That impulse on this occasion has differed from all that went before it in that it founds no new religion, builds no new barrier, does not mark out believers and unbelievers, does not try to proselytise, but only to inspire. For, as I just said, Theosophy goes to all religions as a peacemaker, and does not strive to draw away from any faith those whom the law has brought to birth beneath its shelter. So its first work in preparation for the coming civilisation is to try to bring about a brotherhood of religions, not destroying any, not trying to make any less potent than they were before, but endeavouring to transform them from rivals to brothers, so that each religion may recognise its kinship with other religions, and they may become one mighty family, instead of warring and separate creeds. Now, to that high end it brings the knowledge of facts which have largely been used against religion, but ought really to be used in its service. Those of you who have reached even middle age will remember how in the latter part of the nineteenth century there grew up among the sciences of the time a science which was named Comparative Mythology. You will remember how that science grew; the oldest among you may remember its very beginnings. It sought out of the past religions, as well as out of the present religions, to prove that religion grew up out of ignorance, and only became refined as it grew older and spread among more cultivated people. It used the researches of the archæologist, the discoveries of the antiquarian, as weapons against the religion which dominated Christendom, where science was most powerful and most active. It took up doctrine after doctrine of the Christian faith, and pointed to the existence of those doctrines in other times, in other civilisations, among the religions of the past, both living and dead. It brought information from the open tombs of Egypt, and gathered together the fragments of Egyptian knowledge as they were traced on the papyrus, on the leaf that was put on the bosom of the mummy. It gathered them together, and out of those scattered fragments it made what we know well as the Egyptian _Book of the Dead_. It did the same with Chaldæa, the same with Nineveh, the same with those replicas of Egyptian temples that were unburied in far-off Mexico—temples thousands of years older than the Aztecs, who slew their worshippers and destroyed their civilisation, the Aztecs, who themselves were thousands of years old when Cortez and his Spaniards treated them as they had treated their forerunners. It brought from those unburied temples similar teachings and similar ideas. It gathered, again, similar teachings from the books of China, with its immemorial traditions; from the scriptures of India, from the fragments of the Zoroastrian tradition, from the books of the Buddhist nations, from Greek and Roman. Piling up all the evidence it had gathered, it made out of that the science of Comparative Mythology.