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RECONCILIATION.
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by all considerations of age. This suffices to dispose of the speculative childish thesis of the moderns.
As regards the comparative antiquity of Jainism, its priority in point of time over all other creeds is apparent from the fact that it furnishes a complete explanation of the entire subject, dealing with the problem both from the point of view of science as well as that of metaphysics. The teaching of all other religions is mythological, not scientific even in a single instance; and wherever they tend to approach metaphysics, they make it amply evident that they have no conception of the subject. It is evident that religion is a science as exact as any other that we can think of, so that whoever be its discoverer, he could not have been a primitive savage on the eve of his emergence from monkey ancestry as modern research would have us believe.* The question
* The assumption that the Vedic and other mythologies are the work of primitive humanity because they were composed in an age which is known, by the relics that have been since unearthed and discovered by us, to have been characterised by the existence of men who knew nothing of the potter's, the carpenter's or the blacksmith's art, is, in the light of what has been stated in the preceding pages of this book, as much devoid of merit as the one which insists on taking these different mythologies to embody the expression of the savage admiration for wind, cloud and rain, though it might well be that certain parts of the world were steeped in deep ignorance, at the time of their composition. We are not to be taken as denying the existence of any well attested and duly established fact tending to show that at a certain period of time, in the past history of our globe, certain parts of the world were inhabited by human beings who cannot but be classed as savages. Our thesis does not clash with any such well established fact; nor are we interested in disputing the existence of the cave-man who made his implements at first from stone, and then resorted to metal. What we do dispute is the sweeping inference which has been drawn-all too hastily as it
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