The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Dawn and the Day, by Henry Thayer Niles

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Title: The Dawn and the Day

Author: Henry Thayer Niles

Release Date: December 15, 2004 [eBook #14360]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAWN AND THE DAY***

E-text prepared by Al Haines

THE DAWN AND THE DAY

Or, The Buddha and the Christ, Part I

by

HENRY T. NILES

The Blade Printing & Paper Company
Toledo, Ohio

1894

PREFACE.

When Humboldt first ascended the Andes and saw the trees, shrubs and
flora he had long before studied on the Alps, he had only to look at
his barometer, or at the sea of mountains and hills below, the rocks
and soil around, and the sun above, to understand this seeming marvel
of creation; while those who knew less of the laws of order and
universal harmony might be lost in conjectures about pollen floating in
the upper air, or seeds carried by birds across seas, forgetting that
preservation is perpetual creation, and that it takes no more power to
clothe a mountain just risen from the sea in appropriate verdure than
to renew the beauty and the bloom of spring.

Max Mueller, who looks through antiquity with the same clear vision
with which Humboldt examined the physical world, when he found the most
ancient Hindoos bowing in worship before Dyaus Pitar, the exact
equivalent of the Zeus Pater of the Greeks and the Jupiter of the
Romans, and of "Our Father who art in the heavens" in our own divinely
taught prayer, instead of indulging in wild speculations about the
chance belief of some ancient chief or patriarch, transmitted across
continents and seas and even across the great gulf that has always
divided the Aryan from the Semitic civilization and preserved through
ages of darkness and unbelief, saw in it the common yearning of the
human soul to find rest on a loving Father's almighty arm; yet when our
oriental missionaries and scholars found such fundamental truths of
their own religion as the common brotherhood of man, and that love is
the vital force of all religion, which consists not in blood-oblations
or in forms and creeds, but in shunning