RELIGION, SCIENCE OF (re-Ifliin si'ens 6v).
The Science of Religion, or Comparative The ology, starts with a study of the principal religions of the world.
The name of comparative religion should he avoided. We do not speak of comparative lan guage, but of comparative philology. No one would use comparative bones in the sense of com parative anatomy. If theology is the science of religion, comparative theology is the natural name for a comparative study of religious. 1 if other names were wanted. hierology, as suggested by Prof. Tiele, or pistology, would answer the pur pose.
Like the science of languages, mythology, and thought, it would have been absolutely impossible before the beginning of this century. and it is cer tainly our century which may by right claim it as its own. It is true the Jewish, the Christian and the Mohammedan religions had formed the sub ject of learned studies for many centuries, and the sacred texts on which these religions profess to be founded, the Old Testament, the New Tes tament and the Koran had been carefully edited and translated. \Ve have only to look at the im mense folios on the Old and the New Testament which fill ever so many shelves in our libraries in order to see how much the history of the Jewish and Christian religions had occupied the thoughts of those who came before us. Nor need the works of modern scholars, inspired by what is often contemptuously called the higher criticism, fear comparison with the works of the ancient fathers or reformers of the church.
1. Unhistoric Spirit. What detracts, how ever, from the value of most of these works is the absence of the historical spirit, and the unjustifi able way in which the sacred texts of these re ligions were violently torn away from those great historical movements of human thought, which alone could have given life and meaning to them. If we add to this that all non-Christian religions were treated at the same time in a totally unhis torical spirit by being assigned to the devil as their author, we can well understand why a history of religion and a comparative study of religions were impossibilities before the time of the Reforma tion. It is all the more interesting to observe one
notable exception, and to see the intrepid scholar ship displayed by the famous Cardinal Cusanus in the fifteenth century. He seems to have been the first to study non-Christian religions in the inde pendent spirit of a scholar and an historian. He examined the religions of the Greeks and Romans, of Jews, and as far as possible at the time, of the Hindus and Mohammedans also. He actually ac quired a knowledge of Arabic in order to read the Koran in the original, and devoted a whole book, "De Cribratione Alchoran," to the sifting of the Koran, and an examination of Mohammed's teaching, pointing out what seemed to him the many errors of the prophet. And yet he was able to discover a certain harmony in all religions, as far as they were known to him, and it was on this harmony that he built a hope of universal religion, and of universal peace. He went so far as to say that "even those who worship many gods have borne witness to the existence of God, and that in their many gods the polytheists worship after all the one Deity, though they have divided it among many gods. It was the one God they worshiped in all the other gods." \Ve might also quote St. Augustine as a large-hearted judge of non-Chris tian religions, for though he knew but a small number of religions, it required greater courage in his time, when paganism was still a dreaded enemy, to say what he said, "that there was no religion which did not contain some grains of truth." Since the revival of classical learning in Europe the ancient religions of Greece and Rome have naturally formed the subject of many learned and voluminous treatises. Unfortunately these two mythological religions possess nothing that could he called sacred or canonical books, and even in their most ancient records we meet them already fully developed, no longer as growing and expanding.