~ 
197 
sects which have arisen within the bosom of Hinduism, some 
of them with very noble principles, but none with such a 
moral antiseptic power as could preserve them from the 
grossest and most absurd corruptions. The character of an 
Indian sect must never be judged of from a few quotations 
from the writings or traditional sayings of its founder. 
15. Hinduism itself has had a similar history. The religion of 
the Hindus of the present day is far inferior to the religion that 
appears in the Vedas, with which, indeed, it has very little in 
common, although it must be presumed to be its lineal de- 
scendant. The Vedas, again, show a deterioration in the more 
modern portions aS compared with the more ancient. We 
may not, perhaps, be able fully to accept Canon Cook’s idea, 
that the most ancient hymns of the Rig Veda contain indications 
of a primeval Monotheism which was only passing, not passed, 
away when they were first chanted by the Rishis.* Yet 
Protessor Monier Williams also states that there are to be 
found plain proofs that Dyans, the God of the Bright Sky, had 
been originally worshipped as the Great Supreme.t But lower 
deities, and lower still successively, usurp the worship of the 
people, and, spite of the ever-recurring tendency to Henothe- 
ism, objects of worship are multiplied beyond all numbering. 
The mode, too, of worship becomes more and more debased, 
till at the present day the commonest emblem of Shiva—the 
object of the most widespread, if not the deepest reverence— 
is a thing which cannot be explained to ears polite. 
16. Not that all Hindus are grovelling idolaters. Many 
of them are proud and self-satisfied philosophers—Pantheists 
of the purest water. It is rather startling, on opening a con- 
versation on religion with a village Brahman, to receive, as I 
have done, a reply like this :—‘“‘ Oh yes,—God is everywhere, 
of course,—you are God, I am God, that cow is God.” The 
practical outcome of notions like these, when thoroughly 
accepted, is a state in respect of religion hardly higher than 
that of the lowest fetish worshipper. If there is more intel- 
ligence, there is less reverence, or rather none. ‘The dis- 
tortion of the intellect has killed all real worship, and all real 
thought of God as well. The fact is that under the surface 
of most religions that are conjoined with any degree of culture 
there may generally be detected these two currents—the 
material and the philosophical. Both tend to deterioration, 
neither is likely to evolve anything higher. The intellectual 
proletariat sinks into spiritual barbarism, the intellectual aris- 
* Essays on Religion and Language. + Indian Thought, p. 11. 
