FOREWORD

Sacred Books before 1000 B. C.

All Europe no doubt was "the wilderness eternal" at this early age, long before the days of Romulus and Remus and the wolf, excepting the southern point of Greece. However, a famous civilization flourished on the coast of Asia Minor under Minos, King of Crete, perhaps the most artistic the world ever has known. Mr. H. G. Wells claims their exquisite art was due to the fact that Cnosos (Κνωσός) had been at peace for over a thousand years!

The "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" probably were composed hundreds of years before the first beginnings of the Old Testament.* Yet Matthew Arnold says "Homer was rapid, clear, plain, and direct in thought and expression, and eminently noble."

And Dr. Eliot says in "The Harvard Classics" that "artistically, in spite of their early date, they are the product of a mature art," and "stand at the head of the literature of Greece and of the Epic poetry of the world."

What number of authors in all the world's history have won a greater meed of honor than "The blind old man of Scio's rocky isle "?

Agamemnon rouses the failing courage of his army by assuring them "Father Zeus will never be the protector of liars" and the son of Nestor proclaims that "all mankind hunger after God." Even if the Greeks were limited in the practice of their ideals by their intensely aristocratic form of government, their ethical ideals, at least, apparently were as lofty in aspiration as our own.

Although the writers of Genesis and Exodus make no mention of the pyramids, we know now that the Sphinx, Chephron, the brother of Cheops, had gazed across the Egyptian plains for over two thousand years before these books were written and the Pyramid of Cheops still remains one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Egyptian obelisk that now ornaments Central Park, New York, was erected near the site of Cairo almost one thousand years before the sublime First Chapter of Genesis was written by Jewish priests in captivity by the waters of Babylon.

These obelisks which now stand in the Place de la Concorde. in Paris, on the Thames Embankment in London, and in Central Park, New York, are of such antiquity that Moses and his boyhood friends probably passed them on their way to school, for the two latter stood at the gate of the learned city of Heliopolis.

The superb civilization of Ancient Egypt reached the climax of its splendour in art and science between 3000 and 2400 В. С. At that time some of their portrait sculptures were of so high an order that they are incomparable and in delicacy of modelling never have been surpassed by any modern masterpieces.

It is said to have been due to their religious belief that the souls of human beings returned and dwelt in the statues erected in their honor, that the Egyptian artists attained such marvellous skill in portrait sculpture. So it was necessary to make the likeness as accurate as possible, in order that the "soul of the departed" should recognize at once, the earthly habitation.

The divine thirst for immortality has never been manifested more touchingly than in the ancient mummies of Egypt, that swathed with balsams and aromatic spices to prevent decay, survived for thousands of years, it being their religious belief that the soul could live on after death, only so long as the earthly body with which it had been connected, was preserved.

The great Indian Rishis however taught that the soul was supreme, unlimited by the body after death. So with splendid consistency they burned the body, which the soul had left, to get rid of it as soon as possible, while the Egyptian, on the contrary, strove to preserve it for thousands of years.

The Bible of the ancient Egyptians was the curious magical "Book of the Dead" that describes the strange adventures of their heroes after death, especially the day of judgment, when the heart of man was weighed in the "balance of justice" before Osiris and his judges.

It is significant that the oldest book in the world is said to be "The Moral Aphorisms of Ptah-Hotep," which had a deep and widespread influence among the early Egyptians.

The legendary date of the beautiful Zend-Avesta, both Bible and Prayer-book of the Persians, is five thousand years before the Trojan War, but even if it was written no later than the ninth century B. C., and few critics have suggested any later date, it would still be contemporary with the great Yahwist Bible.

By far the most magnificent literary monuments of antiquity are the Vedas and Upanishads written by the ancient Rishis of India, sometime between 2400 and 1200 B. C., according to Dr. Haug. These books are a vast treasury of the deepest philosophy and some of the loftiest religious teachings ever given to the world.

The Upanishads say "Know thine own soul." To an Indian, religion is the very breath of his life, and the one object of supreme importance in the world is the soul. The man who does not recognize his own soul is not regarded in India, even as a man. The Upanishads say “Know thou the One, the Soul. It is the bridge leading to the immortal being."

