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154
MYTHOLOGY
Surya, Indra and Agni with the sun, ciouds and fire and read the Old Testament and the New Testament compilations historically; and the learned of our day have banded themselves together into a sort of mutual admiration society wliose members are ever ready to ascertain to whom the credit of their diverse discoveries belongs and to proclaim it in a spirit of commendable self-less impartiality.
If I have to criticise even a tenth parth of what these learned explorers of the Bibles of the world have written or said on the subject, it would require at least a volume of about a thousand pages. It is not that they are insincere, or uneducated; some of them are really men who have not their equal in respect of learning in this age. But unfortunately they are all, each and every one of them without a single exception, suffering from mental myopia of which they are altogether ignorant. This mental short-sightedness is furtner aggravated by their lavish praises of each other's insight and breadth of view, already binted at.
If the learned professor who identified Agni with fire or the eloquent Arya-Samajist who took it to represent the culinary art had taken the trouble to note its strange characteristics, he would have surely found much that would have jarred in the most unwholesome manner upon his self-complacent nerves. He would have found that the ancient Rishis described this strangest of gods as
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