s not the son of a Brahman. When
religious ritual became more important, as apparently it did, a desire
would naturally arise among the priests to make their revered and
lucrative profession a hereditary monopoly; and this they were easily
and naturally able to do by only teaching the sacred songs and the
sacrificial rules and procedure to their own descendants. The process
indeed would be to a considerable extent automatic, because the priests
would always take their own sons for their pupils in the first place,
and in the circumstances of early Indian society a married priesthood
would thus naturally evolve into a hereditary caste. The Levites
among the Jews and the priests of the Parsis formed similar hereditary
orders, and the reason why they did not arise in other great religions
would appear to have been the prescription or encouragement of the
rule of celibacy for the clergy and the foundation of monasteries,
to which admission was free. But the military landed aristocracies
of Europe practically formed hereditary castes which were analogous
to the Brahman and Rajput castes, though of a less stereotyped and
primitive character. The rise of the Brahman caste was thus perhaps
a comparatively simple and natural product of religious and social
evolution, and might have occurred independently of the development
of the caste system as a whole. The former might be accounted for by
reasons which would be inadequate to explain the latter, even though
as a matter of fact the same factors were at work in both cases.

2. Their monopoly of literature.

The hereditary monopoly of the sacred scriptures would be strengthened
and made absolute when the Sanskrit language, in which they had been
composed and handed down, ceased to be the ordinary spoken language
of the people. Nobody then could learn them unless he was taught by
a Brahman priest. And by keeping the sacred literature in an unknown
language the priesthood made their own position absolutely secure and
got into their own hands the allocation of the penalties and rewards
promised by religion, for which these books were the authority, that
is to say, the disposal of the souls of Hindus in the afterlife. They,
in fact, held the keys of heaven and hell. The jealousy with which they
guarded them is well shown by the Abbe Dubois: [400] "To the Brahmans
alone belongs the right of reading the Vedas, and they are so jealous
of this, or rather it is so much to their inter