The teachings of the Vedas are that the one end and aim of life is the development of the soul or the union of the individual soul with the Universal Soul of Brahm or God.

The Indian poet chants, "From love the world is born, by love it is sustained, towards love it moves, and into love it enters."

In the Indian civilization the ideal "flower of humanity" is not the statesman, king, artist or poet, but the Rishi, the one who has attained the supreme soul.

Upon the Rishi the nation bestows an extravagant homage that is never given even to the most illustrious kings.

The Vedas declare, God can be seen and known, and the forestdwelling Rishis teach "Listen to me, ye sons of the immortal spirit, ye who live in the heavenly abode, I have known the Supreme Person whose light shines forth from beyond the darkness."

Prof. Rhys-David, than whom there is no higher authority, says "nowhere else are found the records of a movement stretching uninterruptedly for more than three thousand years; nowhere else has greater earnestness or so much ability been devoted so continuously to religious questions and nowhere else do we find so complete a picture of the tendencies and influences which have brought about the marvelous change from the crude hypotheses of the earliest faith to the sublime conceptions of such original thinkers as those who put the finishing touches to the beautiful picture of the Indian Palace of Truth."

China generally is believed to be the most ancient nation in the world. Its history extends back no one knows how far into the dim mists of the past. All the other great nations of the ancient times either have been destroyed utterly or have become the vassals of a foreign power. Assyria that was once the terror of the world fell before her old rival and enemy Babylon. The mighty nations of India and Egypt are subject now to a foreign nation. Babylon, once the most wonderful city on the earth, Babylon that even in the days of the patriarch Abram had a history of over a hundred kings, Babylon whose luxury and magnificence never have been rivalled even by Rome at the height of her pomp, Babylon finally fell before Cyrus, ruined not by the Persian army far from it! but by the dishonesty and corruption in her own government!

China alone of all the nations of antiquity has kept her independence. To the student of folklore the reason is not far to seek. From the earliest times the Chinese have had a most profound reverence for the Moral Law. In one of her most ancient books, "The Shu King," that corresponds to our Old Testament, her patriarchs laid down the principles of right and justice upon which a state must be founded if it is to survive the storms of the ages and they pointed out clearly also how their rulers by violation of these principles could bring the state to ruin. It is said that the whole nation has become so deeply permeated with these teachings that no one is allowed even to perform his religious sacrifices until he has paid every debt. The ideal of the Chinese civilization is that "right and justice is recognized by everyone as a force higher than physical force" and that moral obligation is of supreme importance.

It is interesting to remember that the distinguished Chinese minister Wu Ting Fang said at the opening of our last war, "So long as there is wrong and injustice, so long will there be wars."

It is easy to understand how in a national atmosphere like this it has been claimed by an eminent author, Ku Hungming, that "the dominant note of Chinese humanity is gentleness." He explains that he means by this "the absence of hardness, harshness, roughness or violence, in fact of anything that jars upon you." This gentleness that is "the fundamental characteristic of the real Chinese is the product of the sympathetic intelligence of a people who live almost entirely a life of the heart, - a life of emotion and human affection." In short, the ideal Chinese is one with the intellect of a man and the heart of a child and "the Chinese spirit, therefore, is the spirit of perpetual youth, the spirit of national immortality."

The "deluge myth" evidently was taken by the great Yahwist writer from the celebrated Gilgamesh epic that described the adventures of the old Sumerian king of Erech in his search after immortality, and was written in the highly cultured city of Babylon during a revival of literature under the great king Hammurabi. The discovery of the famous statue of this king, the original of which is now in the Louvre, receiving from the Sun God Shamash his code of laws, the most ancient in the world, and which are inscribed in the block of marble underneath, has proved to our surprise that, even in the days of Abram and Sarai, life was as carefully ordered in all its essentials as in the vaunted civilization of our own day.

It is difficult to imagine words expressing a deeper sympathy and tenderness for his people than those of the preamble to the laws of this wonderful monarch of over four thousand years

ago.

"I am the pastor, the saviour, whose sceptre is a right one, the good protecting shadow over my city; in my breast I cherish the inhabitants of Sumer and Akkad. By my genius in peace I have led them, by my wisdom I have directed them, that the