At present the idea of our Association is pretty well domesticated in Christendom. It was not, after all, entirely new. In 1845 and 1846 Frederick Denison Maurice, lecturing on the Boyle Foundation in London on "The Religions of the World and their Relations to Christianity," attempted to do justice to the ancient faiths of India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In 1882, in Edinburgh, eminent men discussed the same problems under the title of "The Faiths of the World." In 1871 James Freeman Clarke published his "Ten Great Religions." The study of comparative religion has been going on for many years. When Mozoomdar came to this country a few years ago, there was such a rush for him among American orthodox Christians that the Free Religious Association could not get at him at all, though it had tried in vain to get a real Brahmin on its platform. True, there were differences of opinion among the orthodox students of the old-world systems. Some regarded the ancient religions as effete; some denied that Christianity touched them at more than one or two points; some treated them simply as preparations for the crowning faith of Christ. Still, whatever their differences, all agreed that the religious instinct was universal; that there was a ground for revelation in the human heart; since Carlyle's famous lecture in "Heroes," delivered in 1840, it was impossible to regard Mahomet as an impostor, or to look upon religion as a fabrication of the priests, as an attempt to practise upon human ignorance and fear.