| I. Introductory. The Evolution of Appreciation | Title page | III. The Revelations of Comparative Religion |
[ p. 10 ]
The supreme ethical value of the revelations of comparative religion is that they serve to cultivate in us this virtue of appreciation. But before we note the manner in which this spiritual gain is vouchsafed to us, we must turn to the revelations themselves. What are they and whence do they derive? Beginning with the latter question, we owe these revelations directly to the discovery of the Bibles of the great religions. Spaniards discovered the Koran. When, in 711, the Moors crossed from northern Africa into Spain, they brought with them a book for which they made the most astounding claim. They held that if every existing copy of this book were to be destroyed the world would not be the poorer, because an original, everlasting copy is preserved [ p. 11 ] by the throne of Allah and, by means of relays of angels, it could be recommunicated in full to mankind. This “word of God,” as the Mohammedans called it, was the Koran, the sacred book of their religion.
Germans were the discoverers of the Confucian scriptures, some of them edited by the Sage himself and others the work of his own moral genius and that of successors. About the middle of the fourteenth century, certain German travelers found their way to a rich and densely populated country they called Cathay, but later learned to designate as China. Here they discovered a wealth of religious and moral literature, the five “Kings” and the four “Books,” conspicuous for their teaching on business and domestic ethics. Together these works constitute the Bible of Confucianism and, like the Koran, they have been translated into all the leading languages of Europe.
It was a Frenchman, Anquetil du Perron, who, while browsing in the imperial library at Paris, in 1784, came upon a collection of dusty [ p. 12 ] sheets of manuscript, written in a Sanskrit dialect. These proved to he a portion of the Zoroastrian Bible, the Avesta. Wishing to know more of this literature and of these people, Anquetil went to Bombay, in northwestern India, where, for over a thousand years, a colony of Zoroastrian exiles from Persia had established themselves. Anquetil spent three years among them, learning their language, and chancing upon one hundred and eighty-two manuscripts, similar to the sheets he had discovered in the Paris library, the grand total, composing all that we have of the sacred books of the Parsees, or Zoroastrians.
When, in 1787, the British took possession of India, that great commercial enterprise led to the discovery of the oldest part of what is probably the oldest Bible in the world, the Rig-Veda, consisting of some 1,017 hymns in praise of the personified forces of Nature. Add to the Rig-Veda the other three Vedas, the Yajur, Sama, and Atharva, subsequently discovered; the Aranyakas, or “Forest Meditations,” [ p. 13 ] the Upanishads and the two great epics of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and we have a compendium of sacred Hindu literature over four times as large as the Old and New Testaments. Later, still other Indian books were discovered, which proved to be the sacred literature of the Buddhists—the Pitakas. The very letters of these books were regarded as having a sanctity of their own, so they were counted, just as the letters of the New Testament were counted in the days when men thought that not only its teaching, but also its letters were “inspired.” Comparing the total number of letters in the Pitakas with those in the New Testament we find that there are eight times as many in the former as there are in the latter. Such, in brief, are the sources whence the revelations of comparative religion derive.
| I. Introductory. The Evolution of Appreciation | Title page | III. The Revelations of Comparative Religion |