le and what cannot be
naturally discovered, the originators of the old mythologic beliefs
obtruded into provinces in which ultimately the lawless nature of the
obtrusion could not fail to be detected; and thus, by making their false
science a portion of their false religion, they created what was
afterwards to prove its weakest and most vulnerable part. We absolutely
know that the course at present pursued by enlightened Christian
missionaries in India is to bring scientific truth into direct
antagonism with the monstrously false science of the pretended
revelations of Parseeism, Brahminism, and Buddhism; and that by this
means the general falsity of these systems has been so plainly shown,
that it has become a matter of doubt whether a single educated native of
any considerable ability in reality believes in them. They seem to have
lost their hold of all the minds capable of appreciating the weight and
force of scientific evidence.

Let us further remark, that since it seems inevitable that pretended
revelations of ancient date should pledge themselves to a false science,
the presumption must be strong that an ancient revelation of great
multiplicity of detail, which has _not_ so pledged itself, is not a
false, but a true revelation. Nay, if we find in it the line drawn
between what man can know of himself and what he cannot know, and
determine that this line was traced in a remote and primitive age, we
have positive evidence in the circumstance, good so far as it extends,
of its Divine origin. Now, it will be ultimately found that this line
was drawn with exquisite precision in the Hebrew Scriptures,--not
merely the most ancient works that profess to be revelations, but
absolutely the most ancient of all writings. Unfortunately, however,
what God seems to have done for his Revelation, influential theologians
of both the Romish and Orthodox Churches have labored hard to undo; and,
from their mistaking, in not a few remarkable passages, the scope and
object of the vouchsafed message, they have at various times striven to
pledge it to a science as false as even that of Buddhist, Teuton, or
Hindu. And so, not only has the argument been weakened and obscured
which might be founded on the rectitude of the line drawn of old between
what ought and what ought not to be the subject of revelation, but even
a positive argument has been furnished to the infidel,--ever ready to
identify the glosses of the theologian with the enunci