Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/77

 The Hieratic Religion immediate purpose, or its economic aspect, it is thoroughly utilitarian and practical. Its purpose is to secure happiness and success, health and long life for man, notably the rich man, while living upon the earth; to secure to a very talented and thrifty class of priest-poets abundant rewards in return for their services in procuring for men this happiness, success, and so on; to satisfy the divine powers, visible and invisible, beneficent and noxious, gods and demons, that is, to establish livable relations between gods and men; and, finally, to secure after death the right to share the paradise of the gods in the company of the pious fathers that have gone there before. For a generation or two since the real beginnings of the study of the Veda, say fifty years ago, and endur- ing more faintly to the present day, the imagination of scholars thought it saw in the hymns of the Rig- Veda the earliest spontaneous outbursts of the prim- itive mind, face to face with the phenomena of nature. The poets of the Rig-Veda were supposed to be simple sons of nature. Awe-struck and reverent, they were supposed to be pondering, without ulterior motive of any kind, the meaning of day and night ; of dawn, sun, and moon; of sky, thunder, and light- ning; of atmosphere and wind; of earth and fire. The Rig-Veda was the "Aryan Bible," containing the earliest flashes of the religious thought of awakening 61