I have dwelt at some length on the ancient religions, for nothing tends more to open the mind, and break down the narrow barriers of sectarian prejudice, than to see how the ideas which we have believed to be the peculiar possession of our own religion, are in fact the inevitable products of the evolution of the human race from barbarism to civilization, and have appeared in substantially the same forms in so many ages and countries. And surely, in these days, when faith in direct inspiration has been so rudely shaken, it must be consoling to many enlightened Christians to find that the fundamental articles of their creed, trinities, emanations, incarnations, atonements, a future life and day of judgment, are not the isolated conceptions of a minority of the human race in recent times, but have been held from a remote antiquity by all the nations which have taken a leading part in civilization. To all enlightened minds also, whatever may be their theological creeds, it must be a cheering reflection that the fundamental axioms of morality do not depend on the evidence that the Decalogue was written on a stone by God's own finger, or that the Sermon on the Mount is correctly reported, but on the evolution of the natural instincts of the human mind. All advanced and civilized communities have had their Decalogues and Sermons on the Mount, and it is impossible for any dispassionate observer to read them without feeling that in substance they are all identical, whether contained in the Egyptian Todtenbuch, the Babylonian hymns, the Zoroastrian Zendavesta, the sacred books of Brahmanism and Buddhism, the Maxims of Confucius, the Doctrines of Plato and the Stoics, or the Christian Bible. None are absolutely perfect and complete, and of some it may be said that they contain precepts of the highest practical importance which are either omitted or contradicted in the Christian formulas. For instance, the virtue of diligence, and the injunction not to be idle, in the Egyptian and Zoroastrian creeds contrast favourably with the "take no thought for the morrow," and "trust to be fed like the sparrows," of the Sermon on the Mount. But in this, and in all these summaries of moral axioms, apparent differences arise not from fundamental oppositions, but from truth having two sides, and passing over readily into "The falsehood of extremes."