. Till our opinions have thus
been tested and stood the test, we can hardly call them our own.

How true this is with regard to religion has been boldly expressed by
Bishop Beveridge.

"Being conscious to myself," he writes in his "Private Thoughts on
Religion," "how great an ascendant Christianity holds over me beyond the
rest, as being that religion whereinto I was born and baptized; that which
the supreme authority has enjoined and my parents educated me in; that
which every one I meet withal highly approves of, and which I myself have,
by a long-continued profession, made almost natural to me: I am resolved
to be more jealous and suspicious of this religion than of the rest, and
be sure not to entertain it any longer without being convinced, by solid
and substantial arguments, of the truth and certainty of it."

This is bold and manly language from a Bishop, nearly two hundred years
ago, and I certainly think that the time has come when some of the
divinity lecturers at Oxford and Cambridge might well be employed in
placing a knowledge of the sacred books of other religions within the
reach of undergraduates. Many of the difficulties--most of them of our own
making--with regard to the origin, the handing down, the later corruptions
and misinterpretations of sacred texts, would find their natural solution,
if it was shown how exactly the same difficulties arose and had to be
dealt with by theologians of other creeds. If some--aye, if many--of the
doctrines of Christianity were met with in other religions also, surely
that would not affect their value, or diminish their truth; while nothing,
I feel certain, would more effectually secure to the pure and simple
teaching of Christ its true place in the historical development of the
human mind than to place it side by side with the other religions of the
world. In the series of translations of the "Sacred Books of the East," of
which the first three volumes have just appeared,(13) I wished myself to
include a new translation of the Old and New Testaments; and when that
series is finished it will, I believe, be admitted that nowhere would
these two books have had a grander setting, or have shone with a brighter
light, than surrounded by the Veda, the Zendavesta, the Buddhist
Tripi_t_aka, and the Quran.

But as I said before, I was not thinking of religious dogmas only, or even
chiefly, when I maintained that the character of academic teaching must be
Sokratic, not dogma