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LECTURE I.
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are not given in the original, but only in a very poetical French translation, no Sanskrit scholar would hesitate for one moment to say that they are forgeries, and that M. Jacolliot, the President of the Court of Justice at Chandernagore, has been deceived by his native teacher. We find many childish and foolish things in the Veda, but when we read the following line, as an extract from the Veda :
La femme c'est l'âme de l'humanité, — it is not difficult to see that this is the folly of the nineteenth century, and not of the childhood of the human race. M. Jacolliot's conclusions and theories are such as might be expected from his materials?.
With all the genuine documents for studying the history of the religions of mankind that have lately been brought to light, and with the great facilities which a more extensive study of Oriental languages has afforded to scholars at large for investigating the deepest springs of religious thought all over the world, a comparative study of religions has become a necessity. If we were to shrink from it, other nations and other creeds would take up the work. A lecture was lately delivered at Calcutta, by the minister of the Âdi-Samâj (i.e. the Old Church), 'On the Superiority of Hinduism to every other existing Religion. The lecturer held that Hinduism was superior to all other religions, because it owed its name to no man; because it acknowledged no mediator between God and man; because the Hindu worships God, in the intensely devotional sense, as the soul of the soul; because the Hindu alone can
See Selected Essays, vol. ii., p. 468 sq.
