6 EVOLUTION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY. 



maintain their own supremacy. The incarna- 

 tions of Vishnu are well-known instances ; but 

 perhaps the most striking illustration of the 

 powerlessness of the Indian gods is contained 

 in the wild legend of the Sacrifice of Serpents, 

 in the first book of the Maha-Bharata, where 

 we find Indra, the so-called " king of the gods," 

 forced to flee for his life from the presence of a 

 human king and his Brahmins, and to abandon 

 to their vengeance a suppliant whom he had 

 sworn to protect.* 



Were it necessary to pursue the subject 

 further, it would be easy to multiply instances 

 from every mythology to illustrate the finite 

 nature of the deities of uncivilised nations, and 

 it is clearly not accidental, but a special 

 arrangement essential to human progress, that 

 all finite religions thus contain the elements of 

 their own destruction, and are therefore certain 

 to be cast off one by one as civilisation and 

 intelligence advance, to be replaced by faiths 



* Adi-Parva, verses 21212128. As this remarkable myth is little 

 known in England, an abstract is given in note A at the end of this 

 chapter, extracted from the French translation of the Maha-Bharata, 

 in which it is related at great length. Another, by E. Arnold, will 

 be found in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Great Britain and 

 Ireland, n.s. vol. 14, pp. 259 & 260 (1882). 



