TEN GREAT RELIGIONS.

PART I. AN ESSAY IN COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY. WITH AN INDEX.

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CONTENTS: Ethnic and Catholic Religions; Confucius and the Chinese; Brahmanism; Buddhism, or the Protestantism of the East; Zoroaster and the Zend Avesta; The Gods of Egypt; The Gods of Greece; The Religion of Rome; The Teutonic and Scandinavian Religion; The Jewish Religion; Mohammed and Islam; The Ten Religions and Christianity.

Nothing has come to our knowledge which furnishes evidence of such voluminous reading, such thorough study and research, and such masterly grasp of the real elements of these religions, as does the volume before us. James Freeman Clarke has accomplished a work here of solid worth. . . . The secret of the author's success, if we mistake not, turns largely on the fact that he has tried to

place himself in sympathy with the earnest and often he-
roic thinkers who originated these religious systems, and
thus has come into a position to understand more correctly
their mental struggles and the character of the results at
which they arrived. - Missionary Review (Princeton).
A great body of valuable and not generally or easily ac
cessible information.- The Nation (New York).

TEN GREAT RELIGIONS.

PART II. COMPARISON OF ALL RELIGIONS. WITH AN INDEX.
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CONTENTS: Introduction- Description and Classification; Special Types Variations; Origin and Development of all Religions; The Idea of God in all Religions-Animism, Polytheism, Pantheism; Idea of God in all Religions - Ditheism, Tritheism, and Monotheism; The Soul and its Transmigrations, in all Religions; The Origin of the World, in all Religions; Evolution, Emanation, and Creation; Prayer and Worship in all Religions; Inspiration and Art in all Religions; Ethics in all Religions; Idea of a Future State in all Religions; The Future Religion of Mankind; Appendix.

There never was, perhaps, a time when a work like this of Dr. Clarke's could have been so well undertaken. The last few years have done much to throw light upon the religions of the world, and especially those of the East. Of these researches the author has availed himself, and he has given the world a book unique in design and execu

tion; in its attempt to trace the doctrines we have named through all religions the work has no predecessor. The Churchman (New York).

His rare learning, clear style, and the systematic conciseness with which he abridges a vast amount of material are apparent to every one. - Bibliotheca Sacra.

COMMON-SENSE IN RELIGION.

A SERIES OF ESSAYS.

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CONTENTS: Common-Sense and Mystery; Common-Sense View of Human Nature; On the Doctrine Concerning God; The Bible and Inspiration; The True Meaning of Evangelical Christianity; The Truth about Sin; Common-Sense and Scripture Views of Heaven and Hell; Satan, according to Common-Sense and the Bible; Concerning the Future Life; The Nature of Our Condition Hereafter; Common-Sense View of the Christian Church; Five Kinds of Piety; Jesus a Mediator; The Expectations and Disappointments of Jesus; Common-Sense View of Salvation by Faith; On not being Afraid; Hope; The Patience of Hope; Love; The Brotherhood of Men.

Dr. Clarke has much to say which commends itself to our judgment and our feelings. There is a certain vigor in his thought, and an absolute clearness in his style, together with an evident and rugged honesty and strength of

conviction underlying all, which make him an impressive teacher, even when we cannot bring ourselves to accept his instructions.— Congregationalist (Boston).

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PART I. THE ANSWER OF SUBJECTIVE ANALYSIS.

I THINK We may take it for granted that every unsophisticated man is about equally certain of the truth of the following propositions. First, I exist. Second, There exists in time and space a world external to myself. Third, I can produce changes in myself and in that external world. Fourth, Changes take place in me and in that world of which I am not the author.

We may say, further, that the whole superstructure of man's ordinary belief rests upon these four assumptions; and that speculative beliefs vary accordingly as the emphasis of thought varies in relation to them. When all of them are treated as equally true, and when the development from each is equally full, we have a philosophy which may, without shame, call itself the philosophy of common sense. The realities of such a philosophy are the realities upon which every one acts, they are the realities that have become established by the experience of generations of men in their every-day struggle for existence. The reverse of this is equally true. A philosophy that refuses belief to any one of these fundamental assumptions, or that develops one or more of them at the expense of the others, is removed thereby from the sphere of common sense. The advocate of it has by some means obtained a view of the world that makes things appear to him in relations which are radically different from those that impress themselves upon ordinary minds.

