o his _Golden Bough_, "a still wider vista is vouchsafed, a
greater panorama is unrolled by the study which aims at bringing home to us
the faith and the practice, the hopes and the ideals, not of two highly
gifted races only, but of all mankind, and thus at enabling us to follow
the long march, the slow and toilsome ascent, of humanity from savagery to
civilization.... But the comparative study of the beliefs and institutions
of mankind is fitted to be much more than a means of satisfying an
enlightened curiosity and of furnishing materials for the researches of the
learned. Well handled, it may become a powerful instrument to expedite
progress...."

It is possible that all this might disquiet the minds of those who have
been wont to assume perfection in the primitive Christian church, and who
assume also that present-day Christianity is the ultimate form of the
Christian religion. Such persons--if there are {xiv} such--should rather
take heart from the whole-souled devotion to truth everywhere to be seen in
the works of scholars in ancient religion, and from their equally evident
sympathy with all manifestations of human effort to establish the divine
relation; but most of all from their universal testimony that for all time
and in all places and under all conditions the human heart has felt
powerfully the need of the divine relation. From the knowledge that the
desire to get right with God--the common and essential element in all
religions--has been the most universal and the most potent and persistent
factor in past history, it is not far to the conviction that it will always
continue to be so, and that the struggle toward the divine light of
religion pure and undefiled will never perish from the earth.

GRANT SHOWERMAN.

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN.

* * * * *

Notes to Introduction.

[1] This summary of M. Cumont's chapter is quoted from my review of the
first edition of _Les religions orientales_ in _Classical Philology_, III,
4, p. 467.

[2] _Die Religion der Roemer_, p. 116. For the significance of the pagan
faiths, see an essay on "The Ancient Religions in Universal History,"
_American Journal of Philology_, XXIX, 2. pp. 156-171.

* * * * *

{xv}

PREFACE.

In November, 1905, the College de France honored the writer by asking him
to succeed M. Naville in opening the series of lectures instituted by the
Michonis foundation. A few mont