233 
May he dwell a life 
Eternal, holy, 
In the presence 
Of the gods,” &c.* 
On this subject of ancestral worship in India, Professor 
Max Miller has written at length and with great care and 
learning ; but it is remarkable that he says, after all, “ When 
we ask the simple question, What was the thought from 
whence all this outward ceremonial (i.e., the performance of 
endless rites, all intended to honour the departed) sprang, 
and what was the natural craving of the human heart which 
it seemed to satisfy? we hardly get an intelligible answer 
anywhere.” + , He speaks, indeed, of the “human impulse” 
to the daily ancestral sacrifice as being “‘ clear enough,”’ since 
it was “connected with the daily meal;’’?{ but why should 
the daily meal naturally suggest sacrifices to the Pitris or 
ancestors? It is difficult to find the impulse in anything 
human, and thought seems to reduce the “clearness” to 
opacity. On sacrifices, as connected with the daily meal, I 
shall have a word to say afterwards. Max Miiller also says, 
with regard to the monthly ancestral sacrifice, that “it was at 
such moments as the waning of the moon that his thoughts 
would most naturally turn to those whose life had waned, 
whose bright faces were no longer visible on earth, his fathers 
or ancestors.”§ But are we really “naturally ’’? reminded of 
our ancestors by the waning, or reappearing, moon, any more 
than by a thousand other things that happen? Are not 
people ‘‘ naturally ” prone to bury their ancestors out of sight 
and out of mind? Is not the real explanation of these an- 
cestral sacrifices very different, and, in fact, the very converse 
of that so industriously, and often eloquently, urged upon us ? 
Is it not that the primitive men began their religion with the 
full doctrine of the immortality of the soul? and that the 
departed ‘‘ went to the light’? and presence of the Hternal ? 
that, in short, they began their religion in the full blaze of 
what is now the brightest hope of the Christian, the “ inheri- 
tance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away ?” 
The declension from the use of sacrifice, as a worship originally 
before the Deity alone, to a worship of ancestors, until in 
some cases the ancestral worship alone remained, is so much 
in accordance with what we know of human nature, that we 
have the exact parallel in the history of Christianity itself 
within absolutely historic observable periods. 
* Records of the Past, vol. iii. p. 131, &e. + India, p. 228. 
t Ibid., p. 230. § Ihid., p. 231. 
