special
training to carry out. Here, then, was an opening in life for
men of the right temperament;--so a class arose, of _priests:_
among whom many might be real Initiates and disciples of the
Adept-Kings. They had the business of taking care of the
literature sanctioned for use at the sacrifices,--for convenience
we may call all the sacred ceremonies that,--at which they
performed the ritual and carried out the mechanical and formal
parts. It is very easy to imagine how, as the cycles went on and
down, and the Adept-Kings ceased to incarnate continuously, these
religious officials would have crystallized themselves into a
close corporation, an hereditary caste; and what power their
custodianship of the sacrificial literature would have given
them;--how that literature would have come to be not merely
sacred in the sense that all true poetry with the inspiration of
the Soul behind it really is;--but credited with an extra-human
sanction. But it would take a long time. When modern creeds are
gone, to what in literature will men turn for their inspiration?
--To whatever in literature contains real inspiration, you may
answer. They will not sing Dr. Watts's doggerel in their
churches; but such things perhaps as Wordsworth's _The World is
too much with us,_ or Henley's _I am the Captain of my Soul._
And then, after a long time and many racial pralayas, you can
imagine such poems as these coming to be thought of as not merely
from the Human Soul, an ever-present source of real inspiration,
--but as revelations by God himself, from which not one jot or
tittle should be taken without blasphemy; given by God when he
founded his one true religion to mankind. We lose sight of the
spirit, and exalt the substance; then we forget the substance,
and deify the shadow. We crucify our Saviors when they are with
us; and when they are gone, we crucify them worse with our
unmeaning worship and dogmas made on them.

Well, the age of the Vedas passed, and pralayas came, and new
manvantaras; and we come at last to the age of Classical
Sanskrit; and first to the period of the Epics. This too is a
Kshattriya age. Whether it represents a new ascendency of the
Kshattriyas, or simply a continuance of the old one: whether the
priesthood had risen to power between the Vedas and this, and
somewhat fallen from it again,--or whether their rise was still
in progress, but not advanced to the point of ousting the kings
from their lead,--w