creation, and absolutely ignores any Ruler or Governor of the world.  The Buddha neither made the world nor preserves it, and the Buddha is the great object of Buddhist worship.  Mr. Higginson says:  “Every race believes in immortality.”  Though the Buddhists, as we have seen, believe in immortality, it is in so obscure a form that many of the best scholars declare that the highest aim and the last result of all progress in Buddhism is annihilation.  He continues, “Every race recognizes in its religious precepts the brotherhood of man.”  The Koran teaches no such doctrine, and it is notorious that the Brahmanical system of caste, which has been despotic in India for twenty-five hundred years, excludes such brotherhood.  Mr. Higginson therefore is of opinion that caste has grown up in defiance of the Vedas.  The Vedas indeed are ignorant of caste, but they are also ignorant of human brotherhood.  The system of caste was not a defiance of the Vedas.

Nothing is gained for humanity by such statements, which are refuted immediately by the most evident facts.  The true “sympathy of religions” does not consist in their saying the same thing, any more than a true concord in music consists in many performers striking the same note.  Variety is the condition of harmony.  These religions may, and we believe will, be all harmonized; but thus far it is only too plain that they have been at war with each other.  In order to find the resemblances we must begin by seeing the differences.

Cudworth, in his great work, speaks of “the symphony of all religions,” an expression which we prefer to that of Mr. Higginson.  It expresses precisely what we conceive to be the fact, that these religions are all capable of being brought into union, though so very different.  They may say,

    “Are not we formed, as notes of music are,
    For one another, though dissimilar? 
    Such difference, without discord, as shall make
    The sweetest sounds.”

But this harmony can only be established among the ethnic religions by means of a catholic religion which shall be able to take each of them up into itself, and so finally merge them in a higher union.  The Greek, Roman, and Jewish religions could not unite with each other; but they were united by being taken up into Christianity.  Christianity has assimilated the essential ideas of the religions of Persia, Judaea, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia; and each of these religions, in turn, disappeared as it was absorbed by this powerful solvent.  In the case of Greece, Rome, Germany, and Judaea, this fact of their passing into solution in Christianity is a matter of history.  Not all the Jews became Christians, nor has Judaism ceased to exist.  This is perhaps owing to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Deity of Christ, which offend the simplistic monotheism of the Jewish mind.  Yet Christianity at first grew out of Judaism, and took up into itself the best part of the Jews in and out of Palestine.