Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/101

 ( f₁ The Hieratic Religion IIypatia pictures Greek religion when it confronts in final struggle, already in the throes of death, the growing belief of the future, as still the Homeric theology; that is, crude anthropomorphism, dashed with occasional but troubled visions of better things. The real rivals of Christianity in the cen- turies after Christ were Persian forms of religion: Mithraism and Manicheism. Of Mithraism Ernest Renan once said that if the world had not been Christianised it would have been Mithraised; and Manicheism, dualistic, exhaustively Gnostic, with its superb colouring and its appealing asceticism, proved for a time an even more dangerous rival of Christianity. 85 We know from the history of the later classical Sanskrit literature that India's climate and physio- graphy have kept her poets touch with nature to a degree unknown elsewhere, until we come to the modern nature poets. Even so, the transparency of the Vedic Pantheon as a whole remains surprising. This results in what we may call arrested personifi- cation, or arrested anthropomorphism, and this is the very genius of Vedic religion, and more especially of the religion of the Rig Veda. Nothing so much as this has enabled the early Hindu thinkers to think out anew, a second and a third time, what had been apparently settled to everybody's final satisfaction,