meaning, chronological date, and historical value of the
monumental and palaeographic relics of his motherland. It has little,
if ever, entered the mind of the Western public that their scholars
have, until very lately, worked in a narrow pathway obstructed with the
ruins of an ecclesiastical, dogmatic Past; that they have been cramped
on all sides by limitations of "revealed" events coming from God, "with
whom a thousand years are but as one day," and who have thus felt bound
to cram millenniums into centuries and hundreds into units, giving at
the utmost an age of 1,000 to what is 10,000 years old. All this to
save the threatened authority of their religion and their own
respectability and good name in cultured society. And even that, when
free themselves from preconceptions, they have had to protect the honour
of the Jewish divine chronology assailed by stubborn facts; and thus
have become (often unconsciously) the slaves of an artificial history
made to fit into the narrow frame of a dogmatic religion. No proper
thought has been given to this purely psychological but very significant
trifle. Yet we all know how, rather than admit any relation between
Sanskrit and the Gothic, Keltic, Greek, Latin and old Persian, facts
have been tampered with, old texts purloined from libraries, and
philological discoveries vehemently denied. And we have also heard from
our retreats, how Dugald Stewart and his colleagues, upon seeing that
the discovery would also involve ethnological affinities, and damage the
prestige of those sires of the world races--Shem, Ham and Japhet--denied
in the face of fact that "Sanskrit had ever been a living, spoken
language," supporting the theory that "it was an invention of the
Brahmins, who had constructed their Sanskrit on the model of the Greek
and Latin." And again we know, holding the proof of the same, how the
majority of Orientalists are prone to go out of their way to prevent any
Indian antiquity (whether MSS. or inscribed monument, whether art or
science) from being declared pre-Christian. As the origin and history
of the Gentile world is made to move in the narrow circuit of a few
centuries "B.C.," within that fecund epoch when mother earth,
recuperated from her arduous labours of the Stone age, begat, it seems
without transition, so many highly civilized nations and false
pretenses, so the enchanted circle of Indian archeology lies between the
(to them unknown) year of the Samvat