The Religions Of The World And Their Relations To Christianity, Considered In 8 Lects. Founded By R. Boyle

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The publisher of this book utilises modern printing technologies as well as photocopying processes for reprinting and preserving rare works of literature that are out-of-print or on the verge of becoming lost. This book is one such reprint. Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE II. remarks which I made at the close of my I last Lecture will prepare you to expect that I should speak in the present of Hindooism. That faith has been brought into conflict with Maho- metanism, has succumbed to it, and yet has maintained its ground, leaving the victorious religion the religion of a small minority. Though it may pretend to an antiquity which it does not possess, it has certainly lasted 3000 years. The language in which its holy books are composed is the mother- tongue-if I may use that phrase in its literal, rather than its ordinary sense'-of the Greek, the Latin, and the dialects of our Gothic ancestors; consequently, of nearly all which are spoken in Western Europe at this day. From this fact it might, I think, be inferred, if other evidence were wanting, that the mythologies of these nations could be traced to an Indian source. But there is abundant evidence, so much as to have misled those scholars who were first struck with it into a forgetfulness of the important historical principle, that we cannot determine the character of nations, or of their belief, merely by finding the point from which they have started; that each must be studied in itself, and in its own utterances, and that we gain only a secondary aid in our investigations when we have the means of affiliating it IMPORTANCE OF HINDOOISM. 35 to some other. That this mistake was committed by some of the great Orientalists of the last century, I think is now generally acknowledged; they seemed to suppose that they could learn more of the Greeks from Sanscrit books than from their own. But an extravagance which is natural to all discoverers does not make the discovery itself less valuable; in fact, we are only beginning to appreciate its importance. The more practically we learn to ...

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