got their ideas of angels from the Babylonians, with whom, as far as we know, this idea was original, inasmuch as we find no mention of them in the Egyptian religious system. Considering now the civilization which existed in the valleys of Mesopotamia from five to six thousand years ago, the first thing which arrests our attention is their knowledge of astronomy. In place of the Egyptian pyramid, with its sides Oriented toward the cardinal points, we find the ziggurat pointing the angles instead. This one fact shows that Chaldea did not borrow from Egypt, but developed her science independently of her western neighbor. The planets were all known and named, eclipses were foretold with accuracy, and to Accadia we owe not only our observance of Sunday, but our angular duodecimal scale. What length of time must have been required to admit of such a highly-developed civilization as this, with such advanced religious and ethical ideas, is beyond the faintest conjecture. Far more remote than that time, however, were the first settlements on the alluvial plains by the rude aborigines of the highlands. On the plateau of Iran, in Central Asia, we find the location of the oldest known habitation of the Aryan race. Here, in the earliest twilight of our history, we find tribes of human beings who possessed well-developed religious and ethical ideas, and whose descendants, moving toward the southeast and into the valleys of the Himalayas, formulated the hymns which, when compiled, constitute the Vedas or the sacred literature of the Aryan Indians, while the portion who remained behind, became the progenitors of the Aryan Iranians whose religious lore we find in that wonderful collection known as the Avesta. In these two literatures, both of which are worthy of the deepest investigation and maturest deliberation, we have, so far as is known, the oldest idea of a non-anthropomorphic deity. His attributes with the Indian were so subdivided and abstracted as to allow this one god essence to almost fill a panthenon. Their worship took the form of adoration for the striking grandeurs of nature, each of whom they regarded as a separate personal consciousness possessed of superhuman powers. Their religion seems to the superficial investigator to be but an exceptionally pure form of pantheism, but this is not, in fact, the case, since philologists to-day recognize that the overwhelming spontaneous impulse which forces the barbaric human mentality to give utterance to its deepest emotions, is a certain index of a crude monotheistic conception. It is Brahma who is the universal self-existent soul, and who comprises, in his infinity, both the god and the adorer. Of course, as time went on, these ideas became more gross, until, with the introduction of caste, the ancient Vedic religion had lost much of its beauty and purity. The religious system had become both dogmatic and pretentious, and particularly insolent in its authority