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NINTH LECTURE.
General Survey and Conclusions.
Our labours are now about to be ended, this being the last of the lectures that I have to deliver before you. We have seen how different religion has proved to be from what we had taken it to mean, and how it really was the same teaching, the same principle, the same doctrine, the same tenet under different names and forms and formulas. Systems as hostile as Hinduism, that sanctified the cow and Mahomedanism that enjoined its sacrifice, theologies so wide apart as Christianity that made the belief in the existence of a son of God and Judaism and others that denied that their God had a wife or son, have been found to have been real brothers, descendants of the same Parent,-the Scientific Truth-though unknown to and unrecognised by one another, owing to the differences of robes and masks they have been wearing and also of the parts they have been playing on the mythological stage from hoary antiquity. For say what you may to the contrary scientific truth must have existed in the world before men could have set out to build their mythological pantheons on its principles. Allegory cannot precede fact; it is the fact that precedes allegory.
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"Surely it were a foolish attempt," writes Thomas Carlyle, that English writer who is well known for his far-sightedness, "surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend explaining.. .......such a phenomenon as that distant distracted cloudy imbroglio of Paganismmore like a cloud field than a distant continent of firm land and facts! It is no longer a reality, yet it was one. We ought to understand that this seeming cloud field
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