Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

VICTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY METHODS. 37^
Even more extensive were the revelations made by scientific
criticism applied to the sacred literature of southern and
eastern Asia. The resemblances of sundry fundamental narratives
and ideas in our own sacred books with those of Buddhism
were especially suggestive.
Here, too, had been a long preparatory history. The
discoveries in Sanscrit philology made in the latter half of
the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, by
Sir William Jones, Carey, Wilkins, Foster, Colebrooke, and
others, had met at first with some opposition from theologians.
The declaration by Dugald Stewart that the discovery
of Sanscrit was fraudulent, and its vocabulary and
grammar patched together out of Greek and Latin, showed
the feeling of the older race of biblical students. But re-
searches went on. Bopp, Burnouf, Lassen, Weber, Whitney,
Max Miiller, and others continued the work during the nineteenth
century. More and more evident became the sources
from which many ideas and narratives in our own sacred
books had been developed. Studies in the sacred books of
Brahmanism, and in the institutions of Buddhism, the most
widespread of all religions, its devotees outnumbering those
of all branches of the Christian Church together, proved
especially fruitful in facts relating to general sacred literature
and early European religious ideas.
Noteworthy in the progress of this work of Fathers Hue and Gabet.
knowledge was the
In 1839 the former of
resented as saying to Zaratusht (Zoroaster) :
"
I had the worship of thy ancestors ;
thou also worship me." I am indebted to Prof. E. P Evans, formerly of the University
of Michigan, but now of Munich, for a translation of the original text from
Spiegel's edition. For a good account, see also Haug, Essays on the Sacred Lan-
guage, etc., of the Parsees, edited by West, London, 1884, pp. 252 et seq. ; see also
Mills's and Darmesteter's work in Sacred Books of the East. For Dr. Mills's article
referred to, see his Zoroaster and the Bible, in The Ninetceitth Century, January,
1894. For the citation from Renan, see his Histoire du Peuple Israel, tome xiv,
chap, iv ; see also, for Persian ideas of heaven, hell, and resurrection, Haug, as
above, pp. 310 et seq. For an interesting rhumd of Zoroastrianism, see Laing, A
Modern Zoroastrian, chap, xiii, London, eighth edition, 1893. For the Buddhist
version of the judgment of Solomon, etc., see Fausboll, Buddhist Birth Stories,
translated by Rhys Davids, London, 1880, vol. i, p. 14, and following. For very
full statements regarding the influence of Persian ideas upon the Jews during the
captivity, see Kohut, Ueber die judische Angelologie und Daemonologie in ihren
Abhdngigkeit vom Parsismus, Leipzig, 1866.
do