THE ORIENTAL RELIGIONS.

The Textes et monuments original: "Texts and illustrated monuments", this present series of essays, and a numerous series of articles and monographs, all demonstrate the same painstaking and thorough scholarship. Yet, the author is something more than a mere savant a learned person or scholar who has a vast and difficult body of knowledge at his command. He is also a literary architect who builds his material into a well-ordered and graceful structure.

Above all, M. Cumont is an interpreter. In The Mysteries of Mithra, he put into circulation, so to speak, the currency of the ideas he had minted through his patient and careful study of the Textes et monuments. In his studies of The Oriental Religions, he offers the wider public an interpretation of a larger and more comprehensive body of knowledge—a field in which his acquaintance with the religion of Mithra is only a part, and against which it stands as a background. Just as his book The Mysteries of Mithra relates to his specialized knowledge of Mithraism, The Oriental Religions relates to his knowledge of the entire field. He is thus an example of the highest type of scholar: the exhaustive researcher of evidence and the sympathetic interpreter who mediates between his subject and the intellectual life of his time.

And yet, admirable as M. Cumont’s presentation is in The Mysteries of Mithra and The Oriental Religions, it would be a mistake to suppose that his popular works are light reading. While the few specialists in ancient religions may sail smoothly along the current of his thought, the very nature of a subject that branches so extensively and intricately into the whole of ancient life—concerning itself with practically every manifestation of ancient civilization—