The last century has thus accumulated an immense mass of material in literature and art. There are codes of law regulating in the name of deity the practice of family and social life. There are hymns of praise or of penitence, sometimes in strange association with the spells of magic. There are books of ritual and sacrifice, of ceremonial order, of philosophical speculation and moral precept. There are rules of discipline for religious communities; and there are pictures of judgment and delineations of the heavenly life. Sculpture and painting have been employed to give external form to the objects of pious reverence; and the architecture of the sanctuary has wrought into stone the fundamental conceptions of majesty, proportion, and grace. All this, it is plain, rests upon history. When Confucius visited the seat of the imperial dynasty at the court of Chow, he studied with deep interest the arrangements for the great sacrifices to Heaven and Earth; he surveyed the ancestral temples in which the emperor offered his worship; he inspected the Hall of Light whose walls bore paintings of the sovereigns from the remotest times; and then he turned to his disciples with the remark: "As we use a glass to examine the forms of things, so must we study the past to {29} understand the present." Comparison that confines itself solely to counting up resemblances here and there will be of small value. We cannot comprehend the real meaning of a single religious rite, a single sentence of any scripture, apart from the context to which it belongs. Acts and words alike issue out of experiences that may be hundreds of years old, and sum up generations, it may be whole ages, of a continuous process. To trace the successive forms of these changes, to describe the steps through which they have passed, is like making a chart of a voyage, and laying down the lines of continent and ocean, island and cape. Or just as the races of man are sorted, and their characteristics are enumerated without reference to the various causes which have produced their modifications, so geography and ethnography might companion _hierography_, the delineation of "the Sacred" in its concrete manifestations.