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fancy. This god is an ascetic; he must be portrayed with the ascetic's hair, the ascetic's wild appearance. He kills; he must be depicted as a monster, every trait exaggerated, every conceivable horror detailed. This god sported with the shepherdesses; he must have love-adventures related in full, and be worshipped as a darling god of love; and in this worship all must be pictured in excess, that weaker mortal power may strive to appreciate the magnitude of the divine in every fine detail.
These traits are those of late Vedism, Brahmanism, and Hinduism. But how marked is the contrast with the earlier Vedic age! The grotesque fancy, the love of minutiae, in a word, the extravagance of imagination and unreason are here absent, or present only in hymns that contrast vividly with those of the older tone. This older tone is Aryan, the later is Hindu, and it is another proof of what we have already emphasized, that the Hinduizing influence was felt in the later Vedic or Brahmanic period. There is, indeed, almost as great a gulf between the Dawn-hymns and the Çatapatha as there is between the latter and the Pur[ra]nas. One may rest assured that the perverted later taste reproduces the advance of Hindu influence upon the Aryan mind exactly in proportion to the enormity displayed.
On the other hand, from the point of view of morality, Brahmanic religion is not in any way individual. The race, whether Aryan or Hinduistic, had as fragile virtue as have other folks, and shows the same tentative efforts to become purer as those which characterize every national advance. There is, perhaps, a little too much formal insistence on veraciousness, and one is rather inclined to suspect, despite Müllers brave defence of the Hindu in this regard, that lying came very naturally to a people whose law-givers were so continuously harping on the beauty of truth. The vicious caste-system necessarily scheduled immorality in accordance with the caste order, as certain crimes in other countries are estimated according to the race of the sinner rather than according to any abstract standard. In the matter of precept we know no better moral laws than those promulgated by the Brahmans, but they are the laws that every people evolves for itself. Religious immorality, the excess of Çakti worship, is also not peculiar to the Hindu. If one ask how the morality of India as a whole compares with that
