"My God, who knowest the unknown,[4] be merciful to me. My Goddess, who knowest the unknown, be merciful."
"God, who knowest the unknown, in the midst of the stormy waters take me by the hand; my sins are seven times seven, forgive my sins!"
Another hymn is remarkable for its artistic construction. It is in regular strophes, the penitent speaking in each five double lines, to which the priest adds two, supporting his prayer. The whole is in precisely the same style as the similar penitential psalms of the Hebrew Bible, as will appear from the following quotation of one of the strophes from the translation of Zimmern.
Penitent. "I, thy servant, full of sighs call to thee. Whoso is beset with sin, his ardent supplication thou acceptest. If thou lookest on a man with pity, that man liveth. Ruler of all, mistress of mankind, merciful one to whom it is good to turn, who dost receive sighs."
Priest. "While his god and his goddess are wroth with him he calls on thee. Thy countenance turn on him, take hold of his hand."
These hymns are remarkable, both as showing that the sentiments of personal piety and contrition for sin as a thing hateful to the Supreme Being, might be as intense in a polytheistic as in a monotheistic religion; and as illustrating the immense interval of time which must have elapsed before such sentiments could have grown up from the rude beginnings of savage or semi-civilized superstitions. The two oldest religions of the world, those of Egypt and Chaldæa, tell the same story; that of the immense interval which must have elapsed prior to the historical date of 5000 b.c. when written records begin, to allow of such ideas and such a civilization having grown up from such a state of things as we find prevailing during the neolithic period, and still prevailing among the inferior races of the world, who have remained isolated and unchanged in the hunting or nomad condition.
I have dwelt at some length on the ancient religions, for nothing tends more to open the mind, and break down the narrow barriers of sectarian prejudice, than to see how the ideas which we have believed to be the peculiar possession of our own religion, are in fact the inevitable products of the evolution of the human race from barbarism to civilization, and have appeared in substantially the same forms in so many ages and countries. And surely, in these days, when faith in direct inspiration has been so rudely shaken, it must be consoling to many enlightened Christians to find that the fundamental articles of their creed, trinities, emanations, incarnations, atonements, a future life and day of judgment, are not the isolated conceptions of a minority of the human race in recent times, but have been held from a remote antiquity by all the nations which have taken a leading part in civilization.
To all enlightened minds also, whatever may be their theological creeds, it must be a cheering reflection that the fundamental axioms of morality do not depend on the evidence that the Decalogue was written on a stone by God's own finger, or that the Sermon on the Mount is correctly reported, but on the evolution of the natural instincts of the human mind. All advanced and civilized communities have had their Decalogues and Sermons on the Mount, and it is impossible for any dispassionate observer to read them without feeling that in substance they are all identical, whether contained in the Egyptian Todtenbuch, the Babylonian hymns, the Zoroastrian Zendavesta, the sacred books of Brahmanism and Buddhism, the Maxims of Confucius, the Doctrines of Plato and the Stoics, or the Christian Bible.
None are absolutely perfect and complete, and of some it may be said that they contain precepts of the highest practical importance which are either omitted or contradicted in the Christian formulas. For instance, the virtue of diligence, and the injunction not to be idle, in the Egyptian and Zoroastrian creeds contrast favourably with the "take no thought for the morrow," and "trust to be fed like the sparrows," of the Sermon on the Mount. But in this, and in all these summaries of moral axioms, apparent differences arise not from fundamental oppositions, but from truth having two sides, and passing over readily into