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THE PRACTICAL PATH.
as in obeying the voice of the Lord ? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams."is a strong condemnation of a practice in vogue. The attempt to spiritualise the text became clearly marked when it was said :
“I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he-goats out of thy folds...... If I were hungry I would not tell thee......will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats ? Offer unto God thanks. giving; and pay thy vows unto the most high."-(Ps. L. 9-15).
Jeremiah further develops the idea, and makes the Lord say :--
“ ............I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them ......concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices : but this thing commanded I them, saying, obey my voice.........and walk ye in all the ways that I have commanded you, that it may be well unto you."--Jeremiah, vii, 21-23.
These passages furnish too close a resemblance to the vicissitudes of Hindu faith to be a mere co-incidence, and betray the hand of the same agency whom Deussen encountered in the Brihad-Araṇyakam The System of the Vedanta, p. 8) engaged in spiritualising the sacrificial cult. The practice, however, continues to this day.
Hinduism now finds itself face to face with its own progeny, brought up and reared in a foreign land, defying its authority, and also finds its own scripture furnishing its adversaries with arguments in support of the now heartily abhorred go-medha. In recent years, Swâmi Dayâ nanda Sarasvati, a talented grammarian, and the founder of the Arya Samâja, tried to tide over the difficulty by boldly denying that the Vedas had anything to do with animal sacrifice and by challenging, in a wholesale manner, their current translations by European scholars; but an attempt of this kind
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