above all the other prophets. But now comes Comparative Mythology, and shows the legends and marvels to be substantially the same. The legends of Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, and Christ so closely resemble each other that they cease to give a distinctive authority to either, so far as his teaching claims to reveal things beyond universal Jesus descended from heaven, was born of a virgin named Mary, wrought miracles, and ascended to heaven from the top of the Mount of Olives where Catholics still worship his last footprint on earth. But it was already on record that Buddha descended from Heaven, was immaculately conceived and born of Maia, wrought miracles, then ascended from Adam's Peak in Ceylon where Buddhists still adore his last foot-print on earth. Two hundred millions believe the story about

reason.

*It is possible (even though Chrysostom denies it), that Paul was preferred not only because it was Hellenistic, but because Saul seemed related to σaλeve, to persecute, and Paul recalled παύσασθαι to protect,

Jesus; three hundred millions believe the same about Buddha. And yet with the same miraculous authentication one of these prophets is held to have revealed that after death each soul passes before a heavenly Judge, and thence to endless joy or torment; while the other prophet, with the same credentials, taught that at death each soul sinks to everlasting repose, if not annihilation. What will those oriental people think when they find from those millions of Bibles sent out to them that the same signs and wonders which are attesting one thing about the future in Asia are attesting a different thing in Europe? And what will our Christians think when they presently have the Eastern Bibles and make the same discovery? Why the light of the new day will dawn for both East and West. They will see in the legends and fables the broidery of the mantle which falls from prophet to prophet. Its decoration is the hereditary folklore of the ignorant, but it is sacred to them, and their superstitions follow only where their hearts have gone. It is the deep homage of the poor that they believe of Buddha all the legends told of Vishnu, or bring their sweetest fables about Apollo or Minerva to twine them around the brow of Christ and Mary. The legends and miracles concerning the great personal religions, being nearly the same, cannot on the morrow attest their several and contrarious visions; but all the more will those signs attest that each was in his time and place the highest, truest man; a true saviour of the people about whose neck they clung; who touched the depth of their heart and revealed its treasures; at whose grave women planted mystical flowers as they wept for them

selves and their children; and all transmitted a blessed memory that gradually called around it the old fables which had hallowed every prophet till he passed into abstract deification, then fallen on the shoulders of the next worthy to wear their emblem. Miracle is not God's

sign, but sign of the homage of the poor. And when this is realised, as the morning shall reveal it, then shall each great Soul rise from his sectarian tomb, and take his place in the fraternity of Saviours, and each shall bring in his arms all his sheaves from the seed he has sown in human hearts, for the common garner of Humanity.

V.

But, ah, you say, what will the morrow reveal to us about God, and about immortality? What a confession. of the emptiness of all sectarian religions that at the end of so many ages they have left the educated world without certainty on the very points-God and Immortality-upon which they have concentrated their power! So many millions sacrificed, so much wealth diverted from man to God and from the present to the future, only to leave us in scepticism at last!

Of one thing be sure,-the Morrow will reverse all that. It is plain that no more light is to be got from the sectarian day that has set, or from its Afterglow that now fades. Christian enthusiasm is spent. The strongest manifestations of its life in our time have been Mormonism, Shakerism, Moodyism, and Spirit-rapping. Sectarianism has run to seed in Christendom, and just as much in the