Dasyu-i. e. native-king and people. Yet we have to get familiar with the fact, which opens out a whole vista of missionary work, conversions, priestly ambition-and sound national policy.

24. Every one who has lived in India knows—and the English learned it to their cost at the time of the great mutiny-what almost unlimited influence the wandering home-missionaries have over the population. When such a guru (spiritual instructor) makes his rounds, the people of the villages which he honors with a visit pour out to meet him and carry him to their homes under demonstrations of respect almost amounting to worship. Within historical, even modern times, such men have been known to rise to the highest positions at the courts of native potentates, as prime ministers or as unofficial, but all the more powerful, private advisers of the master. Such must have been the Aryan missionaries of the Vedic times, who carried the worship of Agni and Soma into the lands of the Serpent together with Aryan speech and customs. The process of conversion must have been a simple matter enough. A ceremony of initiation, significantly named "a second birth," a simple confession of faith-and the impure brood of the Serpent was transformed into the "twice-born" child of the bright Devas and admitted into the Aryan spiritual community, the Aryan political confederacy. Now there is in the Rig-Veda a short verse which, under the name of GAYATRÎ, is to this day considered the most sacred of all texts, endowed with miraculous powers, and has, through over a score and a half of centuries, been repeated

thrice a day at least, with fervent faith, by numberless millions of human beings. It reads as follows in the translation:

"Of Savitar, the heavenly, that longed for glory may we win, and may himself inspire our prayers.”—(III., 62, 10.)

This text at first sight appears so insignificant as to make the exceeding holiness attached to it something of a puzzle. Our perplexity however vanishes if we assume it to have been the confession of faith demanded of converts—as this would fully account for its sacredness, which endures unimpaired to this day. We can have no proof that this mantra was used for this particular purpose, but there is nothing to make it improbable. Its briefness and simplicity make it appropriate; it is comprehensive too, as the sky-and-sun-worship, a form and development of fire-worship, might well be taken as the symbol of the bright Aryan nature-religion in opposition to the mystic and gloomy earth-worship represented by its weird emblem, the Serpent. This supposition is still further and very greatly favored by the circumstance that the Gâyatrî is found in the collection attributed to the Rishi Vishvâmitra. And here we come on the thin end of a wedge which, being inserted at this early time, sprung a cleft which runs through the entire epic and religious life of India: the schism between the two Brahmanic schools which have their names from the two-probably real-Vedic Rishis VASISHTHA and VISHVÂMITRA.

25. To keep strictly within the information supplied by the Rig-Veda itself-Vasishtha was the

bard of the TRITSU, the leading and purest Aryan tribe, and Vishvâmitra was the bard of the BHARATAS, their great enemies and one of the most powerful native tribes. He at one time had been with the Tritsu, and for whatever cause he left them-not improbably personal revenge-he played a conspicuous part in the confederacy which attempted to check the Aryan advance and increasing power. There is a hymn (53), in Book III., that of the Vishvâmitra family, which evidently alludes to this very thing. In the first part of the hymn it is said that when Vishvâmitra conducted King Sudâs' sacrifices, Indra was gracious to him for the Rishi's sake, and a great blessing is pronounced on the king, and his war-steed and the expedition on which he starts. Then, quite suddenly, Vishvâmitra is made to declare, in his own person, that his prayers protect the tribes of the Bhâratas, and the hymn ends with four verses of imprecations against enemies who are not named, but whom tradition so positively identified with Vasishtha and his family, that the priests of this house in later times never uttered these four verses, and tried not to hear them when spoken by other Brâhmans. It is most probable that the Vishvâmitras resented some distinction conferred upon the Vasishthas, possibly their appointment as purohitas to the Tritsu royal family, and went over to their most powerful enemies, the Purus and Bhâratas. The Tritsu and their allies were victorious in the ensuing struggle, known as "the War of the Ten Kings," and both the bards have left descriptions of it and of the final battle on the banks of the Purushnî,

in some spirited hymns, the most undoubtedly historical of the collection. At a later period the followers of Vasishtha and his descendants represent the narrowly orthodox Brahmanic school, with its petty punctiliousness in the matter of forms, rites, observances, its intolerance of everything un-Aryan, its rigid separatism. This school it was which stood guard through all these ages, and up to our day, the champion-and possibly originally the institutor, of Caste; who advanced and upheld all the exaggerated claims of the Brâhman priesthood, to divinity, to the rule of the world, and ownership of all it holds, to supernatural compelling powers over nature and the gods themselves through sacrifice and ascetic practices, and the like. The followers of Vishvâmitra and his descendants, on the other hand, represented the school of liberalism and progress, of conciliation and amalgamation; it was probably through their efforts chiefly that Aryan speech and worship and, as a consequence, Aryan supremacy, spread among the native princes and their tribes. But it must also have been owing to this their policy of conciliation that many of the beliefs and practices of the once loathed aborigines gradually crept into Aryan worship, and gained a footing there, paving the way for the mixed forms of Hinduism in the future. Their orthodox antagonists blamed and despised them for this laxity, wherein they saw a danger which they strove to avert by redoubled zeal in keeping high and strong the bulwark of Caste; and while they could not deny the holiness and authority of one who ranks with their own Rishi in the Rig-Veda