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PREFACE.
TN recent years there has been an enormous amount of
I study of the religions of India and the allied people of ancient Bactria and Persia; and we may now form definite opinions as to many questions which in previous ages were not understood. There can be little doubt of the great antiquity of the religious ideas represented by the Vedas, extending probably to a thousand years before Christ. We see in them that the early belief in numerous spirits superintending departments of nature had become crystallised into poetry of a high order in the hands of a series of religious poets; and we realise too the common origin of numerous ideas about religion and the gods which both the early Aryan Hindus and the Greeks had. We find in them a worship of the Powers of Nature personified, which was in many ways of an elevating nature. Ideas of immortality and a future life are by no means absent. Later on, we find expressions pointing to the existence of ancestor worship and the tendency to deification of departed heroes.
In still later times the remarkable attainments of many Hindus, both in philosophy and in legislation, were displayed in such books as the Brahmanas, the Upanishads, and the laws of Manu; and by this time the Brahmans had made themselves of vital importance as a religious caste, without whom the Hindus could not attain or keep ceremonial and religious purity. Henceforward the Hindu system presents a remarkable combination of
