rs. The householders, or such of them as the epic
unfortunately is busied with, the royal priests, seem to be those that
are in reality priests only in name. In the king's palace, his
constant advisors, his most unscrupulous upholders in wickedness, they
gave themselves up to quest of wealth and power. But one would err if
he thus dismissed them all. There were others that had no preferment,
who lived in quiet content in their own houses, and deserved none of
the opprobrium rightly bestowed upon their hypocritical brothers. The
hermits, too, appear to have been a mild and inoffensive race, not
presuming too much on their caste-privileges.

To offset rapaciousness there are tomes of morality of the purest
sort. Even in the later additions to the epic one reads: "Away with
gifts; receiving gifts is sinful. The silkworm dies of its wealth"
(xii. 330. 29). One should compare, again, the exalted verse
(Buddhistic in tone) of _ib_. 321. 47: "The red garment, the vow of
silence, the three-fold staff, the water-pot--these only lead astray;
they do not make for salvation." There were doubtless good and bad
priests, but the peculiarity of the epic priest, rapacious and
lustful, is that he glories in his sins.

The chief objects of worship (except for the influence of the
sectarian religions) were priests, Manes, and, for form's sake, the
Vedic gods. These gods, with the addition of the Hindu Plutus (Kubera,
the god of riches), are now called the eight 'world-guardians,' viz.,
Indra, Yama, Varuna, Kubera, Agni, S[=u]rya, V[=a]yu, Soma, and are
usually simple and shadowy subordinates of the greater new gods.

In the shifting of religious opinion and in the development of
theological conceptions what difference can be traced between the same
gods as worshipped in the Veda and as worshipped in the epic? Although
the Vedic divinities have been twice superseded, once by the
Father-god and again by the _[=a]tm[=a]_, Lord, they still remain
adorable and adored, active in many ways, though passive before the
great All-god. It is, indeed, extremely difficult, owing to the
superstruction of sectarian belief, to get down to the
foundation-religion of the epic. The best one can do is to see in what
way the old gods differ, as represented in the poem, from their older
selves of the Rig Veda. From this point of view alone, and entirely
irrespective of the sects, manifold changes will be seen to have taken
place. Great Soma is no more. Soma i