"How striking a proof is it," says a writer on The Religions of India, "of the strength of the adoring principle in human nature--what an illustration of mankind's sense of dependence upon an unseen Supreme--that the grandest works which the nations have reared are those connected with religion! Were a spirit from some distant world to look down upon the surface of our planet as it spins round in the solar rays, his eye would be most attracted, as the morning light passed onward, by the glittering and painted pagodas of China, Borneo, and Japan; the richly ornamented temples and stupendous rock shrines of India; the dome-topped mosques and tall, slender minarets of Western Asia; the pyramids and vast temples of Egypt, with their mile-long avenues of gigantic statues and sphinxes; the graceful shrines of classic Greece; the basilicas of Rome and Byzantium; the semi-oriental church-domes of Moscow; the Gothic cathedrals of Western Europe: and as the day closed, the light would fall dimly upon the ruins of the grand sun-temples of Mexico and Peru, where, in the infancy of reason and humanity, human sacrifices were offered up, as if the All-Father were pleased with the agony of his creatures!" "Moral rules," says Matthew Arnold, in his Essay on Marcus Aurelius, "apprehended as ideas first, and then rigorously followed as laws, are and must be for the sage only. The mass of mankind have neither force of intellect enough to apprehend them clearly as ideas, nor force of character enough to follow them strictly as laws. The mass of mankind can be carried along a course full of hardships for the natural man, can be borne over the thousand impediments of the narrow way, only by the tide of a joyful and bounding emotion. It is impossible to rise from reading Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius without a sense of constraint and melancholy, without feeling that the burden laid upon man is well-nigh greater than he can bear. Honor to the sages who have felt this, and yet have borne it!... For the ordinary man, this sense of labor and sorrow constitutes an absolute disqualification; it paralyzes him; under the weight of it he cannot make way toward the goal at all. The paramount virtue of religion is that it has lighted up morality; that it has supplied the emotion and inspiration needful for carrying the sage along the narrow way perfectly, for carrying the ordinary man along it at all. Even the religions with most dross in them have had something of this virtue; but the Christian religion manifests it with unexampled splendor." The Duke de Chaulnes once said to Dr. Johnson that "every religion had a certain degree of morality in it." "Ay, my lord," answered he, "but the Christian religion alone puts it on its proper basis." "It is Christianity alone," said Max Mueller, "which, as the religion of humanity, as the religion of no caste, of no chosen people, has taught us to respect the history of humanity as a whole, to discover