he lower religion of the tribes the Aryans had conquered. It
was from the Dravidian and Kolarian aborigines, we are told, that
Indian religion took its later corruptions. The Vedic religion has no
idols, it has no dark descriptions of hell, the caste system on which
later Brahmanism was based is absent from it, it has no demons to be
guarded against, and no bad deities. The doctrine of metempsychosis
is not found here, except perhaps in germ. The immolation of the
widow on the funeral pile of her husband is not sanctioned by the
Vedas, and of ancestor-worship only a few traces are found. All
these, it may be held, are later corruptions. The Vedic religion is a
bright and happy system, and the primitive beliefs of mankind, less
changed by the Indians than they were elsewhere, are here to be seen;
the hymns show the kind of faith to which a strong and happy race of
men naturally came, as their minds began to open to the wonders of
the world they lived in, the faith of "primitive shepherds praising
their gods as they lead their flocks to the pasture." The Indians had
preserved, longer than other peoples, the gift of recognising deity
in nature; and the primitive beliefs of mankind survive here in
something like their first integrity, while elsewhere they were
broken up and confused.

[Footnote 1: _Origin of Religion_, p. 135.]

[Footnote 2: _Sanscrit Texts_, vol. v. p. 4.]

[Footnote 3: According to Mr. Max Mueller the Mantra or hymn period is
to be placed 1000-800 B.C.; but other scholars place it earlier.]

2. It is Advanced.--On the other hand, it is urged that the society
in which the hymns arose was not a primitive one, but one
considerably advanced both in arts and institutions. The Rishis
(seers), who composed them, belonged to families who cultivated such
an art; and the hymns were no artless outpourings of childlike
emotion, but were written on an elaborate metrical system for a
definite purpose, namely, to form part of great acts of worship. As
for the absence from them of savage myths and of immoral stories of
the gods, this fact does not prove that such things were not known to
the people at the time, but only that the poets did not put them in
their hymns. Mr. Lang has collected the savage myths, similar to
those of other peoples in various parts of the world, which are found
in Indian literature of a later date, and has also shown that the
hymns themselves were not quite ignorant of some of them. The Indi