is to drive things forward, hence called pravahana (provehere). In the same manner all other historical and geographical names should be explained, etymologically, not historically.'

This is only a small specimen of what forensic theology can achieve, and could achieve long before our own time. It enables us to see both what was originally intended by such words as God-given, Godinspired, Sruti, what has been heard, Revelation, what has been unfolded, and what was made of these words afterwards. It was the sense of an over-powering truth which led to the admission of a revelation. But while in the beginning truth made revelation, it soon came to pass that revelation was supposed to make truth. When we see this happening in every part of the world, when we can watch the psychological process which leads in the most natural way to a belief in supernatural inspiration, it will hardly be said that an historical study of religion may be useful to the antiquarian, but cannot help us to solve the burning questions of the day. But this is not what I am pleading for at present. At present I want to prove no more than that an historical study of the religions of the world possesses this one great advantage, that it familiarises us with the old problems of the philosophy of religion, and fits us for a more fearless treatment of them in their modern form.

The old Problems in their simpler Form.

And by showing us the various phases through which many of these problems have passed before they assumed their present form, it teaches us another and most important lesson, namely, that in attempting to solve these problems we must not attempt to solve

them in their modern form only, and with all the perplexities which they present to us in their often obscure metaphysical phraseology, but that we must trace them back, as far as we can, to their first beginnings and to their simplest form.

It is with these religious problems as it is with the problems of language. Who could account for language, if he only knew the language of to-day? If we knew none of the antecedents of English, as it now exists in its 250,000 words, many of them with different meanings, many of them again having one and the same meaning, even the wisest of us could say no more than what Plato said in the Cratylus, namely that language could not possibly have been invented by man1. And now that we know by what simple process language was, if not invented, at all events produced and elaborated by man, does it lower language, because it was not invented by the gods, or does it lower man because he was not presented by the gods with a language ready made? I believe not, and I hold the same with regard to religion. If we see with what natural feelings and simple sentiments religion began, and then follow its course till it reaches that perfect, or at all events that complete state in which we find it in later times, we shall hardly think that we degrade religion by accepting it as the most precious product of the human mind, nor shall we consider man as robbed of his dignity, be

Rousseau makes the same confession. Quant à moi,' he writes, 'effrayé des difficultés qui se multiplient, et convaincu de l'impossibilité presque démontrée que les langues aient pu naître et s'établir par des moyens purement humains, je laisse à qui voudra d'entreprendre la discussion de ce difficile problème.' See De Bonald, Recherches Philosophiques, p. 117.

cause on the day of his birth the gods did not descend from heaven to present him with a religion ready made or reduced to settled creeds and finished articles of faith, but left him to grow and to learn to stand on his own legs, and to fight his own battle in the struggle for truth.

LECTURE X.

COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGIOUS PROBLEMS.

W

The Problem of Creation.

HEN we study the same problem, first in the heated controversies of our own time, and then look at it from a more elevated position which allows us to watch its historical progress, in all its varying aspects, it seems often difficult to believe that the problem is really the same. And yet, if history teaches us anything, it teaches us that there is continuity in the growth of thought as in the growth of language.

Let us look at the problem of creation. The question which the Vedic poet asked (X. 31, 7) when he said, 'What was the forest, what was the tree from which they hewed heaven and earth,' is in reality the same question which we ask to-day, and which has received ever so many answers from century to century, and will receive as many more, so long as heaven and earth remain. It is true these early questioners would hardly understand our language, if we tried to put them off with the nebular theories of Kant and Laplace, with Lyall's explanation of the formation of the crust of the earth, or with Huxley's account of the transition of inorganic into organic protoplasm. But

what they were in search of was after all the same, and what they called wood, out of which heaven and earth were hewn, was but another name for vλŋ, wood, materies, wood, then material and matter, something behind or antecedent to the phenomenal world, as it appears before our eyes.

The Logic of Facts.

It is sometimes quite startling, after we have tried to unravel the subtle webs of philosophy, such as the so-called Cosmological, Ontological, and Teleological proofs of the existence of a supreme deity, to have to face the question, what the earliest searchers after God would have said to these arguments, They would hardly have comprehended the language in which they present themselves now, and if we tried ourselves to translate them, for instance, into Vedic Sanskrit, we should completely fail. And yet we are the descendants of those Vedic poets, their language is essentially our language, their thoughts are essentially our thoughts, the world we live in is much the same as their Aryan home, and whatever discoveries have been made in other branches of knowledge, no new facts have been discovered since their time to help us to solve that old and yet always new question, whether there is an author of the Universe, whether there is a Creator and a God.

That the three famous arguments, the Cosmological, the Ontologicul, and the Teleological, have collapsed before the tribunal of formal logic, may be admitted. But it has been truly said1 that 'as an analysis of the unconscious or implicit logic of religion, as tracing

1 Caird, Philosophy of Religion, p. 133.