Page:The religions of India.djvu/31

Rh manas. If there is any justice in tliese views, it is evident that a literature such as this will only embrace what is within the scope of a limited horizon, and will have autho- ritative weight only in regard to things in a more or less special reference, and that the negative conclusions espe- cially which may be deduced from such documents must be received with not a little reservation. A sinoie instance, to which I limit myself, will suffice for illustration. Suppose that certain hymns of the tenth book of the Rig- Veda — a book which the majority of critics look upon with distrust — had not come down to us, what would we learn from the rest of the collection respecting the worship of the manes of the departed ? We might know that India paid homage to certain powers called Pitris, or Fathers, but we could not infer from that, any more than from the later worship of the Matris, or Mothers, this worship of ancestors, or spirits of the dead, which, as the comparative study of the beliefs, customs, and institutions of Greece and Eome shows us, was nevertheless from the remotest antiquity one of the principal sources of public and private right, one of the bases of the family and the civic community. I am therefore far from believingj that the Yeda has taught us everything on the ancient social and religious condition of even Aryan India, or that everything there can be accounted for by reference to it. Outside of it I see room not only for superstitious beliefs, but for real popular religions, more or less distinct from that which we find in it ; and on this point, we shall arrive at more than one conclusion from the more profound study of the subsequent period. We shall perhaps find that, in this respect also, the past did not differ so much from the present as might at first appear, that India has always had, alongside of its Yeda, something equivalent to its great ^ivaite and Vishnuite religions, which we see in the ascendant at a later date, and that these anyhow existed contemporaneously with it for a very much longer period than has till now been generally supposed.