proved Mr. Seward's plan. Other statesmen, too, who had favored the purchase of St. Thomas, Samana, and Alaska, under the lead of Mr. Seward, afterward took opposite ground, for reasons which were doubtless satisfactory to themselves.

President Grant was not slow in following Mr. Seward's initiative, and in endeavoring to obtain possession of the gulf of Samana. He fully understood its value as a naval and military station, and earnestly desired its acquisition; besides, the President of the Dominican Republic had laid before our Administration the advantages such a cession of territory would be not only to the United States but to his own country, which sadly needed money, and had no particular use for Samana.

My readers will doubtless recollect the bitter opposition President Grant encountered in his patriotic desire to secure for this country a cession of territory that would be invaluable to us in case of war with a naval power, an opposition that could not be justified on reasonable grounds, but was to the last degree unwise, as, from my knowledge of the island and sentiments of the inhabitants, I am certain that it must necessarily become in the future a territory of the United States, unless, in contempt of the Monroe doctrine, we suffer it to fall into the clutches of some European power.

I have merely glanced at what ought to be an interesting subject to the people of the United States. A detailed account of the climate, resources, exports, natural history, etc., of San Domingo, would set young America to thinking on the matter of acquiring a foothold in the gulf of Samana.

DAVID D. PORTER.

VI.

SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST.

In order to have a solid foundation for a comparative study of the religions of the East, we must have, before all things, complete and thoroughly faithful translations of their sacred books. Extracts will no longer suffice. We do not know Germany, if we know the Rhine; nor Rome, when we have admired St. Peter's. No one who collects and publishes such extracts can resist, no one at all events, so far as I know, has ever resisted the temptation of giving what is beautiful, or it may be what is strange and startling, and leaving out what is commonplace, tedious, or it may be repulsive, or lastly, what is difficult to construe and to understand. We must face the problem in its completeness, and I confess it has been for many years a problem to me, ay, and to a great extent is so still, how the sacred books of the East should, by the side of so much that is fresh, natural, simple, beautiful, and true, contain so much that is not only unmeaning, artificial, and silly, but hideous and repellent. This is a fact, and must be accounted for in some way or other.

To some minds this problem may seem to be no problem at all. To those, and I do not speak of Christians only, who look upon the sacred books of all religions except their own as necessarily the outcome of human or superhuman ignorance and depravity, the mixed nature of their contents may seem to be exactly what it ought to be, what they expected it would be. But there are other and more reverent minds who can feel a divine afflatus in the sacred books, not only of their own, but of other religions also, and to them the mixed character of some of the ancient sacred canons must always be extremely perplexing.

I can account for it to a certain extent, though not entirely to my own satisfaction. Most of the ancient sacred books have been handed down by oral tradition for many generations before they were consigned to writing. In an age when there was nothing cor

responding to what we call literature, every saying, every proverb, every story handed down from father to son, received very soon a kind of hallowed character. They became sacred heirlooms; sacred because they came from an unknown source, from a distant age. There was a stage in the development of human society when the distance that separated the living generation from their grandfathers or great-grandfathers was, as yet, the nearest approach to a conception of eternity, and when the name of grandfather and greatgrandfather seemed the nearest expression of God.* Hence, what had been said by these half-human, half-divine ancestors, if it was preserved at all, was soon looked upon as a more than human utterance. It was received with reverence, it was never questioned and criticised.

Some of these ancient sayings were preserved because they were so true and so striking that they could not be forgotten. They contained eternal truths, expressed for the first time in human language. Of such oracles of truth it was said in India that they had been heard, sruta, and from it arose the word sruti, the recognized term for divine revelation in Sanskrit.

But besides such utterances which had a vitality of their own, strong enough to defy the power of time, there were others which might have struck the minds of the listeners with great force under the peculiar circumstances that evoked them, but which, when these circumstances were forgotten, became trivial and almost unintelligible. A few verses sung by warriors on the eve of a great battle would, if that battle proved victorious, assume a charm quite independent of their poetic merit. They would be repeated in memory of the heroes who conquered, and of the gods who granted victory. But when the heroes, and the gods, and the victory which they gained were forgotten, the song of victory and thanksgiving would often survive as a relice of the past, though almost unintelligible to later generations.

