Introduction to the Science of Religion

Author(s): Max Muller
Publisher: Longmans Green and Compny London

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LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION.
worship God at all times, in business and pleasure, and everything; because, while other Scriptures inculcate the practice of piety and virtue for the sake of eternal happiness, the Hindu Scriptures alone maintain that God should be worshipped for the sake of God alone, and virtue practised for the sake of virtue alone ; because Hinduism inculcates universal benevolence, while other faiths merely refer to man; because Hinduism is non-sectarian (believing that all faiths are good if the men who hold them are good), non-proselytizing, pre-eminently tolerant, devotional to an entire abstraction of the mind from time and sense, and the concentration of it on the Divine; of an antiquity running back to the infancy of the human race, and from that time till now influencing in all particulars the greatest affairs of the State and the most minute affairs of domestic life?
A Science of Religion, based on an impartial and truly scientific comparison of all, or at all events, of the most important, religions of mankind, is now only a question of time. It is demanded by those whose voice cannot be disregarded. Its title, though implying as yet a promise rather than a fulfilment, has become more or less familiar in Germany, France, and America; its great problems have attracted the eyes of many inquirers, and its results have been anticipated either with fear or with delight. It becomes therefore the duty of those who have devoted their life to the study of the principal religions of the world in their original documents, and who value religion and reverence it in whatever form it may present itself, to take possession of this new territory in
1 See Times,' Oct. 27, 1872.