Koran alone as the sole guide to truth and life. And the Christian who sees in the New Testament the only source of religious faith and practice belongs to the same class. No writer has given us a more vivid picture of the erroneous way of regarding the religions of the world than Milton in his Paradise Lost. That all religions except the Christian are pure inventions. of the Devil to ensnare the unwary is his fundamental thought.

This position has been the source of untold mischief and suffering in the past, and immensely impedes the progress of mankind at present. It is contrary to actual fact, and is based upon the false assumption that man possesses the ability to acquire absolute certainty in religious matters, a thing which is denied to him in every other sphere.

The truth is that man's religion develops as he himself develops. The steps in the evolution of religion are the steps in his own mental advancement. There is never a time after he comes into conscious possession of his powers as a person when he is without religion, and there is no possibility of his outgrowing religion. He does not get his religion out of any book, but primarily out of the experiences of his own mind and heart. The experiences of others are a help to him only as he reproduces them in his own. sual he is, the more sensual will be his religion, and the more rational and pure his life is, the more refined and spiritual will his religion become. In other words, the more of a man he is himself, the loftier will his conception be of the Maker and Sustainer of all truth and life.

The more sen

The reason for this is that every man is so constructed that he must make his god in his own image.

Religion arises in the ability of man to form an ideal of things that transcend the real. A man without imagination would be without religion, for he would be no longer a man, but would have sunk down to the level of the brute. No man ever worshipped an abstraction. He pays homage only to some concrete thing, and his ability to form a picture of a Power higher than himself depends upon his imagination, which simply takes the highest in his own experience and attributes it to his god. This has been true of man in all stages of his history, is true now, and we cannot think of a time when it will be otherwise.

The charge that religion is anthropomorphic is admitted without hesitation. For this is true of everything beyond the merely physical, of which we have any knowledge. We cannot think of any being above ourselves, unless we assume that being to be in some respects at least in our own image. It is psychologically impossible not to do so, if we make the attempt at all. Every man must worship his own thought of God, and his progress in civilization is best measured by the worthiness of that thought. The religious nature of man, when once aroused, can never be lulled to' rest. It must feed upon something. For it is the most fundamental and pervasive of all man's powers. It is perpetually yearning for expression, and can only for a time be partially smothered. It will reach its full and complete fruition in every one of us only when we come to realize in our own experience the most commonplace and yet truest saying of all the ages upon this subject, that the highest of all existences in this universe is "not far from every one of us; for in him we live and move and have our being."

CHAPTER III.

SACRED BOOKS AND HOW THEY ORIGINATE.

a. The Sacred Tablets of the Babylonians.In treating of the subject of the relation of bibles to religion we need, first of all, to note the fact that three things existed in this world long before there were any bibles, namely, nature, man, and God.

The "little speck of matter" in our stellar universe which we call the earth had passed through innumerable changes in form and condition ages before man appeared upon its surface, and man had established elaborate systems of religious worship on many portions of our planet centuries before a bible of any description had even been thought of. For the moment a human being begins to attain a consciousness of his own existence and the existence of a world around and above him, he forms at once some sort of religion, and there is never a time in his history as a man when he is without religion.

Hence a very little reflection will lead us to see that a bible cannot be brought into existence until man has had some experience with nature and has learned to look with some degree of clearness through nature up to superhuman powers. No bible can create this experience. All it can do is to record what has been experienced in the past and anticipate with more or less assurance what may come within the realm of

future experience. Religion, therefore, cannot be based upon any bible. On the contrary, it is religion that makes bibles, not bibles religion.

Nevertheless, the content and form of religion may come to be immensely affected by their influence, and such has been the historic fact. Every religion of any moment in the world has sooner or later found itself in possession of a bible in which it treasured up its profoundest thoughts and its noblest inspirations. It is, therefore, our present purpose to state very briefly the leading features of some of these bibles, to set forth the opinion of scholars as to how they grew to be what they now are, and at the same time to estimate in a general way their value to the cause of religion in our day. Taking them up, as far as possible, in their chronological order, we mention first of all the Sacred Tablets of the Babylonians.

There is at present no agreement among scholars as to what portion of the earth first produced a permanent record of its religious life, and many are of the opinion that the origin of civilization will never be traced to any one people or country. All, however, now admit that the Sacred Tablets recently unearthed in Babylonia are among the oldest literary records of any sort yet discovered, and that they carry us back to a date far beyond the wildest dreams of scholars a half-century ago.

As early as 1842 M. Botta, a Frenchman, began making excavations in a mound on the left bank of the Tigris, not far from Mosul. In it he discovered the ruins of a magnificent palace. From the inscriptions on the walls and from other data it was shown that the palace was erected by Sargon II., who reigned over Assyria from 721 B.C. to 705 B.C. Inspired by Botta's

remarkable successes, Sir Austin Henry Layard, an eminent English archæologist, a few years later started to open some mounds on the opposite bank of the river a few miles to the south of Mosul. The result was that he soon unearthed the remains of the ancient city of Nineveh, bringing to light many palaces and temples still filled with the sculptured treasures of literature and art.

His principal find, however, was a great collection of clay tablets, covered with cuneiform or wedge-shaped inscriptions, which turned out to be the famous royal "brick" library gathered by Asshurbanipal, who succeeded to the Assyrian throne in 668 B.C. Some 30,000 fragments of this library are now in the British. Museum and, together with the notable finds made shortly after by H. Rassam and George Smith, give us on the whole a most satisfactory knowledge of the religious beliefs and rites of this ancient people.

But what is still more remarkable, recent discoveries show us that these tablets take us back to a time far more remote than that of Asshurbanipal, or even of the existence of the Assyrians as a nation. In 1854 Sir Henry Rawlinson began uncovering the sites of the ancient cities of Babylonia. The French and German governments later took up the work. Expeditions from the University of Pennsylvania led by Dr. John C. Peters and Professor Hilprecht have within the last few years explored the region of Nippur and Mugheir, the biblical Ur of the Chaldees. From the material thus acquired it is now ascertained that the tablets of Layard are copies of originals found in the far more ancient Babylonian temples, and that they go back to a time much earlier than anything found in the mounds of Assyria proper. In fact, scholars now tell us that the