RELIGION OF THE BRAHMINS. 
63 
changes and fluctuations that take place in the 
world.”* 
So far as appears from the writings of the most emi- 
nent among their sages, the religion of the Brahmins 
has always been decidedly pantheistic. Pantheism, 
no doubt, prevails in the modern creeds of a large 
portion of the Hindoo population, of which the im- 
mense multitude of their deities, amounting to the 
prodigious number of three hundred and thirty mil- 
lions, is of itself a sufficient attestation. In fact, 
everything in nature is deified. They confound God 
and the universe, and their notion of the final consum- 
mation with respect to man is absorption into the di- 
vinity. One would imagine that Spinoza had taken 
from their abstract theology the pernicious dogmas 
which he propagated to a generation hungry and raven- 
ous after novelty in religion. The asceticism of many 
Hindoo visionaries has led them to contemplate God 
as a mere abstraction, passing their lives in those 
dreamy contemplations which absorb every perceptive 
faculty of the mind, and render them the dupes of 
their own prurient phantasies, placing the ultimate 
happiness of man in mere uninterrupted quietism. 
The doctrines of many of their philosophers, who un- 
questionably had precedence of the Grecian sages in 
point of time, were in a high degree metaphysical and 
abstruse. Some of them taught that the deity was 
identical with what they called nature — the universal 
plenum, in which everything inert, passive, or ani- 
* See Ward on the History, Literature, and Mythology of 
the Hindoos, vol. ii. pp. 261-2. 
