[86] As M. Vernes has remarked, the preparation for teaching the history of religions might well be the same as that for teaching philosophy, history, and letters. It should include the studies in the upper classes, of the philosophical section of the _école normale_, and a preparatory course in the divers other faculties: a real _normal_ course. In this course the professor should point out the general principle of the history of religions and should confine himself to indicating them very summarily in the case of the religions of Greece and Rome, to which a general literary education will have given the pupil access; he should deal, without excessive attention to detail, with the other Indo-European religions (those of India, Persia, etc.), with the religions of Egypt, of Assyria, of Phœnicia, of Islam; and should spend his greatest efforts on the criticism of Judaism and the early stages of Christianity, on the history of the principal Christian dogmas and their development. [Sidenote: Education of instructors.] It has been said, after M. Laboulaye, that a professor of the history of religion should be at once an archæologist, an epigraphist, a numismatist, a linguist, an anthropologist, and versed in Hindu, Phœnician, Slavonic, Germanic, Celtic, Etruscan, Greek, and Roman antiquities; he should be nothing less than a Pico della Mirandola. At that rate one might show also that neither schools nor colleges can be expected to include a course on natural history or on the political history of some seven or eight nations—nay, even that it is impossible to teach children to read: the art of reading is so difficult in its perfection! Really is it necessary that the historian of religion should be a master of all the historical sciences? He is under no obligation to discover new materials, he has simply to make use of those which philologists and epigraphists have put at his disposal; such materials are now abundant enough and well enough ascertained to require a course specially devoted to them. There is no need for the instructor to master such and such a particular division of the history of religion; he is simply required to furnish students in our universities, in the course of one or two years, with a general view of the development of religious ideas in history. The professor will no doubt encounter certain difficulties in dealing with religious questions because of the amount of feeling that such problems always involve, but the same difficulty is met with in every course which deals with contemporary questions, and almost every course does deal with them. A professor of history has to deal with contemporary facts, to describe the successive changes in the form of government in France, etc. A professor of philosophy has to deal with questions of theodicy and morals; and even in pure psychology, materialistic and