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LECTURE III.
125 subject is extremely difficult, and I confess I doubt whether I shall succeed in engaging your sympathy in favour of the religious opinions of people so strange, so far removed from us, as the Chinese, the Mongolians, the Samoyedes, the Finns, and Lapps. We naturally take an interest in the ancient history of the Aryan and Semitic nations, for, after all, we are ourselves Aryan in language, and Semitic, at least to a certain extent, in religion. But what have we in common with the Turanians, with Chinese and Samoyedes? Very little, it may seem; and yet it is not the yellow skin and the high cheekbones that make the man. Nay, if we look but steadily into those black Chinese eyes, we shall find that there, too, there is a soul that responds to a soul, and that the God whom they mean is the same God whom we mean, however helpless their utterance, however imperfect their worship.
That the languages of the Finns, Lapps, Samoyedes, Turks, Mongol and Tungusians presuppose an early, though, it may be, not a very firm settlement, is now admitted by all competent authorities. That the Tamulic, Lohitic, Gangetic, Malaic and Taic languages presuppose a similar concentration, is as yet an hypothesis only, while the convergence of these two branches, the North Turanian and South Turanian, towards the most ancient Chinese as their common centre, though it may be called plausible, has certainly not yet been established by sufficient scientific evidence. If therefore we endeavour to discover among the religions of these people fragments, and, more particularly, linguistic fragments which betray the same origin, and must have descended from one and the same
