t it, still desiring to escape.
"Save us, O God!" they have seemed to say, "from the distress of
believing that so many years ago there was a sublime human life." Show
such persons that the great religious ideas and maxims are as old as
literature; and how they resist the knowledge! "Surely it is not so
bad as that," they say. "Is there not a possibility of a
mistranslation? Let us see the text, explore the lexicon; is there no
labor, no toil, by which we can convince ourselves that there is a
mistake? Anything rather than believe that there is a light which
lighteth every man that cometh into the world."

For this purpose the very facts of history must be suppressed or
explained away. Sir George Mackenzie, in his "Travels in Iceland,"
says that the clergy prevented till 1630, with "mistaken zeal," the
publication of the Scandinavian Eddas. Huc, the Roman Catholic
Missionary, described in such truthful colors the religious influence
of Buddhism in Thibet that his book was put in the _index
expurgatorius_ at Rome. Balmes, a learned Roman Catholic writer,
declares that "Christianity is stripped of a portion of its honors" if
we trace back any high standard of female purity to the ancient
Germans; and so he coolly sets aside as "poetical" the plain
statements of the accurate Tacitus. If we are to believe the accounts
given of the Jewish Essenes by Josephus, De Quincey thinks, the claims
made by Christianity are annihilated. "If Essenism could make good its
pretensions, there, at one blow, would be an end of Christianity,
which, in that case, is not only superseded as an idle repetition of a
religious system already published, but as a criminal plagiarism. Nor
can the wit of man evade the conclusion." He accordingly attempts to
explain away the testimony of Josephus.[E]

And what makes this exclusiveness the more repulsive is its
modernness. Paul himself quoted from the sublime hymn of Cleanthes to
prove to the Greeks that they too recognized the Fatherhood of God.
The early Christian apologists, living face to face with the elder
religions, made no exclusive claims. Tertullian declared the soul to
be an older authority than prophecy, and its voice the gift of God
from the beginning. Justin Martyr said, "Those who live according to
Reason are Christians, though you may call them atheists.... Such
among the Greeks were Socrates and Heraclitus and the rest. They who
have made or do make Reason (Logos) their rule of life are