shocking idolatry of Canaan than Moses himself? Yet the learning of those great men only incited them to seek other sources of truth, piety, and virtue, than those in which they had long been immersed. There is no shadow then of a foundation for an opinion, that Moses borrowed the first nine or ten chapters of Genesis from the literature of Egypt; still less can the adamantine pillars of our Christian faith be moved by the result of any debates on the comparative antiquity of the Hindus and Egyptians, or of any inquiries into the Indian Theology.

Very respectable natives have assured me, that one or two missionaries have been absurd enough, in their zeal for the conversion of the Gentiles, to urge, "that the Hindus were even now almost Christians, because their Brahmá, Vishnu, and Mahésa, were no other than the Christian Trinity;" a sentence in which we can only doubt whether folly, ignorance, or impiety predominates. The three powers, creative, preservative, and destructive, which the Hindus express by the triliteral word O'm, were grossly ascribed by the first idolaters to the heat, light, and flame of their mistaken divinity the Sun; and their wiser successors in the East, who perceived that the Sun was only a created thing, applied those powers to its creator; but the Indian Triad, and that of Plate, which he calls the Supreme Good, the Reason, and the Soul, are infinitely removed from the holiness and sublimity of the doctrine which pious Christians have deduced from texts in the Gospel; though other Christians, as pious, openly profess their dissent from them. Each sect must be justified by its own faith and good intentions. This only I mean to inculcate, that the tenet of our Church cannot,

without profaneness, be compared with that of the Hindus, which has only an apparent resemblance to it, but a very different meaning.

One singular fact, however, must not be suffered to pass unnoticed. That the name of Crishna, and the general outline of his story, were long anterior to the birth of our Saviour, and probably to the time of Homer, we know very certainly; yet the celebrated poem entitled Bhágavat, which contains a prolix account of his life, is filled with narratives of a most extraordinary kind, but strangely variegated and intermixed with poetical decorations. The incarnate Deity of the Sanscrit romance was cradled, as it informs us, among herdsmen; but it adds, that he was educated among them, and passed his youth in playing with a party of milkmaids. A tyrant at the time of his birth ordered all new born males to be slain; yet this wonderful babe was preserved by biting the breast, instead of sucking the poisoned nipple, of a nurse commissioned to kill him. He performed amazing but ridiculous miracles in his infancy; and, at the age of seven years, held up a mountain on the tip of his little finger. He saved multitudes, partly by his arms, and partly by his miraculous powers. He raised the dead, by descending for that purpose to the lowest regions. He was the meekest and best tempered of beings, washed the feet of the Brahmans, and preached very nobly indeed, and sublimely, but always in their favour. He was pure and chaste in reality, but exhibited an appearance of excessive libertinism, and had wives or mistresses too numerous to be counted. Lastly, he was benevolent and tender, yet fomented and conducted a terrible war. This motley story

must induce an opinion, that the spurious Gospels, which abounded in the first age of Christianity, had been brought to India, and the wildest parts of them repeated to the Hindus, who ingrafted them on the old fable of Césava, the Apollo of Greece.

As to the general extension of our pure faith in Hindustán, there are at present many sad obstacles to it. The Muselmans are already a sort of heterodox Christians. They are Christians, if Locke reasons justly, because they firmly believe the immaculate conception, divine character, and miracles, of the Messiah; but they are heterodox, in denying vehemently his character of Son, and his equality, as God, with the Father, of whose unity and attributes they entertain and express the most awful ideas; while they consider our doctrine as perfect blasphemy, and insist, that our copies of the Scriptures have been corrupted both by Jews and Christians. It will be inexpressibly difficult to undeceive them, and scarce possible to diminish their veneration for Mohammed and Ali, who were both very extraordinary men, and the second a man of unexceptionable morals. The Koran shines indeed, with a borrowed light, since most of its beauties are taken from our Scriptures; but it has great beauties, and the Muselmans will not be convinced that they were borrowed. The Hindus, on the other hand, would readily admit the truth of the Gospel; but they contend, that it is perfectly consistent with their Sástras. The Deity, they say, has appeared innumerable times, in many parts of this world, and of all worlds, for the salvation of his creatures; and though we adore him in one appearance, and they in others, yet we adore, they say, the same God, to whom our several wor

ships, though different in form, are equally acceptable, if they be sincere in substance. We may assure ourselves, that neither Muselmáns nor Hindus will ever be converted by any mission from the Church of Rome, or from any other Church; and the only human mode, perhaps, of causing so great a revolulution will be to translate into Sanscrit and Persian such chapters of the Prophets, particularly of Isaiah, as are indisputably evangelical, together with one of the Gospels; and a plain prefatory discourse, containing full evidence of the very distant ages, in which the predictions themselves, and the history of the Divine Person predicted, were severally made public; and then quietly to disperse the work among the well educated natives; with whom, if in due time it failed of producing very salutary fruit by its natural influence, we could only lament more than ever the strength of prejudice, and the weakness of unassisted reason.

ON

The Mystical Poetry

OF THE

PERSIANS AND HINDUS.

BY SIR WILLIAM JONES.

131

A FIGURATIVE mode of expressing the fervour of devotion, or the ardent love of created spirits toward their Beneficent Creator, has prevailed from time immemorial in Asia; particularly among the Persian theists, both ancient Húshangis and modern Súfis, who seem to have borrowed it from the Indian philosophers of the Védánta school; and their doctrines are also believed to be the source of that sublime but poetical theology, which glows and sparkles in the writings of the old Academics. "Plato traveled into Italy and Egypt," says Claude Fleury, "to learn the theology of the Pagans at its fountain head:" its true fountain, however, was neither in Italy nor in Egypt (though considerable streams of it had been conducted thither by Pythagoras, and by the family of Misra), but in Persia or