He knew Dr. Timothy Richard. He went out as a missionary to China to preach the Gospel. He wondered what Dr. Richard thought the Gospel really was: he could have no real grasp of it, or he could not have confused the two-Mahâyâna Buddhism and Christianity. Dr. Tisdall's conclusion was emphatically right: study of the two religions forbade us to recognize Mahâyânism as an Asiatic form of the Gospel of Christ." "A Mr. M. L. ROUSE said that he had had the pleasure of listening to a lecture from Dr. Tisdall at St. Michael's, Cornhill. Dr. Tisdall said there that that which St. James had condemned, viz., saying to a needy person, "Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled," without giving those things which were needful for the body, was very poor Christianity, but it was quite good Buddhism. The Rev. JOHN TUCKWELL said he was extremely grateful to Dr. Tisdall for a most valuable and important paper. He had been for many years interested in the Missionary Society which sent Dr. Richard out to China, and he believed he was correct in saying that his views when first published had excited great concern both in the Committee and the Denomination to which Dr. Richard belonged. But Dr. Richard had for many years been President of the “Christian Literature Society of China," and was now invalided, and had very little connection with any society whatever. He congratulated the Victoria Institute on having had such a paper as that to which they had listened that afternoon. There was a tendency abroad to take little studies of heathen philosophy and associate them with the doctrines of Christianity under the title of "Comparative Religions." But there was in truth very little connection between Christianity and any other religion, or between the Bible and any other "sacred books." The Buddhistic view of the universe, however, appears to have much in common with the materialistic view of the universe with which Haeckel has made us familiar in his doctrine of Monism, by which he ascribes thought, emotion and will-in fact all the principal elements of personality, to his original uncreated monistic substance. Haeckel's substitute for God resembles very much the indefinable "Suchness" of Buddhism and the effort to correlate such heathen doctrines with the doctrines of Christianity could only have the effect of belittling Christianity. Professor LANGHORNE ORCHARD said that they had listened to a paper of profound human interest. In Haeckel's view, mind was developed out of matter; in the Buddhist manual, The Awakening of Faith, the same idea is brought forth. The root idea was that the universe was self-existent, without will or consciousness. He would like to ask the Lecturer how he accounted for murders being so common in Buddhist countries, seeing that Buddhists were so careful of animal life. He would also like to ask what was the Buddhist's notion of sin. The CHAIRMAN considered Buddhism to be a serious declension from Hinduisin, the latter teaching a greater sense of sin. Buddhism was, therefore, even more than Hinduism, opposed in its spirit to Christianity. False religions originating in declensions from, or corruptions of, the one true God-revealed religion, it was only reasonable to suppose that they would, more or less, retain traces of it, and touch it at certain points. In Genesis i we are told of the Creation of the heavens and the earth. Were the heavens material or ethereal? If the latter, they would seem to correspond to the Buddhist Tao. In the name of the Meeting, he asked Dr. Tisdall to accept their sincere thanks for his most admirable and instructive paper. The LECTURER thanked the audience for the great attention which they had paid to what he feared was a dull paper. The Buddhist's idea of sin was anything that tended to hinder progress toward Nirvana, or personal extinction; the opposite of this was the Buddhist idea of virtue. Sin, therefore, was to do that which was inexpedient. There was no sense of a breach of law, because there was no law, since there was no lawgiver. With regard to the prevalence of murders in Ceylon, that was a region where Hînâyâna Buddhism prevailed, not Mahâyâna Buddhism. The reason of the small regard for human life seemed to be that no real distinction was felt between the ego of the man and that of the animal. Fish were killed for human food-why not a man if he stood in one's way, and if you were benefited by his death? The murdered person would revive in some other form. The Buddhist use of holy water, of praying beads and the like, was earlier than their use by the Roman Catholics, who, therefore,. could not have given them to the Buddhists. The Meeting adjourned at 6 p.m. 570TH ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING, HELD IN COMMITTEE ROOM B, THE CENTRAL HALL WESTMINSTER, ON MONDAY, MAY 17TH, 1915, AT 4.30 P.M. E. J. SEWELL, ESQ., IN THE CHAIR. The Minutes of the preceding Meeting were read and confirmed. The SECRETARY announced that Mr. Walter Henry Bacon, the Rev. William Edgar Woodhams Denham, and Miss Jessie Little had been elected Associates of the Institute. The CHAIRMAN introduced the Rev. Archibald R. S. Kennedy, M.A., D.D., Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages in the University of Edinburgh, and called upon him to address the Meeting on the subject of "Hebrew Weights and Measures." HEBREW WEIGHTS AND MEASURES. THE By Professor HE sources of our information regarding the weights and measures of the nations of antiquity are of two kinds, monumental and literary. Under the first head, the monumental evidence, fall (a) such actual standards of measurement as have survived to our own day-inscribed weights, measuring-rods, etc., and (b) other archæological remains, such as coins and buildings, from