ordinary bloom of weird legend,
so the images of the gods, to the eye in their temples, to the mind in
the descriptions of them, take to themselves the most uncouth details
imagined by a curious fancy. This god is an ascetic; he must be
portrayed with the ascetic's hair, the ascetic's wild appearance. He
kills; he must be depicted as a monster, every trait exaggerated,
every conceivable horror detailed. This god sported with the
shepherdesses; he must have love-adventures related in full, and be
worshipped as a darling god of love; and in this worship all must be
pictured in excess, that weaker mortal power may strive to appreciate
the magnitude of the divine in every fine detail.

These traits are those of late Vedism, Brahmanism, and Hinduism. But
how marked is the contrast with the earlier Vedic age! The grotesque
fancy, the love of minutiae, in a word, the extravagance of
imagination and unreason are here absent, or present only in hymns
that contrast vividly with those of the older tone. This older tone is
Aryan, the later is Hindu, and it is another proof of what we have
already emphasized, that the Hinduizing influence was felt in the
later Vedic
or Brahmanic period. There is, indeed, almost as great a gulf between
the Dawn-hymns and the Catapatha as there is between the latter and
the Pur[=a]nas. One may rest assured that the perverted later taste
reproduces the advance of Hindu influence upon the Aryan mind exactly
in proportion to the enormity displayed.

On the other hand, from the point of view of morality, Brahmanic
religion is not in any way individual. The race, whether Aryan or
Hinduistic, had as fragile virtue as have other folks, and shows the
same tentative efforts to become purer as those which characterize
every national advance. There is, perhaps, a little too much formal
insistence on veraciousness, and one is rather inclined to suspect,
despite Muellers brave defence of the Hindu in this regard, that lying
came very naturally to a people whose law-givers were so continuously
harping on the beauty of truth. The vicious caste-system necessarily
scheduled immorality in accordance with the caste order, as certain
crimes in other countries are estimated according to the race of the
sinner rather than according to any abstract standard. In the matter
of precept we know no better moral laws than those promulgated by the
Brahmans, but they are the laws that every people evolves for itself.
Religious i