Current Literature [pp. 382-391]

386 CUJ?RENT LITERA TURE. [APRIL,
Hence the inequality of edu~tion and privi- immense influence in shaping ancient laws,
leges to which woman was so long condemn- customs, and institutions, and may safely be
ed, and which still, to a large degree, affects referred to as the source from which were
her condition, even in countries which have evolved, through successive stages, the modlost the memory of the primitive worship. ified but related institutions of modern sociHence the injustice which cut off the younger ety, including certain hoary abuses and su.
sons from inheritance, and which still leaves perstitions which it is the aim of modern resome of the most civilized nations cursed formatory efforts to abolish. So far as the
with the law of primogeniture, long after the ingenious author of The Ancie,tt City reoriginal motive for it has been forgotten by calls the fading features of that old selfish
those who maintain it. piety, and enables us to trace its effects in
As the ancient family had its altar and its usages and statutes, he does a real service to
gods, so in time related families, forming the the student of ancient history, and enlivens
gens, had a special worship, and constituted it with the breath of philosophy. It would
the first society. Still later, groups of gens be a pleasant task, if space permitted, to folformed the phrales and aer)', and there were low him in his efforts to show to what extribal gods, distinct and peculiar. Finally tent the city received from the family its
came the city, and that also had its gods. principles, its rules, its usages, and its ma.
Thus the fabric of ancient society, among gistracies; and finally, in his interesting
the races from which we are descended, statement of the processes by which, in the
formed about the family, as its germ, as that course of time, the ancient religion became
formed about the idea of ancestral worship; modified or effaced, private law and politiand it was ages before there was a popular cal institutions being modified with it, and a
conception of a god whose providence ex- series of revolutions and social changes regutended beyond the family, beyond the gens, larly following the development of knowl.
beyond the tribe, beyond the city, embracing edge. We can only say, in conclusion, that
a whole country, and at last the whole of he sums up his animated and original work
mankind. This, at least, is the theory of by introducing Christianity upon the scene
M. de Coulanges. We discern in his book, as the beneficent successor of an exclusive
however, a tendency to apply his theory too worship, which only a few philosophers had
arbitrarily. While the graphic picture which projected beyond the family, the city, or the
he produces of the old family religion is true state and had made to include the whole
enough in its general features, accordant human race as the equal object of Divine
with the soundest historic authorities so far love.
as they go, and consistent with the illuminating glimpses of ancient life afforded by San. BUDDHisM: Its Historical, Theoretical and
scrit studies, it is, we think, made too ex- Popular Aspects. By Ernest J. Eitel.
clusive. There is reason to believe that a London: Trubner & Co.
general faith, above and beyond the family FENG - SHut; or the Rudiments of Natural
religion-a faith in which a whole people Science in China. By Ernest J. Eitel.
shared-was synchronous with the earliest London: Trubner & Co.
evidences of the worship of ancestors. In These two pamphlets seem to have been
passages of the Vedic hymns believed to be really printed in Hongkong, where they
thirty-five centuries old, and pointing to an were written and partly delivered as lectorigin much earlier, Indra was praised as ures, by Dr. Eitel, of the London Missionary
the supreme god of all. We know, too, on Society. Together, they constitute the most
the very evidence of old linguistic rocks to succinct and perspicuous analysis of the rewhich M. de Coulanges appeals, that the ligious cult of old India and China which
Zeus of the Greeks and the Jupiter of the has come to our knowledge. Their author
Romans, recognized by them as supreme is a liberal-minded scholar, who is not blind.
gods, were only the Deus Pitar of the early ed by his Christian belief to whatever of merit
Aryans. or deep significance there is in the dominat.
The family worship undoubtedly had an ing faith of Asia. He does not commit the