If we turn to China, we find that the religion of Confucius is founded on the Five _King_ and the Four _Shu_ books—in themselves of considerable extent and surrounded by voluminous Commentaries, without which even the most learned scholars would not venture to fathom _the depth_ of their sacred canon.(9) But they have not fathomed it; and this is the complaint of the Confucianists, as a very learned member of that body, in Paris, complained in 1881. If our scholars turn to the ancient literature of the Semitic religions, to the Scriptures of Chaldea, the elder sister and instructress, if not the fountain‐head of the Mosaic Bible, the basis and starting‐point of Christianity, what do they find? To perpetuate the memory of the ancient religions of Babylon, to record the vast cycle of astronomical observations of the Chaldean Magi, to justify the tradition of their splendid and preëminently occult literature, what now remains? Only a few fragments, which are _said to be_ by Berosus. These, however, are almost valueless, even as a clue to the character of what has disappeared, for they passed through the hands of his Reverence, the Bishop of Cæsarea—that self‐constituted censor and editor of the sacred records of other men’s religions—and they doubtless to this day bear the mark of his eminently veracious and trustworthy hand. For what is the history of this treatise on the once grand religion of Babylon? It was written in Greek for Alexander the Great, by Berosus, a priest of the temple of Belus, from the astronomical and chronological records preserved by the priests of that temple—records covering a period of 200,000 years—and is now lost. In the first century B.C. Alexander Polyhistor made a series of extracts from it, _which are also lost_. Eusebius (270‐340 A.D.) used these extracts in writing his _Chronicon_. The points of resemblance—almost of identity—between the Jewish and the Chaldean scriptures,(10) made the latter most dangerous to Eusebius, in his _rôle_ of defender and champion of the new faith which had adopted the former scriptures and together with them an absurd chronology. Now it is pretty certain that Eusebius did not spare the Egyptian synchronistic tables of Manetho—so much so that Bunsen(11) charges him with mutilating history most unscrupulously, and Socrates, a historian of the fifth century, and Syncellus, vice‐patriarch of Constantinople in the beginning of the eighth, denounce him as the most daring and desperate forger. Is it likely, then, that he dealt more tenderly with the Chaldean records, which were already menacing the new religion, so rashly accepted?