Excerpt from Universal Beliefs: Or, the Great Consensus I. It is hoped that no reader of the following pages will do as some have done - will infer from the fact that all systems of religion have some good in them that they are all equally good, or even that it cannot reasonably be claimed that while one is from above all the others are from beneath. This certainly would be very poor logic. A system may have some good elements, and yet as a whole be very bad. Truth is not such a Midas as to turn all it touches into gold. It may, practically, be cancelled, and more than cancelled, by errors closely bound up with it; just as sundry excellent soldiers in an army may not prevent it from being a terrible scourge; just as sundry good traits in a citizen may not prevent his becoming a public nuisance; and just as sundry chemical elements, in themselves wholesome, may not prevent the compound to which they belong from acting as a deadly poison. The non-Christian religions are poisons, despite the good elements they contain. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.