This inquiry would complete the study of history as a science. But when we deal with moral as distinct from material relations, we feel that there is a question of philosophy as well as science, one of ethics and metaphysics, which rises above all lower ones. We instinctively wish to measure the responsibility of the moral agents who have contributed to work out the results which have been studied. We turn to the personal and biographical question for the purpose of the ethical lesson. The theist also asks another question. Believing that nature and man are the work, direct or indirect, of a personal Creator and Governor, of infinite power and goodness, he strives to search out the purposes of Providence, hoping to find in the drama of universal history the solution of the plot which he could not expect to attain by the study of a portion of it. Such are the ideas which are intended in the text. Note 2. p. 4. The Comparative Study Of Religions. The comparison of Christianity with other religions was necessarily forced upon the Christian church by contact with the heathen world. We meet in the early fathers with two distinct opinions; the one held in the Alexandrian school, that the heathen religions were imperfect but had a germ of truth, and that philosophy was a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ; the other chiefly in the African school, that they were entire errors, and an obstacle to the conversion of mankind. In the middle ages, contact with Mahometan life (see Lect. III. p. 88) created a sceptical mode of comparing Christianity with other creeds; circumstances compelling toleration, and toleration passing into indifference. A similar spirit is also seen in the hasty attempt of the French philosophers of the last century to resolve all religion into priestcraft. It is only in still more recent times that the first scientific conception of a comparative study of religion arose. Even in Herder the comparison is æsthetical more than scientific, and relates to the comparison of literatures more than of religious ideas. Benjamin Constant (_De la Religion Considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements_, 1824) seems to have been the first who really suggested a serious psychological examination; and hence there soon arose the idea of comparative theology analogous to comparative anatomy. His spirit has pervaded French literature subsequently. The religious speculations of the eclectic school give expression to it; e.g. Quinet (_Le Génie des Religions_, vol. i.); and the mode of contemplating religion in Renan (_Etudes de l’Histoire Religieuse_) is based upon it. Caution in using the method is necessary on the part of those who believe in the unique and miraculous character of the Jewish and Christian revelations. In Lect. III. (p. 87) we have given an enumeration of three modes; the one true, the others false; in which Christianity may be put into comparison with other creeds.