Even a single ceremonial act, performed at the time of a famine or an inundation, and apparently attended with a sudden and almost miraculous success, might often be preserved in the liturgical code of a family or a tribe with a superstitious awe entirely beyond our understanding. It might be repeated for some time on similar emergencies, till when it had failed again and again it survived only as a superstitious custom in the memory of priests and poets.

Bishop Callaway, "Unkulunkulu, or the Tradition of Creation, as existing among the Amazulu and other Tribes of South Africa," p. 7.

Further, it should be remembered that, in ancient as in modern times, the utterances of men who had once gained a certain prestige would often receive attention far beyond their merits, so that in many a family or tribe the sayings and teachings of one man, who had once in his youth or manhood uttered words of inspired wisdom, would all be handed down together, without any attempt to separate the grain from the chaff.

Nor must we forget that though oral tradition, when once brought under proper discipline, is a most faithful guardian, it is not without its dangers in its incipient stages. Many a word may have been misunderstood, many a sentence confused, as it was told by father to son, before it became fixed in the tradition of a village community, and then resisted by its very sacredness all attempts at emendation.

Lastly, we must remember that those who handed down the ancestral treasures of ancient wisdom would often feel inclined to add what seemed useful to themselves, and what they knew could be preserved in one way only, namely, if it was allowed to form part of the tradition that had to be handed down, as a sacred trust, from generation to generation. The priestly influence was at work, even before there were priests by profession, and, when the priesthood had once become professional, its influence may account for much that would otherwise seem inexplicable in the sacred codes of the ancient world.

These are a few of the considerations which may help to explain how, mixed up with real treasures of thought, we meet in the sacred books with so many passages and whole chapters which either never had any life or meaning at all, or, if they had, have, in the form in which they have come down to us, completely lost it. We must try to imagine what the Old Testament would have been, if it had not been kept distinct from the Talmud; or the New Testament, if it had been mixed up, not only with the spurious gospels, but with the records of the wranglings of the early councils, if we wish to understand, to some extent at least, the wild confusion of sublime truth with vulgar stupidity that meets us in the pages of the Veda, the Avesta, and the Tripitaka. The idea of keeping the original and genuine tradition separate from apocryphal accretions was an idea of later growth, that could spring up only after the earlier tendency of preserving whatever could be preserved of sacred or half-sacred lore had done its work, and wrought its own destruction.

In using, what may seem to some of my fellow workers, this very strong and almost irreverent language with regard to the ancient sacred books of the East, I have not neglected to make full allowance for that very important intellectual parallax which, no doubt, renders it very difficult for a Western observer to see things and thoughts under exactly the same angle and in the same light as they would appear to an Eastern eye. There are Western expressions which offend Eastern taste as much as Eastern expressions are apt to offend Western taste. A symphony of Beethoven's would be mere noise to an Indian ear, an Indian Sangîta seems to us without melody, harmony, or rhythm. All this I fully admit, yet, after making every allowance for national taste and traditions, I still confidently appeal to the best Oriental scholars, who have not entirely forgotten that there is a world outside the four walls of their study, whether they think that my condemnation is too severe, or that Eastern nations themselves would tolerate, in any of their classical literary compositions, such violations of the simplest rules of taste as they have accustomed themselves to tolerate, if not to admire, in their sacred books.

But then it might, no doubt, be objected that books of such a character hardly deserve the honor of being translated into English, that the sooner they are forgotten the better. Such opinions have of late been freely expressed by some eminent writers, and supported by arguments worthy of the Caliph Omar himself. In these days of anthropological research, when no custom is too disgusting to be recorded, no rules of intermarriage too complicated to be disentangled, it may seem strange that the few genuine relics of ancient religion which, as by a miracle, have been preserved to us, should thus have been judged from a purely æsthetic, and not from an historical point of view. There was some excuse for this in the days of Sir W. Jones and Colebrooke. The latter, as is well known, considered "the Vedas as too voluminous for a complete translation of the whole," adding that "what they contain would hardly reward the labor of the reader, much less that of the translator."* The former went still further in the condemnation which he pronounced on Anquetil Duperron's translation of the Zend-avesta. Sir W. Jones, we must remember, was not only a scholar, but also a man of taste, and the man of taste sometimes gained a victory over the scholar. His controversy with Anquetil Duperron, the discoverer

* Colebrooke's "Miscellaneous Essays," 1873, vol. ii., p. 102.