BOOK REVIEWS.


ORIENTAL RELIGIONS AND THEIR RELATION TO UNIVERSAL RELIGION. By SAMUEL
JOHNSON, with an introduction by O.B. FROTHINGHAM. _Persia_,
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1885.

This is the third volume of the series, and was not quite completed at
the time of Mr. Johnson's death in 1882. The other volumes, on
_India_ and _China_, created much interest in the world of
religious and ethnical study, a prominent London publisher and
literateur saying to a friend of the present writer that nothing more
would need to be written of China for the next quarter of a century. Max
Muller testified to the high value of Mr. Johnson's work.

In the study of the various religions, the author finds in each some
peculiar manifestation of the universal religious sentiment. In Southern
Asia he clearly sees nature almost absorbing the individual and hence a
pantheistic vagueness and vastness in which man does not realize a
complete sense of personality. But in the North and West the same
Tudo-European race comes to a self-conscious individuality and there is
the "evolution and worship of personal will." Mr. Johnson's first
chapter on "Symbolism" brings out this epoch of will development as
illustrated by the Persians,--the human soul impressing itself upon the
material world--and finding outside itself natural emblems to express
its religious life. "Symbolism is mediation between inward and outward,
person and performance, man and his environment." "Work is the image man
makes of himself on the world in and through nature." Mr. Johnson finds
the personal element becoming supreme in these people of Northern and
Western Asia.