Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/277

Rh to overthrow. That it is not a purely beneficent divinity many a sweltering attendant and many a dyspeptic partaker at the altar are prepared to attest; but pure beneficence, as every one knows, is not a quality that votaries always exact of their deities. Thus, just as long ago, at Ephesus, there were shrine-makers who stoutly withstood the new-fangled ideas broached by Paul, so to-day there are shrine-makers i. e., stove-makers who can not be expected to take very kindly to the ideas of our modern apostles of scientific cookery. We can not blame them if they are not in a hurry to break their molds and send their castings to the junk-shop; but, all the same, a reform so deeply founded in common sense must come in time, and it would be well to prepare for its coming by gradually approximating to the type of cooking apparatus required.

It is not in the matter of cookery alone that science is prepared to lend a helping hand in every-day life. There are a hundred reforms remaining to be accomplished, each one of which would do something to make our lives more worthy of rational beings. The most important and beneficent ones are those that can only be wrought by the earnest co-operation of each individual. "What we have to do is to see that a duty lies in making the most of our knowledge; and it can nowhere be caused to yield a larger return than in its application to those ordinary affairs of life with which all are concerned.

address on "Israelite and Indian," which is concluded in this number of the "Monthly," presents an unusually lucid and interesting study in comparative civilization and religion. The author's purpose in selecting these two particular peoples for comparison is, as he declares in the beginning, not because

there is any special resemblance between them more than between any two other peoples at corresponding stages of civilization, but because they offer convenient types illustrative of a general principle. We are familiar with both with the Israelites, through the universal habitual study of the Bible; and with the Indians, by virtue of our historical intercourse with them; and the illustrative incidents do not have to be explained, as they would be in the case of any other two peoples that might have been selected. The principle, which has been reached by anthropologists and students of religion generally, and is admitted by many eminent theologians that religion is a thing of growth, and subject to continual development and refinement, and keeping pace with the advance of each nation in civilization and knowledge is well set forth in the examples cited. The article bears the marks throughout that the author has studied the subject carefully and to the bottom. On the Israelite side he displays a critical knowledge of the Bible and the environment within which it was composed; besides which, he has brought to bear upon his argument the results of the investigations of that band of eminent scholars whose conclusions, under the name of the "higher criticism," have deeply moved the theological world. On the Indian side, he is at home in his own special field of research. Taking the two peoples at those periods in their history when they had reached nearly equivalent stages in civilization, he holds up the parallelisms in their religious opinions, particularly their ideas of God and a future state, their myths and their social usages, which, he assumes, were not peculiar to them, but could be found also among other bodies of people in the same stages of culture. That similar parallelisms are to be found among other nations of like civilization is a fact familiar to students of Oriental archæology.