Nothing is more elevating than the study of the human race through its successive phases of existence. Therein is to be discovered the scheme of God’s Providence among the nations, slowly raising the race from one stage of progress to another and higher. The world advances slowly,—but still “it moves!” Severed into distinct nations, and divinely placed or led into climes congenial to the peculiar development of each,—secluded behind mountain chains, deserts, or seas, each section of mankind has been left to develop a civilisation of its own—forms of government, religion, art, science, philosophy, more or less peculiar to itself. Through long ages this birth of nations has been going on, each learning for itself the lessons of life. And each of those nations, whether ancient or modern, has attached itself in a peculiar manner to some one of the many forms of truth, carrying it to greater perfection than the other sections of the race. Every one knows that such was the case among the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Hebrews,—but do not let it be supposed that the wisdom of the ancient world ends here. Do not suppose that nothing is to be learned from the old history and writings of China—that land where social ethics and utilitarian science were first carried to comparative perfection; or from the ancient Hindoos, who first pre-eminently devoted themselves to the study of the spiritual nature of man, and in whose lofty speculations may be found the germ of almost every system of philosophy, whether true or false, to which the European world has given birth. Hegel and Spinosa are but Hindoos reviving in the eighteenth century. Auguste Comte, with his boasted new science of Positivism, is but a systematiser of the doctrines of Confucius and the old philosophers of China,—and what are magnetism, clairvoyance, and suchlike researches at present making into the spiritual powers of man, but unconscious repetitions of what has been known or imagined in India for three thousand years?