missionaries have to meet face to face in every part of the world; and
unless our religion has ceased to be what it was, its defenders should
not shrink from this new trial of its strength, but should encourage
rather than depreciate the study of comparative theology."--_Science of
Religion_, p. 22.]

[Footnote 33: _History of Christian Theology_, Vol. I., p. 52.]

LECTURE III.

THE SUCCESSIVE DEVELOPMENTS OP HINDUISM

The religious systems of India, like its flora, display luxuriant
variety and confusion. Hinduism is only another banyan-tree whose
branches have become trunks, and whose trunks have produced new
branches, until the whole has become an intellectual and moral jungle of
vast extent. The original stock was a monotheistic nature worship, which
the Hindu ancestors held in common with other branches of the Aryan
family when dwelling together on the high table-lands of Central Asia,
or, as some are now claiming, in Eastern Russia. Wherever may have been
that historic "cradle" in which the infancy of our race was passed, it
seems certain from similarities of language, that this Aryan family once
dwelt together, and had a common worship, and called the supreme deity
by a common name. It was a worship of the sky, and at length of various
powers of nature, _Surya_, the sun: _Agni_, fire: _Indra_, rain, etc. It
is maintained by many authors, in India as well as in Europe, that these
designations were only applied as names of one and the same potential
deity. This is the ground held by the various branches of the modern
Somaj of India. Yet we must not suppose that the monotheism of the
early Aryans was all that we understand by that term; it is enough that
the power addressed was _one_ and personal. Even henotheism, the last
name which Professor Max Mueller applies to the early Aryan faith,
denotes oneness in this sense. The process of differentiation and
corruption advanced more rapidly among the Indo-Aryans than in the
Iranian branch of the same race, and in all lands changes were wrought
to some extent by differences of climate and by environment.[34] The
Norsemen, for example, struggling with the wilder and sterner forces of
storm and wintry tempest, would naturally differ in custom, and finally
in faith, from the gentle Hindu under his Indian sky; yet there were
common elements traceable in the earliest traditions of these races, and
the fact that religions are not wholly dependent upon local conditio