Freedom, indeed, within such a religion is as essential to its teachings as is absolutism without. The truth which is for the whole world must know no distinction of color or caste, of family or rank. As in the full development of government all men must be equal before the law (see p. 13S), so in the theory of the universal religion all men must stand equal before God. What is wrong or right to one must in similar circumstances be wrong or right to the other.
As the truth is one, so the doctrine must be one and the same through out a universal religion, at least in its essential features. This, however, it would be impossible to maintain, even in appearance, unless the doctrine were recorded in writing. Verbal transmission alone could never preserve its requisite uniformity. Hence all world religions must be book religions. They must have the record of the divine communication on which they can fall back to establish their unity.
Buddhism, Christianity, and are the neces sary features of all religions claiming universality. They are three in number—in the order of their appearance, Buddhism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, which is also the order of their success, measured by the number of their professed adherents. Taken altogether, they nomi nally include considerably more than three-fourths of the human race, and geographically they control nine-tenths of the earth's surface. Practi cally, therefore, they have driven from the field all tribal and national religions, and remain alone to struggle for the mastery.
By some writers their history has been explained as an ethnologic phenomenon, and it has been sought to account for their distribution by their relative suitability to different races. For this there seem no suffi cient grounds. All three were founded by members of the white race— one, the oldest and the most widely extended, by the Indo-Aryan Buddha or Sakya Muni; the others by Semitic teachers. Buddhism counts equally faithful and active votaries in Ceylon and China, and both Christianity and Mohammedanism have supplanted many of the older faiths of Africa and Malaysia. Doubtless there are bitter animosities and mutual charges of irreligion in all three of these great creeds, as is illustrated in the Sun nite and Shiite schism of 'Mohammedanism, but they all agree in those traits which we have above described as characterizing world religions.
However apart and contradictory the sects may seem, all Buddhists justify their doctrines from the Dhammapada, all Mussulmans from the Koran, all Christians from the Bible.
have seen that the foundation of religion is a wish or hope, the fulfilment of which is believed to depend on sonic unseen, supernatural being. The notions that man formed to himself about such beings, their names, their supposed doings and relations, constitute myth ology. Myths are accounts of the gods. They are not stories spun by the fancy, nor fictions devised by priests to deceive the people, nor theories evolved by philosophers—each of which views has been at times advanced —but they are unconscious growths of the mind under the promptings of the religious sentiment.
The Study of study is a most important branch of eth nology. In the opinion of many able writers, nothing more sharply char acterizes a nation than its religion, and mythology is the expression of religion in language. "A people," says Sehelling, "can only be said to exist when it has determined itself with regard to its mythology," and Professor Max Mfiller, in quoting this saying, adds : "It is language and religion that make a people, but religion is even a more powerful agent than language." The study of Comparative Mythology, therefore, in its ethnologic bearings, closely approaches in importance the study of Comparative Linguistics. It teaches us the coincidences and contrasts of the intelli gence of nations on those topics which lie nearest their hearts, and those great questions of the origin and destiny of man which even the rudest savage cannot wholly escape.
Influence of Language on study of language is an indis pensable preliminary to the comparative mythologist, for, as we have said, the myth is the expression of religious thought in language, and the modelling and shaping action of language on the thought expressed is of the most extensive character, often leading to a complete concealment of the original idea. In so many directions does the plain, naked statement of the primitive myths " Change Into something rich and strange," through the transformations unconsciously wrought by the laws of lan guage, that these as applied to mythology become the only keys to its mysteries. Some of the more prominent of these laws we may briefly enumerate.