Page:The World's Parliament of Religions Vol 1.djvu/236

 208 INTRODUCTION TO PARLIAMENT PAPERS. God ; that the Holy Scriptures of the Christian church have reached through their intrinsic excellence exceptional control of a very large portion of our race ; and that comparison of the Christian Bible with other Bibles of other faiths will show that these are as torches in the night, while the Christian Bible is as the sun giving full day to the world. In another sixth-day paper Rabbi G. Gottheil recalled how for two centuries, the first two centuries of the Christian era, no other Bible was known but the Old Testament, while fol- lowing this Dr. T. T. Hunger declared that Christ stood upon the Hebrew scriptures, not as an authoritative guide in relig- ion, but as illustrative of truth, as valuable for their inspiring quality, and as full of signs of more truth and fuller grace. His relation to them was literary and critical. On the twelfth day Joseph Cook spoke on Columnar Truths of Scripture, presenting the moderate Evangelical view. In a fourth paper of the sixth day the strict Catholic doc- trine of the Bible as God's written Word, coming directly from God and in the hands of the church for authoritative use, was presented by Mgr. Seton, with an explanation of the nature of inspiration and of the position of the Vulgate version as the only one known to Catholics as authentic. The paper of Professor M. S. Terry, also on the sixth dav, passed in review the whole roll of the sacred books of the world. It noted the interest of recently discovered Akkadian or early Chaldean hymns and of Babylonian penitential psalms ; remarked on the Toa-teh-king, the obscure sacred book of Taoism, which yet has hints of a deep theism ; and reproduced remarkable hymns from the Veda, the oldest of the Bibles of mankind. Of the scriptures of Buddhism it related that they consist of three collections, known as the Tripitaka or three baskets ; one of them preserving the discourses of Buddha, another treating of doctrines and metaphysics, and the third devoted to ethics and discipline. The sacred books of Con- fucianism Professor Terry described as embracing the five King and the four Shu. The word King means a web of cloth, or the warp which keeps the thread in place. It is applied to