which their respective units of weight and of length may be readily deduced. The literary evidence is also of a twofold character, since it includes (a) the direct evidence of early writers on metrology, and (b) the more or less incidental references in ordinary writers to the values of the various standards in use in their day. As regards Hebrew weights and measures in particular, the monumental evidence is exceedingly limited. Indeed it is only in the department of the weight-standards of Palestine, for which a considerable amount of fresh evidence has recently come to light, that we have monumental data of any extent. As for the literary evidence, it may be said that while the Biblical data are on the whole sufficient to enable us to reconstruct the various scales, and to determine the relative values of the different denominations in each scale, we are dependent on later writers, among whom Josephus is pre-eminent, for the valuation of these in terms of the better-known Greek and Roman measures. The aim of this lecture is to provide a summary of our present knowledge of the weights and measures current in Palestine from the Hebrew conquest to the end of the Jewish state in A.D. 70, distinguishing at the same time results that are certain, or fairly certain, from those to which only varying degrees of probability can be assigned. Where my results differ from those of other students in this field, I shall do my best to state as clearly as possible the evidence on which these results. are based. Before proceeding to details, however, I wish to make two remarks of a general nature. The first is a reminder that the Hebrews were the heirs of the older Canaanites, whom they dispossessed of their land and whose advanced civilization they adopted. When, therefore, we speak of the weights and measures of the Hebrews, in the pre-exilic period of their history at least, we are really dealing with the metrology of the earlier inhabitants of Canaan. The second remark is this: the key to the metrology of Palestine is found in its geographical position. From the earliest times, Palestine was the meeting place of the two great civilizations of the ancient world, the Babylonian and the Egyptian. It is natural, therefore, to expect that its metrology would reflect this fact of history, and such we shall find to be the case. I. HEBREW WEIGHTS. Passing now to the more detailed exposition of the three main systems of weights, measures of length, and measures of capacity, I propose to begin with the department of Palestinian metrology for which the monumental evidence is most abundant and most decisive, viz.: the weight-standards of Palestine. The excavations carried out in the last twenty years or more by our own Palestine Exploration Fund, and by the Germans, Austrians and others, have brought to light a very large number of ancient Palestinian weights. Professor Macalister's great work, The Excavation of Gezer (ii, 278–292), alone contains a descriptive list of well over two hundred weights. These, with similar material from other sites in south-west Palestine, from Taanach, Megiddo, Jericho and Jerusalem itself, await the attention of an expert metrologist. A modest beginning was made by myself two years ago (see Expository Times, xxiv, .. August and September, 1913, " Inscribed Hebrew Weights from Palestine"); the results will be summarized below. Cf. E. J. Pilcher, Weights of Ancient Palestine (from P.E.F.St., 1912). The weights in question are almost all of stone, as we should expect from the Old Testament references, where the Hebrew word rendered "weight" literally means a stone (Leviticus xix, 36, Deuteronomy xxv, 13, 15, etc.). "Hard, compact, and heavy stones, capable of taking a polish, such as hæmatite, jasper, basalt, and quartzite, are the stones chiefly used " (Macalister, op. cit., ii, 279f-where see fig. 429 for illustration of "typical forms of weights"). For the smaller weights the two commonest forms are the shuttle-shaped and the dome-shaped, the former tapering to a blunt point at both ends, the latter "either hemispherical, or more or less cylindrical, with convex top and plane base." The influence of Babylonia on the Hebrew weight-system is seen in the adoption of the Babylonian scale of three denominations based on the shekel as unit; 50 shekels made a mina (Hebrew manch), and 3,000 shekels, or 60 minas, a talent. That the shekel was the unit of weight among the Hebrews is evident from the rarity of the term mina in the Old Testament. The pre-exilic writers, indeed, never use the mina or "pound," preferring to express even large weights of silver in terms of the shekel, and the largest as so many talents and shekels. A very slight acquaintance with the actual weights recovered from the soil of Palestine reveals the existence side by side, in ancient times, of a bewildering variety of standards of weight. Let me try to pass in review the more assured, at least, of these standards. (i) The Phenician or 224-grain shekel. This is the best attested of all the Palestinian weightstandards. Its unit is the shekel universally known as the Phoenician shekel from the fact that the rich series of silver coins struck by the great trading cities of Phoenicia, such as Tyre and Sidon, are on this standard. The highest effective weight shown by the coins is 223-8 grs. (Hill, Brit. Mus. Cat. [B.M.C.], Coins of Phenicia, p. cxxxiv), and the theoretical weight of the shekel is usually reckoned as 2246 grs. The average weight, however, of the shekels or tetradrachms of the coinage both of the Phoenician cities and of the Ptolemies of Egypt, who adopted this standard, may be set down as about 218 grs., the weight of our own half-crown. Now the shekel of 218-224 grs. has this special interest |