36 
tlie attainment of ignoble or comparatively insignificant objects, 
if they are not guided and hallowed by virtuous principle. True 
self respect, real happiness, the blessing of God, and your everlast- 
ing welfare, all depend on you strictly regulating your lives accord- 
ing to the dictates of conscience and the Divine will.” 
In 1854, having completed his term of service, John Muir 
returned to England, and, after a brief residence in London, he 
settled permanently in Edinburgh. During his last few years in 
India his earlier literary attempts at religious subjects were followed 
up by a Life of the Apostle Paul , and an Examination of Religion, 
both of them in Sanscrit verse, with English (the former treatise 
also with Bengali and Hindi) translations. The deep interest which 
he always took, not only in the moral improvement of the Hindus, 
but in religious and theological matters generally, led him, in later 
years, to offer to the University of Cambridge a prize of £500 for 
the best exposition of the errors of Indian philosophy, and the 
principles of Christianity in a form suitable for learned Hindus ; 
and to the University of Glasgow a prize of £100 for proficiency in 
Hebrew scholarship, open to all Scottish graduates in arts of not 
more than six years’ standing. It also prompted him, some years 
since, to endow, for a period of five years, a lectureship on the 
Comparative Science of Eeligion in the University of Edinburgh. 
Moreover, it induced him to take up the systematic study of the 
religious literature of India, and the writings of modern European 
theologians. The results of many years of unwearied research were 
laid down in a number of papers, mostly contributed to the Journal 
of the Royal Asiatic Society , and ultimately collected in four 
volumes of Original Sanskrit Texts on the Origin and History 
of the People of India , their Religion and Institutions. This 
work, of which a revised and greatly enlarged edition, in five 
volumes, was published in 1868-70, forms by far the most com- 
plete and trustworthy digest of authentic texts bearing on the 
growth of the Brahmanical doctrines and institutions. The amount 
of patient, methodical research with which the various religious 
conceptions of the ancient Hindus are traced by him from their 
first germs through the various phases of development; and the 
impartial spirit with which he reproduces and examines the often 
conflicting views of European scholars on single points of Hindu 
