es
reside, where the desires of our heart are attained, there make me
immortal."

[Footnote 3: Rawlinson, p. 121.]
[Footnote 4: Wilson: Rig-Veda, vol. iii. p. 170.]
[Footnote 5: Mueller: Chips from a German Workshop, vol. i. p. 46.]

In the oldest Vedic poems there were great simplicity and joyousness,
without allusion to those rites, ceremonies, and sacrifices which formed
so prominent a part of the religion of India at a later period.

Four hundred years after the Rig-Veda was composed we come to the
Brahmanic age, when the laws of Menu were written, when the Aryans were
living in the valley of the Ganges, and the caste system had become
national. The supreme deity is no longer one of the powers of Nature,
like Mitra or Indra, but according to Menu he is Brahm, or Brahma,--"an
eternal, unchangeable, absolute being, the soul of all beings, who,
having willed to produce various beings from his own divine substance,
created the waters and placed in them a productive seed. The seed became
an egg, and in that egg he was born, but sat inactive for a year, when
he caused the egg to divide itself; and from its two divisions he framed
the heaven above, and the earth beneath. From the supreme soul Brahma
drew forth mind, existing substantially, though unperceived by the
senses; and before mind, the reasoning power, he produced consciousness,
the internal monitor; and before them both he produced the great
principle of the soul.... The soul is, in its substance, from Brahma
himself, and is destined finally to be resolved into him. The soul,
then, is simply an emanation from Brahma; but it will not return unto
him at death necessarily, but must migrate from body to body, until it
is purified by profound abstraction and emancipated from all desires."

This is the substance of the Hindu pantheism as taught by the laws of
Menu. It accepts God, but without personality or interference with the
world's affairs,--not a God to be loved, scarcely to be feared, but a
mere abstraction of the mind.

The theology which is thus taught in the Brahmanical Vedas, it would
seem, is the result of lofty questionings and profound meditation on the
part of the Indian sages or priests, rather than the creation of poets.

In the laws of Menu, intended to exalt the Brahmanical caste, we read,
as translated by Sir William Jones:--

"To a man contaminated by sensuality, neither the Vedas, nor liberality,
nor sacrifices, nor strict observances, nor