This consideration, which can hardly be challenged, might seem in itself to afford a sufficient answer to the question, What is realCopyright, 1889, by HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & Co.

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ity? Is not that which everybody considers real thereby proved to be real? Is not the long experience of the race decisive? And is not any philosophy that departs from the consensus of human experience in the long run, by that very departure, condemned? These questions might be answered with an unconditional affirmative but for one thing, namely, the existence of the rational faculty in man. The mere circumstance that we are in the habit of regarding certain things as real, and that we find it convenient so to regard them, is not sufficient for this exacting faculty. Despising the test of convenience, reason urges upon us the necessity of being logical and consistent.

But, it may be urged, this necessity is one that exists only for a very limited number of minds. The great mass of men get on very well without being logical. They are not troubled by seeming to themselves inconsistent, so long as inconsistency works well. The question, therefore, as to what constitutes reality is not a practical one. It may be a legitimate one for philosophers to sharpen their wits upon, but it is more apt to be productive of evil than of good. It has often proved an ignis fatuus, luring men from the beaten paths of positive helpful knowledge into impracticability and nonsense.

Now, if it were true, or if it seemed to the writer to be true, that our question is not a practical one, this discussion would certainly never have been entered upon; for the whole inspiration. of his effort has been the conviction that it is eminently practical. It is undoubtedly a fact that men's philosophical theories often seem to be quite unrelated to their daily activities. They plow and sow and reap, they buy and sell, they build houses and barns, much the same whether they call themselves idealists or materialists, whether they believe in a God or profess themselves to be agnostics. In short, they do all those things which they must do for the preservation and enjoyment of life without much regard to the logic of the thing.

But this certainly is not the whole of life. Men always have formed and always will form for themselves conceptions that transcend the constraining influences of material surroundings. They will not forbear trying to interpret the intimations that life suggests of existences other and higher than themselves. In that which is they discover prophecies of something better that is to be. They frame ideals as to that which might be and which ought to be; and they shape, or try to shape, their lives to the achievement of these ideals. The reality of these conceptions, as

actual factors of a most powerful kind, is not, of course, open to discussion; but the reality of the existences they postulate, and of the destinies they prophesy, is. And it is just here that reason asserts itself. The critical faculty institutes a court of inquiry. The convictions of common realism, it seems to say, are good enough for the direction of the material life in which they have been formed, but they are not good enough to reason by. They are not finalities, not the ultimate things of existence; they are only the realities of convenience.

It is unquestionably true that the conception of God as a personal being is built directly upon that postulate of common realism that affirms man to be a living soul. Our belief that God is a designer, a creator, a sustainer of the world is a manifest reflection from the image of ourselves as related to the objects which we consciously put together and use for the attainment of our ends. I think it is no less true that all these prolific conceptions of ourselves have been bred in us by experience, by the oftrepeated discipline of contact with environment. The question, then, that confronts a philosopher is this: Do we, if we hold these beliefs to be true, act rationally or irrationally? They have come to us instinctively; they have been woven into the texture of our organized thought without the consent of reason. But now that reason has taken the lead in a conscious, rational development, can it justify and accept them? Or must it set them aside, and build up its philosophy from a new and critical foundation?

The latter alternative is the one pronounced to be necessary by almost every formal philosophy, a unanimity that is not hard to understand. For immediately the light of reason is turned upon our common realism, it resolves itself into what seems to be an aggregate of heterogeneous convictions, convictions that refuse to justify themselves as a logical deduction from any single assumption regarded as the basis of reality. They cannot be connected by the word therefore. Neither, if we isolate them, are they individually able to give an account of themselves. They simply are. But this is not all. These convictions are revealed to reason not simply as separately and irresponsibly dogmatic; their testimony is conflicting. The dogmatism of one,

when followed to its conclusions, seems to contradict that of another; and self-conscious, critical reason accepts their dictation, not because it is logically convinced, but simply because it cannot get along without them.