smallest pretense to civilization and to culture. Wherever there is literature at all, there are Sacred Books. If in some isolated cases it is not so, these cases are exceptions too trifling in extent to invalidate the rule. Speaking generally we may say, that every people which has risen above the conditions of savage life; every nation which possesses an organized administration, a settled domestic life, a religion with developed and complex dogmas, possesses also its Sacred Books. If this truth has been too generally forgotton; if the Bible has been too commonly treated as something exceptional and peculiar which it was the glory of Christianity to possess, this omission is probably in great part due to the fact that the attention of scholars has been too much confined to the literature, the religion, and the general culture of the Greeks and Romans. From special circumstances these nations had no Sacred writings among them. Their religion was independent of any such authorities; and our notions of pagan religion have been largely drawn from the religions of Greece and Rome. But the Greeks and Romans were only an insignificant fraction of the Aryan race; and other far more numerous branches of that race had their recognized and authoritative Scriptures, containing in some portions those most ancient traditions of the original stock which entered into the intellectual property of the Hellenic family, in the form of mythological tales and current stories of their gods. We must not therefore be led by the example of classical antiquity to ignore the existence of these writings, or to overlook their importance.[1]
We may classify the Sacred Books to which reference will be made in this chapter as follows, proceeding (as in the case of prophets) from East to West:—
1. The Thirteen King, or Canon of the Confucians.
2. The Tao-tè-king, or Canon of the Taò-sè.
3. The Veda, or Canon of the Hindus.
4. The Tripitaka, or Canon of the Buddhists.
5. The Zend Avesta, or Canon of the Parsees.
- ↑ See on this subject the truly admirable remarks of Karl Otfried Muller, in his Prolegomena zu einer Wissenschaftlichen Mythologie (Gottingen, 1825), pp. 282-284.
