THE ORIENTAL RELIGIONS.

should rather take heart from the whole-hearted devotion to truth everywhere visible in the works of scholars of ancient religion, and from their equally evident sympathy with all human efforts to establish a divine relation. Most of all, they should take heart from the universal testimony that, for all time and in all places and under all conditions, the human heart has felt a powerful need for a divine relation. From the knowledge that the desire to be reconciled with God—the common and essential element in all religions—has been the most universal, potent, and persistent factor in past history, it is not a far step to the conviction that it will always continue to be so, and that the struggle toward the divine light of religion, pure and undefiled, will never perish from the earth.