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154
LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION.
no evil, but rejoices in the truth wherever it can be found.
I suppose that most of us, sooner or later in life, have felt how the whole world--this wicked world, as we call it-is changed as if by magic, if once we can make up our mind to give men credit for good motives, never to be suspicious, never to think evil, never to think ourselves better than our neighbours. Trust a man to be true and good, and, even if he is not, your trust will tend to make him true and good. It is the same with the religions of the world. Let us but once make up our mind to look in them for what is true and good, and we shall hardly know our old religions again. If they are the work of the devil, as many of us have been brought up to believe then never was there a kingdom so divided against itself from the very beginning. There is no religionor if there is, I do not know it—which does not say, Do good, avoid evil. There is none which does not contain what Rabbi Hillel called the quintessence of all religions, the simple warning, "Be good, my boy.'
Be good, my boy,' may seem a very short catechism; but let us add to it, ‘Be good, my boy, for God's sake, and we have in it very nearly the whole of the Law and the Prophets.
I wish I could read you the extracts I have collected from the sacred books of the ancient world, grains of truth more precious to me than grains of gold; prayers so simple and so true that we could all join in them if we once accustomed ourselves to the strange sounds of Sanskrit or Chinese. I can to-day give you a few specimens only.
Here is a prayer of Vasishtha, a Vedic prophet,
