Among the things that can never be shaken are the foundations of Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, and other cognate religious systems. Here and there, perchance, a steeple may come down with a crash, a minaret may fall, a pagoda crumble into dust; but the foundation-stones, laid beneath the surface, buried in mystery, and encompassed by darkness, remain irremoveable, changeless, and eternal.
It is, then, in this brooding darkness which envelopes their occult sources that we must take our stand; and not until we have grown into and become one with the encircling gloom, and been subjectively steeped in it, can we hope to understand or pronounce a fair judgment upon what is the less obscure and objective.
The comparative study of religions requires approach with an open and receptive mind, and a large amount of intuitive sympathy with all. It cannot be fairly undertaken if the initial object of investigation is to mould the one or the other to the shape of personal fancy.
Mr. Arthur Lillie, a most interesting exponent of Buddhism in relation to Christianity, says that the study of an ancient religion is not philosophy, but pure history. This may be true, in a sense; but, at the same time, it is necessary that the records of the past should be studied in a philosophical and synthetic spirit, with an Impressionist rather than a pre-Raphaelite tendency. Mr. Lillie hardly makes due allowance for the measure of failure which must accompany all human efforts to do justice to a great idea, and perhaps overstrains the theory that literary and philological analysis have had their day, and that archæology and history should now reign supreme.
In connection with the placing of too great a reliance upon the "letter" of venerated records, a warning--serious enough if we appropriate it to ourselves--has issued from the pen of the Rev. Spence Hardy, who, in a passage of his book, entitled _Eastern Monachism_ (p. 166), emphasizes with tremendous force the precarious position of those who take their stand solely upon sacred books. "The priests of India," he writes, "are encompassed by weapons that may be wrested from their hands and used to their own destruction. When it is clearly proved to them that their venerated records contain absurdities and contradictions, they must of necessity conclude that their origin cannot have been divine; and, the foundations of the system being thus shaken, the whole mass must speedily fall, leaving only the unsightly ruin as a monument of man's folly, when he endeavours to form a religion from the feculence of his own corrupt heart or the fancies of his own perverted imagination."