The re-discovery of India, lost to Europe for centuries after the beginning of the Christian era, almost as completely as America was hidden from it, was a fact of even greater import than the resurrection of Greece. It was no wilderness of ruins which was thus disclosed, from which only the shards of a long-buried civilisation could be exhumed, but a living and cultured world, whose institutions were rooted in an antiquity more profound than Greece could claim, and whose language and manners and religion were separated from the West by far more than a hemisphere. So totally unlike to the Western world was it, that the labours and sacrifices of several generations of the finest intellects of Europe were required before a key could be found to interpret its significance. Since the days when Anquetil Duperron, after many adventures and hardships, succeeded in breaking through the tangled thicket which guarded its treasures, the scholars of all nations have pressed into it, each one announcing, as he emerged, the dawn or the progress of another Renaissance, whose meaning and direction and ultimate issues only the rash will venture to predict or pretend to foresee. One of the first-fruits of their combined or independent researches is the new science of Religion. By a careful collection, analysis, and comparison of all the beliefs of mankind available, with the view of eliciting what is peculiar to each, and what they all share in common, its professors aim at discovering what may be the real nature and origin and purpose of all religion.[2] As yet it should hardly be designated a science, for though the elements for it undoubtedly exist, they are too widely scattered to be of service for immediate induction. The materials already collected have not been sufficiently sifted, and moreover, it requires the assistance of other sciences, as yet too immature, to render it effective support. The title may not be a “misnomer,”[3] but only a somewhat inflated expression by which an age, rather wise in its own conceit, proclaims the discovery of a new field of learning which it means assiduously to cultivate. The discovery however is a solid one, and the assiduity of those who would improve it is unmistakable; year by year their numbers increase, their implements improve in quality, and this generation may not pass away before an abundant harvest has been reaped.