Our Own Religion in Ancient Persi

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE TO THE FIRST (Fearing to include too many points in summing up, I have separated some remarks which originally appeared in the main body of the First Lecture, but which may yet be useful. Should this Lecture be read publicly in Bombay, where that much-appreciated honour has already...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE TO THE FIRST (Fearing to include too many points in summing up, I have separated some remarks which originally appeared in the main body of the First Lecture, but which may yet be useful. Should this Lecture be read publicly in Bombay, where that much-appreciated honour has already been conferred upon some of my well-meant productions, the main points of the previous Lecture should be here recapitulated.)] . . . Many indeed have been the erroneous statements made by well-meaning tyros in Christian pulpits, as by myself too, once among them, with regard to the ' impossibility ' of all later connections between our great doctrines and analogous truths once held by nations foreign to the Jews who may yet have been brought into connection with them; and the fervent novice may well be pardoned if, in his first sincere efforts, he is too decided in a negative sense; but in men of maturer years let us hope for better things. For surely?to be sentimental, if only for a moment, ? the first object of religion next after the suppression of unlawful violence or appropriation should be the suppression of inaccurate statement, and to deny without any effort to become an expert what every expert knows to be the truth is, so it seems to me, to commit a crime in the name of Christianity for which Christianity will be one day called upon to account. It is therefore to help the Church against well-furnished gain- sayers, and to re-establish her character for conscientious investigation, that Christian specialists in Orientalism havegiven the best years of their lives, ?to save the endeared religion which once inculcated every honourable principle from continuing herself to be a victim if not the agent of that most sinister of equivocations known as ' pious fraud.' I...