e specifications
written out by the founder:

The general subject of the lectures I desire to be: "The
Relation of the Bible to any of the Sciences, as Geography,
Geology, History, and Ethnology, ... and the relation of the
facts and truths contained in the Word of God, to the
principles, methods, and aims of any of the sciences."

Now, among the sciences which we must call to our aid are those of
geography and geology, by which are conditioned history and ethnology of
which we must largely treat; and, most of all, the science of
Comparative Religion.

This last is Christianity's own child. Other sciences, such as geography
and astronomy, may have been born among lands and nations outside of and
even before Christendom. Other sciences, such as geology, may have had
their rise in Christian time and in Christian lands, their foundation
lines laid and their main processes illustrated by Christian men, which
yet cannot be claimed by Christianity as her children bearing her own
likeness and image; but the science of Comparative Religion is the
direct offspring of the religion of Jesus. It is a distinctively
Christian science. "It is so because it is a product of Christian
civilization, and because it finds its impulse in that freedom of
inquiry which Christianity fosters."[2] Christian scholars began the
investigations, formulated the principles, collected the materials and
reared the already splendid fabric of the science of Comparative
Religion, because the spirit of Christ which was in them did signify
this. Jesus bade his disciples search, inquire, discern and compare.
Paul, the greatest of the apostolic Christian college, taught: "Prove
all things; hold fast that which is good." In our day one of Christ's
loving followers[3] expressed the spirit of her Master in her favorite
motto, "Truth for authority, not authority for truth." Well says Dr.
James Legge, a prince among scholars, and translator of the Chinese
classics, who has added several portly volumes to Professor Max Mueller's
series of the "Sacred Books of the East," whose face to-day is bronzed
and whose hair is whitened by fifty years of service in southern China
where with his own hands he baptized six hundred Chinamen:[4]

The more that a man possesses the Christian spirit, and is
governed by Christian principle, the more anxious will he be to
do justice to every other system of religion, and to hold his
own without tai