How it cheers and enlarges us to hear of these great thoughts and know that the Divine has never been without a witness on earth! How it must sadden the soul to disbelieve them. Worse yet to be in a position where one has to hope that they may not be correctly reported,--that one by one they may be explained away. A prosecuting attorney once told me that the most painful part of his position was that he had to hope that every man he prosecuted would be proved a villain. What is the painful circumstance in Mrs. Stowe's Byron controversy? That she is obliged to hope that the character of a sister woman, hitherto stainless, may be hopelessly blackened. But what is this to their position who are bound to hope that the character of humanity will be blackened by wholesale, who are compelled to resist every atom of light that history reveals. For instance, as the great character of Buddha has come out from the darkness, within fifty years, how these reluctant people have struggled against it, still desiring to escape. "Save us, O God!" they have seemed to say, "from the distress of believing that so many years ago there was a sublime human life." Show such persons that the great religious ideas and maxims are as old as literature; and how they resist the knowledge! "Surely it is not so bad as that," they say. "Is there not a possibility of a mistranslation? Let us see the text, explore the lexicon; is there no labor, no toil, by which we can convince ourselves that there is a mistake? Anything rather than believe that there is a light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." For this purpose the very facts of history must be suppressed or explained away. Sir George Mackenzie, in his "Travels in Iceland," says that the clergy prevented till 1630, with "mistaken zeal," the publication of the Scandinavian Eddas. Huc, the Roman Catholic Missionary, described in such truthful colors the religious influence of Buddhism in Thibet that his book was put in the _index expurgatorius_ at Rome. Balmes, a learned Roman Catholic writer, declares that "Christianity is stripped of a portion of its honors" if we trace back any high standard of female purity to the ancient Germans; and so he coolly sets aside as "poetical" the plain statements of the accurate Tacitus. If we are to believe the accounts given of the Jewish Essenes by Josephus, De Quincey thinks, the claims made by Christianity are annihilated. "If Essenism could make good its pretensions, there, at one blow, would be an end of Christianity, which, in that case, is not only superseded as an idle repetition of a religious system already published, but as a criminal plagiarism. Nor can the wit of man evade the conclusion." He accordingly attempts to explain away the testimony of Josephus.[E]