wise dispensing healing
balms and medicines to those that win his favour. The Rigvedic priests
as yet do not take much interest in him, and for the most part they
leave him to their somewhat despised kinsmen the Atharvans, who do a
thriving trade in hymns and spells to secure the common folk against
his wrath.

There are many more gods, godlings, and spirits in the Vedic religion;
but we must pass over them. We have seen enough, I hope, to give us a
fair idea of the nature and value of that religion in general. What
then is its value?

The Rigveda is essentially a priestly book; but it is not entirely a
priestly book. Much of the thought to which it gives utterance is
popular in origin and sentiment, and is by no means of the lowest
order. On this groundwork the priests have built up a system of
hieratic thought and ritual of their own, in which there is much that
deserves a certain respect. There is a good deal of fine poetry in
it. There is also in it some idea of a law of righteousness: in spite
of much wild and unmoral myth and fancy, its gods for the most part
are not capricious demons but spirits who act in accordance with
established laws, majestic and wise beings in whom are embodied the
highest ideals to which men have risen as yet. Moreover, the priests
in the later books have given us some mystic hymns containing vigorous
and pregnant speculations on the deepest questions of existence,
speculations which are indeed fanciful and unscientific, but which
nevertheless have in them the germs of the powerful idealism that is
destined to arise in centuries to come. On the other hand, the priests
have cast their system in the mould of ritualism. Ritual, ceremony,
sacrifice, professional benefit--these are their predominant
interests. The priestly ceremonies are conceived to possess a magical
power of their own; and the fixed laws of ritual by which these
ceremonies are regulated tend to eclipse, and finally even to swallow
up, the laws of moral righteousness under which the gods live. A few
generations more, and the priesthood will frankly announce its ritual
to be the supreme law of the universe. Meanwhile they are becoming
more and more indifferent to the personalities of the gods, when they
have preserved any; they are quite ready to ascribe attributes of one
deity to another, even attributes of nominal supremacy, with
unscrupulous inconsistency and dubious sincerity; for the
personalities of the different gods