"Because He that is praised is, in fact, only One, In this respect all religions are only one religion."
[3] Broughton, _Dictionary of all Religions_, 1745.
The materials of comparison are, of course, of the most varied kind. The interest of the ancient Greeks was early roused in the diverse practices which they saw around them, and the observations of Herodotus concerning the Egyptians, the Persians, the Scythians, and many another tribe upon the fringe of barbarism, have earned for him the modern title of the "Father of Anthropology." Travellers, missionaries, government officers, men of trade and men of learning, have recorded the usages of the lower culture all over the world, naturally with varying accuracy and penetration, and a vast range of facts has been registered through successive stages of complexity in social and religious development. Many of these have their parallel in the folklore of countries where the uniformity of modern civilisation has not crushed out all traditional beliefs, while annual customs or even village games may contain survivals of what were once important ceremonial rites. The irruption of the Arab conquerors into Europe brought Christianity face to face with Mohammedanism and its sacred book. In the { 27} seventeenth century the Jesuit Fathers in China first made known the teachings of Kong-fu-tse ("Philosopher Kong") 500 B.C. whose name they Latinised into Confucius. Towards the end of the eighteenth century a brilliant little band of English scholars in Calcutta began to reveal the astounding copiousness of the sacred literature of India. During the expedition of Napoleon to Egypt in 1799 the Rosetta Stone (now in the British Museum) yielded the clue to the hieroglyphics which cover the walls of temple and tomb. A generation later a young British officer, Lieutenant Henry Rawlinson, began in 1835 to copy a triple inscription on a cliff of Mount Behistun, near Kermanshah in Persia. The work was dangerous and difficult, but he was enabled to complete it ten years later. It contained an identical record in three languages, Persian, Median, and Babylonio-Assyrian, and provided the means for deciphering the cuneiform script of the tablets and cylinders soon recovered from the mounds of Mesopotamia.