Many religions still exist, but some are extinct. We speak of languages as dead or living; the ancient Greek and the Latin, which are no longer spoken, are called dead. The French, German or English, which are in common use to-day, are called living. Though these dead languages are no longer spoken, words and phrases which are derived from them still survive in the living languages. Indeed some of the living languages are built up out of these dead languages. Just so in religions, there are worships which have no followers to-day; there are ruins of their temples and idols, and portions of their sacred books remaining to us. The accounts which ancient historians have preserved for us of their worships, the ruins of their temples, their majestic monuments and inscriptions, and their sacred books which have of late years been translated into our language, enable us to learn very minutely of many of these worships. Of the living religions, we have but to study the narratives of travelers and of those scholars who have taken special pains to study and explain the sacred books, rites, legends and customs of the people following these faiths. ORIGINAL RELIGIONS AND REFORMED RELIGIONS. By original religions we mean to denote those which are, or were, the religions of the earliest inhabitants of the various countries, and which are but little changed in the course of time. By reformed religions we mean such as at some later day have branched off from the earlier religions. These reforms are always begun by some great man, who, seeing or imagining error in the old system, undertakes to correct it, and before he is hardly aware of it, establishes a new faith. Thus Zoroaster rebelled against the impure worship of the corrupt religion of his country and founded Parseeism; thus Confucius gathered together some of the traditions and sayings of the ancient Chinese writers, added to them a great many teachings of his own and founded Confucianism; thus Gautama, the Buddha, convinced of the inability of the ancient Hindu faith to help the world’s sorrow or to heal its wounds, founded Buddhism; and thus Mohammed felt himself called of God to wage a war against idolatry, and so he founded the Moslem faith. Further, we shall take up these religions in each class as far as possible, in the order of time, taking the oldest first and the youngest last. DEAD RELIGIONS.