II The World's Religions THE publishers rightly call Dr. Murphy's
betak "the result of a lifetime of study and research and of many 'years of university teaching." The last words suggest that it is also, like some of Aristotle's works, the product of generations of lectures ; and, like Aristotle, Dr. Murphy is subject to the defects of this method of compilation. One is a complete lack of the literary graces. Style, presentation and even orthography are alike slipshod. It is enough to note that an identical paragraph of some 200 words occurs twice in four pages (318 and 321) ; and that, apart ,from such solecisms as " dessicated " and many arbitrary spellings of Greek terms, Dr. Murphy is apt to give his sources different names in different con- texts ; Mr. Leonard Woolley, for instance, becoming Woo/ey, Sir L., in the index. As an example of his sometimes inscrutable prose, page 433 yields this: "The earliest members of the British Parliament who were Hindus, were Parsis."
A more serious consequence of what seems to be a lack of planning in the compilation of the book is that unequal depth and detail are given to equally important matters. The early chapters treat in a masterly fashion of the earliest developments of religious
feeling inthe human mind. Seldom have the fruits of anthropology and even of zoology been so lucidly applied to the ultimate deriva. tions of this feeling, to wfiich Dr. Muephy firmly denies the label of "instinct." In the later stages of his thesis, too, Dr. Murphy shows an admirable clarity and common sense in picking out funda- mental facts which are too seldom appreciated by lay students of comparative religion—for instance, that there is no essential conflict or " duality " between the Eastern and the Western mentalities in their approach to religion; or that Buddha, no less than Confucius, was a practical reformer with both feet on the ground rather than a religious mystic. On the other hand, the detailed information on religious ideas and practices which the general reader will expect to find in the foreground is often lacking. This is especially true of Chinese religion, where the antithesis of yin and yang is first introduced with quite inadequate explanation ; and of Zoroastrian. ism, where the conflict of Ormazd and Ahriman is hardly explained at all. But by far the most serious omission from the book is that of Christianity.
Nothing at the beginning of the book prepares the reader for this omission. Dr. Murphy rightly quotes in his first chapter the stricture that, "down to comparatively recent times, almost the only forms of religion seriously studied in Europe have been those of the various Christian Churches," and that "the study of religion has meant mainly the study of Christian beliefs." He argues against this attitude that, on the contrary, a history of religion must take all religions for its material and embrace all stages of religious development. What is odd, in view of these just remarks, is that Dr. Murphy does not act on them. He omits all branches of the Christian faith altogether, except for casual allusions and compari- sons at half-a-dozen scattered points. It seems a pity that his massive learning has not been applied to making this comparative study truly complete. And there is something doubly paradoxical and inconclusive about presenting Hamlet without the Prince, after blaming others for treating him as the only character in the play. C. M. WOODHOUSE.
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