Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/91

 The Hieratic Religion acknowledge that never has sacrifice had such genuine poetry to serve it. But the reverse of the coin is, that never has poetic endowment strayed so far from wholesome theme as to fritter itself away upon the ancient hocus-pocus of the fire-priest and medicine-man. Of course, what finally saves this poetry from banality is the presence in it of those same luminous gods whose brilliance is obscured but not extinguished by such childish treatment. We are now better prepared to bear up under the statement that Vedic religion is from the very first moment practical and utilitarian, and that the Vedic people, to begin with, practise their religion for what there is in it. The Rig-Veda with its worship of the great nature-gods represents from the start a' form of worship very similar, though apparently neither as extensive nor as formal and rigid as the later technical ritual of the Yajur-Vedas and the Brahmanas. The poetry of the Rig-Veda is in the main also really dull and mechanical, but we have seen that, in good part, it is leavened by true beauty of conception, fineness of observation, and all the circumstances of literary composition which we of modern times are accustomed to see at work with its eyes shut-or half shut-to practical considera- tions. We must not be misled by these mental defects of the Vedic poets into an exaggeratedly 75