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G. S. Leonard— The Mythic History of the God Virdj. [No. 2, 
curiosity concerning him with a hare description of his nature and attri¬ 
butes, according to the import of the word and its definition given in the 
S'astras, with an exposition of the system of religion which is promulgated 
under that name in the Puranas and the Vedanta, together with its analogies 
in other Asiatic and European systems. 
Viraj, as the word signifies (virajati = regit from the root £ rajri’ = 
regere ) means the ever-reigning ruler or sovereign of the universe, be he 
whoever he may, whose entity is composed of three natures : viz. the intel¬ 
lectual or chaitanya , the spiritual or Yaisvanara, and a concrete gross 
nature, sthiila sarira , which respectively constitute his omniscience, omni¬ 
potence, and omnipresence throughout the utmost bounds of existence. He 
is also considered as Visva constituting the individual souls of the Visve- 
devas or different orders of gods or supernatural beings which subsist in 
him, and is sometimes represented as Maha = magnus or Kshudra = parvus 
in the relation of father and son, as he fills a greater or lesser sphere, the 
whole universe or a part, and both of the same nature and jn’operties. 
Such being the import of the word according to its definition, Viraj 
proves to be the lord of the universe coeval with its creation, but whose 
essence, instead of dying away with the dissolution of the material world, 
as the Pantheist says, will continue for ever with the entity of its divine 
origin to all eternity. He proves also, from the joint testimony of the 
S'astras given in the following pages, to be the automaton or moving princi¬ 
ple of the visible world, whose body, as the poet figuratively expresses it, 
“ is nature, and whose soul is god.” He may be called both great and 
small, agreeably to our conception of him presented to our enlarged or 
limited faculties ; and as infinity is beyond the conception of a finite being, 
we, for the sake of meditating on his nature, can assign to him a greater or 
a lesser magnitude of a whole or part, according to the powers of our 
understandings, for he is “ as great in the earth as in the ethereal frame.” 
The form of Mahavirat is no more than the macrocosm of European philo¬ 
sophers, which comprehends the whole of the visible world, and the Kshudra- 
virat agrees exactly with the microcosm of metaphysicians, which Dr. Reid, 
like the Vedantists, applies to Man or Manu who is an aggregate of the 
intellectual and physical natures of Viraj. The obvious manifestation of 
the deity in the face of nature, though of itself evident to the meanest 
understanding from every object of creation by which on all sides we are 
beset, is yet so mystified by the reveries of theologians, and the rhapsodies 
of philosophers on the one hand, and so diversified by the discordant de¬ 
scriptions of poets and obscured by the conflicting accounts of mythologists 
on the other, that this confused chaos of abstract mysticism of the Vedanta, 
and the contradictory myths of the Puranas would well nigh destroy each 
other, and leave a void in the belief of the Virajian religion, as it has 
