tions of which must stand or fall exclusively on their own merits.

21. We have now arrived at the end of a survey, not incomplete, if necessarily brief, of what can, in the stricter sense, be called Vedic Literature. In a wider sense, all the literature of India may, theoretically, be said to come under that head, since the Veda-the Rig-Veda in the last instance-pervades and dominates her spiritual life, even as her own Himalaya sways and regulates the conditions of her material existence. But the special and distinctive Vedic literature is that which follows directly from the Veda and revolves around it, treating only of such matters as it either contains or suggests. It naturally falls into three very obvious main divisions: I, the Mantra period-the period of collecting the songs with no special object beyond that of preserving them; 2, the Brâhmana period—the period of commentary and a certain amount of exegesis, with the patent object of establishing the supremacy of the Brahman caste; 3, the Sûtra period-the period of concise special treatises for practical use at school and sacrifice. Chronologically, these periods do not strictly succeed one another, any more than the socalled culture ages-of stone, of brass, of iron-but overlap both ways over and over. Thus, if the second period corresponds to a well-defined stage of the Aryas' conquest of India-that of their advance eastward and their establishment in the valleys of the Gangâ and Yamunâ-the third may be said to straggle down actually into modern times, since the monumental commentary on the Rig-Veda,

the Brâhmans' standard authority, was written by SAYANA as late as the fourteenth century of our era.1

1 PÂNINI'S no less monumental grammar, though a much earlier work (4th cent. B.C.), and by its subject belonging to the Vedângas, can hardly be classed under strictly Vedic literature, for the language which he found and dissected with an acumen and thoroughness unrivalled even by Greek grammarians, is not that of the Veda at all, and Vedic forms of speech are studied by him as curious philological relics.

I. WHEN we prepare to investigate one of the world's great religions, and before we enter on an analytical study of details, we naturally incline, in our desire to feel firm ground under our feet, to ask the preliminary question: What is its character? in what category should it be classed? to what division of the spiritual world does it belong? Polytheism? Pantheism? Animism? or what other? When it is the Rig-Veda into which we are about to plunge, we doubly feel the need of some such guiding thread, some anchor to rest upon, for its 1028 hymns, bristling with names and allusions, produce, on a first perusal, a labyrinthine, chaotic, wholly bewildering impression. But alas, a direct, plain answer to such a question is seldom, if ever, possible, and, in the case of the Rig-Veda, perhaps a little less so than in that of any other analogous spiritual document. The growth of a long series of centuries, elaborated in many million busy, subtle brains, containing a great race's spiritual food for as many centuries to come and materials for endless transformations, could not

possibly be so simple and transparent a thing as to admit of a sweeping definition in one word. The study of the Zend-Avesta showed us how many varied elements, and how intricately stratified, go to the making of a great national religion. The same unconscious work of time and influences confronts us in the Veda, but by so much more many-sided and complicated by how much the contemplative, introspective character which the Aryas developed

in India is more involved and self-absorbed than that of their sternly simple, active, and hardy Eranian brethren.

2. Let us, however, attempt to answer the question with which we began the present chapter, just to see how far and deep it will carry us. Even a cursory first study of our text will establish the following points: A great many gods are named and invoked in the Rig-Veda; consequently, the religion it embodies is decidedly POLYTHEISTIC; the spirits of deceased ancestors come in for a large share of honor and worship, so that ANIMISM may be said. to be a conspicuous feature of it; an early tendency to view the deity as pervading the universe, both as a whole and in its minutest parts, animate or inanimate-a view exhaustively expressed in such words as these: "He whose loins the seas are" is also "contained in this drop of water"-early reveals a strong attraction towards PANTHEISM; while many are the passages which explicitly inform us that the various gods are only different names of "that which is One"-more than hinting at a dim, underlying MONOTHEISM. There is no doubt that the purer and

more abstract conceptions could be traced to the later of the many centuries which it took to evolve the Rig-Veda in its final form, if we but had a sure key to its chronology; as it is, we have only, as in the Avesta, the internal evidence that goes so far in the hands of trained criticism, to support and guide our impressions, our conjectures. But one thing appears sure: Vedic religion at no time, until opened to alien and grosser influences, was idolatrous. In this respect the Aryas of India were in no wise behind their brethren of Erân: nature was their temple; they did not invite the deity to dwell in houses of men's building, and if, in their poetical effusions, they described their Devas in human form and with fanciful symbolical attributions, thereby unavoidably falling into anthropomorphism, they do not seem to have transferred it into reproductions more materially tangible than the spoken word-into the eidolon (portraiture,—of limner's, sculptor's, or potter's hand) -which becomes the idol.

3. And if the Rig-Veda may be shown to contain the germs of most of the religions and even philosophical systems which subsequently covered the spiritual soil of India with crops of such bewildering luxuriancy, the main character of this book of books, in nearly half its mantras,-answering, no doubt, to the earlier and main period of their composition and collection,—is simple and easy to define; at this earliest and unalloyed stage, the religion which we see faithfully mirrored in them is NATURALISM, pure and simple, i. e., the worship of the Powers of Nature as Beings, generally beneficent, with only a very