“‘In all my travels I found but one religion, yet that religion passed current under a vast variety of names. All men alike believed in good and evil, a Heaven of some sort, and some sort of Hell likewise. I found that while at bottom Faith was everywhere the same, yet the names by which that faith was known, differed widely in different places and latitudes. For instance, I found that the Catholic or Papal, the Protestant or reformed, the Hindoo and Brahminical, the Boodhistic, Lamaic, Greek, Polytheistic, Atheistic, Deistic, Magian, Guebre, Islamic, Fetisch, and all other systems and modes of belief, were, instead of being antipodal, in fact the same at bottom. This may surprise you. Doubtless it would, were I to leave the subject just as it is. But I will explain. They are all one at bottom, inasmuch as that each and all of their respective and apparently dissimilar devotees do homage at the same shrine, of the same Great Mystery. The modes and names differ with latitude, but the _meaning_ and the principle are everywhere the same. “‘Popular estimate or opinion can never be a true criterion either of persons, thoughts, events, principles, or things. We grow daily beyond our yesterdays, and are ever reaching forth for the morrow. The world has had a long night, as it has had bright days; and now another morn is breaking, and we stand in the door of the dawn. “‘I agree with you that could the dates on the tablets here before us, be revealed, they would prove that human history really extends much further back into the night of Time than the period assigned by Moses as its morning. “‘Human monuments are in existence that indubitably prove not only that the world is much older than people give it credit for, but also that civilizations, arts, sciences, philosophy, and knowledge infinitely superior in some respects to what exists to-day, have blessed the earth in by-gone ages, and been swept away, leaving only scattered vestiges of the wreck behind to inform posterity that such things have been, but are not. “‘But what is still stronger food for thought, is the fact that amidst these ruins of the dead Ages, we find others that are evidently relics of times and civilizations still more remote--the débris of a world-wreck remembered only by the seraphim! A demonstration of this assertion is found in the pyramids, the date and purpose even of the building of which is wrapped in conjecture, and has been for ages past. The authentic history of Egypt can be traced for over 6,000 years, yet even in that remote past the pyramids were as much a mystery as they are to-day.