eir picturesqueness and philosophic
interest. By the same token, we begin to understand why the same
signs, symbols, and emblems were used by all peoples to express their
earliest aspiration and thought. We need not infer that one people
learned them from another, or that there existed a mystic, universal
order which had them in keeping. They simply betray the unity of the
human mind, and show how and why, at the same stage of culture, races
far removed from each other came to the same conclusions and used much
the same symbols to body forth their thought. Illustrations are
innumerable, of which a few may be named as examples of this unity
both of idea and of emblem, and also as confirming the insight of the
great Greek that, however shallow minds may differ, in the end all
seekers after truth follow a common path, comrades in one great quest.

An example in point, as ancient as it is eloquent, is the idea of the
trinity and its emblem, the triangle. What the human thought of God is
depends on what power of the mind or aspect of life man uses as a lens
through which to look into the mystery of things. Conceived of as the
will of the world, God is one, and we have the monotheism of Moses.
Seen through instinct and the kaleidoscope of the senses, God is
multiple, and the result is polytheism and its gods without number.
For the reason, God is a dualism made up of matter and mind, as in the
faith of Zoroaster and many other cults. But when the social life of
man becomes the prism of faith, God is a trinity of Father, Mother,
Child. Almost as old as human thought, we find the idea of the trinity
and its triangle emblem everywhere--Siva, Vishnu, and Brahma in India
corresponding to Osiris, Isis, and Horus in Egypt. No doubt this idea
underlay the old pyramid emblem, at each corner of which stood one of
the gods. No missionary carried this profound truth over the earth. It
grew out of a natural and universal human experience, and is explained
by the fact of the unity of the human mind and its vision of God
through the family.

Other emblems take us back into an antiquity so remote that we seem to
be walking in the shadow of prehistoric time. Of these, the mysterious
Swastika is perhaps the oldest, as it is certainly the most widely
distributed over the earth. As much a talisman as a symbol, it has
been found on Chaldean bricks, among the ruins of the city of Troy, in
Egypt, on vases of ancient Cyprus, on Hittite remains and