This is bold and manly language from a Bishop nearly two hundred years ago, and I certainly think that the time has come when some of the divinity lecturers at Oxford and Cambridge might well be employed in placing a knowledge of the sacred books of other religions within the reach of undergraduates. Many of the difficulties--most of them of our own making--with regard to the origin, the handing down, the later corruptions and misinterpretations of sacred texts, would find their natural solution, if it was shown how exactly the same difficulties arose and had to be dealt with by theologians of other creeds. If some--ay, if many--of the doctrines of Christianity were met with in other religions also, surely that would not affect their value, or diminish their truth; while nothing, I feel certain, would more effectually secure to the pure and simple teaching of Christ its true place in the historical development of the human mind than to place it side by side with the other religions of the world. In the series of translations of the "Sacred Books of the East," of which the first three volumes have just appeared,[14] I wished myself to include a new translation of the Old and New Testaments; and when that series is finished it will, I believe, be admitted that nowhere would these two books have had a grander setting, or have shone with a brighter light, than surrounded by the Veda, the Zendavesta, the Buddhist Tripi_t_aka, and the Qur'än. But as I said before, I was not thinking of religious dogmas only, or even chiefly, when I maintained that the character of academic teaching must be Socratic, not dogmatic. The evil of dogmatic teaching lies much deeper, and spreads much further. Think only of language, the work of other people, not of ourselves, which we pick up at random in our race through life. Does not every word we use require careful examination and revision? It is not enough to say that language assists our thoughts or colours them, or possibly obscures them. No, we know now that language and thought are indivisible. It was not from poverty of expression that the Greek called reason and language by the same word, λόγος. It was because they knew that, though we may distinguish between thought and speech, as we distinguish between body and soul, it is as impossible to tear the one by violence away from the other as it is to separate the concave side of a lens from its convex side. This is something to learn and to understand, for, if properly understood, it will supply the key to most of our intellectual puzzles, and serve as the safest thread through the whole labyrinth of philosophy.