’Come unto me all ye that labor.’”—­Confessions, Bk. vii., xxi.  “But having then read those books of the Platonists, and thence being taught to search for incorporeal truth, I saw Thy invisible things, understood by the things which are made; and though cast back, I perceived what that was which, through the darkness of my mind, I was hindered from contemplating, being assured ’that Thou wert and wert infinite, and yet not diffused in space, finite or infinite, and that Thou truly art who art the same ever, in no part nor motion varying; and that all other things are from Thee....  Of these things I was assured, yet too insecure to enjoy Thee.  I prated as one skilled, but I had not sought Thy way in Christ our Saviour; I had proved to be not skilled but killed.”—­Confessions, Bk. vii., xx.]

[Footnote 29:  We may judge of the bearing of the common term heathen as applied to non-Christian nations, when we consider that the Greeks and Romans characterized all foreigners as “barbarians,” that Mohammedans call all Christians “infidels,” and the Chinese greet them as “foreign devils.”  The missionary enterprise as a work of conciliation should illustrate a broader spirit.]

[Footnote 30:  The Celts, Maclear.]

[Footnote 31:  Lives of the Fathers, Farrar.]

[Footnote 32:  “Christianity,” says Max Mueller, “enjoyed no privileges and claimed no immunities when it boldly confronted and confounded the most ancient and the most powerful religions of the world.  Even at present it craves no mercy and it receives no mercy from those whom our missionaries have to meet face to face in every part of the world; and unless our religion has ceased to be what it was, its defenders should not shrink from this new trial of its strength, but should encourage rather than depreciate the study of comparative theology.”—­Science of Religion, p. 22.]

[Footnote 33:  History of Christian Theology, Vol.  I., p. 52.]

LECTURE III.

THE SUCCESSIVE DEVELOPMENTS OP HINDUISM

The religious systems of India, like its flora, display luxuriant variety and confusion.  Hinduism is only another banyan-tree whose branches have become trunks, and whose trunks have produced new branches, until the whole has become an intellectual and moral jungle of vast extent.  The original stock was a monotheistic nature worship, which the Hindu ancestors held in common with other branches of the Aryan family when dwelling together on the high table-lands of Central Asia, or, as some are now claiming, in Eastern Russia.  Wherever may have been that historic “cradle” in which the infancy of our race was passed, it seems certain from similarities of language, that this Aryan family once dwelt together, and had a common worship, and called the supreme deity by a common name.  It was a worship of the sky, and at length of various