THE CHINESE RECORDER : AND MISSIONARY JOURNAL. VOLUME XVII. SHANGHAI: AMERICAN PRESBYTERIAN MISSION PRESS 1886. Rev. C. W. Mateer., D.D. 111 93 Question in America, a Memorial to the Presbyterian General Assembly. 201 Christ, Name of, in China 401 and Confucianism, Ethics of, Compared Rev. D. Z. Sheffield. 365 36, 75, 117, 151, 203, 272, 350, 397, 436, 471 Diary of Events in the Far East 44, 81, 124, 164, 211, 244, 281, 324, 364, 404, 414 Easy Wenli New Testament... Rev. R. C. Mateer. 51 Journal, Missionary 118, 260, 316, 316 42, 83 401 53 73 272 44, 84, 124, 164, 212, 244, 284, 324, 364, 404, 444, 480 Methods of Missionary Work ... Rev. J. L. Nevius, D.D. 24, 55, 102, 166, 252, 297 Rev. R. H. Graves, M.D., D.D. 380, 411 Missionary Conference, International, Rev. A. H. Smith. 55, 102, 166, 252, 297, 455 Native Agents, May they be Supported by Foreign Funds? "THERE is an inexhaustible fascination in the study of the religions of the world." Thus opens a brief but brilliant review of Mr. Samuel Johnson's "Oriental Religions," Vol. m. Persia. The succeeding sentences may serve as the text of the following study. "Whether Mr. Herbert Spencer is right or not in asserting that all religion had its beginning in the worship of 'ghosts, it is certain that there has never been anything in our world more real than has been the power of the religious instincts over the faiths of men. This it is which, more than any other one thing, has awed and charmed, mastered and moulded the human heart and life." "Comparison, insisted the great Cuvier, is the lamp of science." If this be true of the great world religions, some of which have been studied so profoundly by modern investigators of comparative theology, it is no less true of those more local and little understood systems of religious life which prevail among men. It is from the myths and mythologies of Greece and Rome that we discover a deeply hidden theology. It is from Folk-lore and Fable that we discover the springs of superstition. By the ever widening collation of the facts of human experience we build solidly a Social Science, or an Ethical Science, or a Science of Religion. It is the fascination of the study of life, especially of the study of the spiritual life of men, so exhaustless in variety and yet so common in its passions and needs, that gives occasion and excuse to the present endeavor. "The fortress of time-honored customs and supernatural beliefs," says Mr. Robert West, "in which the soul of the heathen is, as it were, entrenched, must be explored and studied: if any atom of adamantine truth has survived it must be respected |