Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/158

148 remarks, the book of the Old Testament farthest removed from Jewish particularism, and most nearly approaching to Christian Catholicity; and this should be ample compensation for the sacrifice of its miraculous and supernatural part. M. Francis Lenormant has applied the same method in his studies on the "Origins of History according to the Bible and the Traditions of the Oriental Peoples." "I do not recognize," he writes, "a Christian science and a freethinking science; I admit only one science, the one that has no need of any other epithet, which lays aside theological questions as foreign to its domain, and of which all seekers in good faith are the servitors, whatever may be their religious convictions. That is the science to which I have consecrated my life; and I believe it would be a violation of a holy duty of conscience if, influenced by a preoccupation of another kind, however worthy of respect, I should hesitate to speak sincerely and without ambiguity the truth as I discern it."

It is nevertheless true that hitherto orthodoxies have hardly shown themselves disposed to understand the rights of science in this way.

If religious prejudice opposes itself to the scientific study of one's own religion, can it also interpose an obstacle to the knowledge of strange religions? At first thought we might be tempted to answer in the negative. How can any opinions, even those which we hold as absolute truth, prevent us from observing, classifying, and describing the beliefs, or, if you prefer, the errors of another?

It is a fact that, if we arrange all religious opinions in two categories—that of our own, which we believe came down ready-made from heaven, and that of the religions of others, which we declare indiscriminately to be the results of perversions—we become incapable of grasping the real nature of the religious sentiment, and consequently of its different manifestations. With the Iranians, who personify their supreme being in the great Ahura, the devas represent the agents of the bad principles. To the Brahmans, who adored the devas, the asuras were the adversaries of gods and men. To the historian of religions, asuras and devas are analogous conceptions, which a priori he connects with the normal development of the human mind, and a posteriori shows to have been derived from the same religious center, anterior to the separation of the Persians and the Indians, and to the organization of dualism in the Aryan theologies.

How shall we preserve the even mind and the freedom of appreciation essential to all impartial analysis of foreign ideas and customs, if we imagine, like some of the fathers, that they are the work of the evil-one? The Christians of the first centuries had no doubt of the real existence of the pagan divinities, but they regarded them as evil spirits who had turned the worship of men from the only God by a caricature of the true religion. Such is likewise the recent explanation given by Father Hue of the curious resemblances which he