Page:The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Volume 01.djvu/15



speaking of the Sacred Books of the East, that great American sage and teacher, Emerson, called them that "class of books which are the best: I mean the Bibles of the world, or the sacred books of each nation, which express for each the supreme result of their experience. . . . All these books are the majestic expression of the universal conscience. They are for the closet, and to be read on the bended knee. Their communications are not to be given or taken with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart. Friendship should give and take, solitude and time brood and ripen, heroes absorb and enact them. They are not to be held by letters printed on a page, but are living characters translatable into every tongue and form of life. We call them Asiatic, we call them primeval; but perhaps that is only optical, for Nature is always equal to herself, and there are as good eyes and ears now in the planet as ever were. Only these ejaculations of the soul are uttered one or a few at a time, at long intervals, and it takes millenniums to make a Bible."

Emerson spoke with but a shadow of our present knowledge of the East. Mighty books unknown to him have since been recovered by modern scientific search. Yet the reader may well take Emerson's words as a hint of how profoundly, even when only the barest fragments of it were known, began at once to shape the thought of our foremost men.

We ask therefore of the reader a moment's consideration of the sources of the earliest human thought and books. In