ns wear a symbolical tessera of three threads is
acknowledged on all hands; but, from whatever the custom arose, it is
not to be supposed that the Brahmins, who have thousands of ridiculous
contradictory legends, should agree in their accounts or explanations of
it. They have various accounts of a Divine Person having assumed human
nature. And the god Brahma, as observed by Cudworth, is generally
mentioned as united in the government of the universe with two others,
sometimes of different names. They have also images with three heads
rising out of one body, which they say represent the Divine Nature.{*}
But are there any traces of these opinions in the accounts which the
Greek and Roman writers have given us of the Brahmins? And will the wise
pay any credit to the authority of those books which the public never
saw, and which, by the obligation of their keepers, they are never to
see; and some of which, by the confession of their keepers, since the
appearance of Mohammed, have been rejected? The Platonic idea of a
trinity of divine attributes was well known to the ancients, yet perhaps
the Athanasian controversy offers a fairer field to the conjecturist.
That controversy for several ages engrossed the conversation of the
East. All the subtilty of the Greeks was called forth, and no
speculative contest was ever more universally or warmly disputed; so
warmly, that it is a certain fact that Mohammed, by inserting into his
Koran some declarations in favour of the Arians, gained innumerable
proselytes to his new religion. Abyssinia, Egypt, Syria, Persia, and
Armenia were perplexed with this unhappy dispute, and from the earliest
times these countries have had a commercial intercourse with India. The
number, blasphemy, and absurdity of the Jewish legends of the Talmud and
Targums, bear a striking resemblance to the holy legends of the
Brahmins. The Jews also assert the great antiquity of their Talmudical
legends. Adam, Enoch, and Noah are named among their authors; but we
know their date; Jerusalem, ere their birth, was destroyed by Titus. We
also know, that the accounts which the Greek writers give of the
Brahmins fall infinitely short of those extravagances which are
confessed even by their modern admirers. And Mohammedanism does not
differ from Christianity, more than the account which even these
gentlemen give, does from that of Porphyry. That laborious philosopher,
though possessed of all the knowledge of his age, though h