the Gospel or from any other trustworthy source in support of so unhallowed a belief. They have generally appealed to the devilries and orgies of heathen worship; they have quoted the blasphemies of Oriental Sufis and the immoralities sanctioned by the successors of Mohammed; but they have seldom, if ever, endeavoured to discover the true and original character of the strange forms of faith and worship which they call the work of the devil. If the Indians had formed their notions of Christianity from the soldiers of Cortez and Pizarro, or if the Hindus had studied the principles of Christian morality in the lives of Clive and Warren Hastings; or, to take a less extreme case, if a Mohammedan, settled in England, were to test the practical working of Christian charity by the spirit displayed in the journals of our religious parties, their notions of Christianity would be about as correct as the ideas which thousands of educated Christians entertain of the diabolical character of heathen religion. Even Christianity has been depraved into Jesuitism and Mormonism, and if we, as Protestants, claim the right to appeal to the Gospel as the only test by which our faith is to be judged, we must grant a similar privilege to Mohammedans and Buddhists, and to all who possess a written, and, as they believe, revealed authority for the articles of their faith. But though no one is likely to deny the necessity of studying each religion in its most ancient form and from its original documents, before we venture to pronounce our verdict, the difficulties of this task are such that in them more than in anything else, must be sought the cause why so few of our best thinkers and writers have devoted themselves to a critical and historical study of the religions of the world. All important religions have sprung up in the East. Their sacred books are written in Eastern tongues, and some of them are of such ancient date that those even who profess to believe in them, admit that they are unable to understand them without the help of translations and commentaries. Until very lately the sacred books of three of the most important religions, those of the Brahmans, the Buddhists, and the Parsis, were totally unknown in Europe. It was one of the most important results of the study of Sanskrit, or the ancient language of India, that through it the key, not only to the sacred books of the Brahmans, the Vedas, but likewise to those of the Buddhists and Zoroastrians, was recovered. And nothing shows more strikingly the rapid progress of Sanskrit scholarship than that even Sir William Jones, whose name has still, with many, a more familiar sound than the names of Colebrooke, Burnouf, and Lassen, should have known nothing of the Vedas; that he should never have read a line of the canonical books of the Buddhists, and that he actually expressed his belief that Buddha was the same as the Teutonic deity Wodan or Odin, and _S_âkya, another name of Buddha, the same as Shishac, king