The-papacy-its-history-dogmas-genius-and-prospects-wylie

420 INFLUENCE OF POPERY ON THE INDIVIDUAL MAN.the standard according to which we judge of religion, so isthe intellectualdevelopment and the social advancement ofthat people. This order obtains over all the earth. It cannotbe regarded as a mere coincidence. To regard it as suchwould be not less unphilosophical than to regard as a merecoincidence the connection between stinted food and a dwarfedbody, or that other connection which is found to exist inall ordinary cases between sufficient aliment and visrorous physicalpowers. A fact of such universal occurrence must necessarilyhave birth in some great and universal law.Neither climate,nor race, nor government, can solve thephenomenon.Solutions have often been attempted on one or other of theseprinciples ; but there are innumerable facts which defy solutionon all of them, and which are soluble only with referenceto the influence of religion.Not to mention other instances,we find in the very heart of the Mahommedan empire a smallChristian society,—the Chaldeans of the Kurdish mountains.Their lovely and well-cultivated valleys, their clean, thrivingvillages, their pure morals, and cultivated manners and tastes,form a striking but most agreeable contrast to the barbarism,the sloth, the filth, and the vice, that on all sidessurround tiiem.They are under the same climate and governmentas their neighbours : in one thing only do theydiffer froni them, and that is their religion. Thus, in allcircumstances the influence of Christianity is the same.Here we find it, though existing in a very imperfect state,creating a very oasis of beauty in the midst of the waste wildernessof Mahommedan idolatry.* And, to come nearerhome, we have in Britain a striking fact standing; in directantagonism to the theory which resolves all these great nationaldiversities into influence of race. We have the Celtsof Ireland and the Celts of Scotland standing at the very antipodesof the moral and social scale.the proof from analysis ;But we have not onlythe proof from direct experiment* For a most interesting account of these Christians, see Layard's Ninevehand its Remains, vol. i. pp. 147-173.