p the multi-coloured web of Indian life.

In course of time this priesthood will spread out octopus-like
tentacles over the whole of India. Becoming all things to all men, it
will find a place in its pantheon for all gods and all ideas,
baptising them by orthodox names or justifying them by ingenious
fictions. It will send forth apostles and colonies even to the
furthermost regions of the distant South, which, alien in blood and in
tradition, will nevertheless accept them and surrender its best
intellect to their control. It will even admit into the lower ranks of
its own body men of foreign birth by means of legal fictions, in order
to maintain its control of religion. Though itself splitting up into
scores of divisions varying in purity of blood and tradition, it will
still as a whole maintain its position as against all other classes of
society. That the Brahman is the Deity on earth, and other classes
shall accept this dogma and agree to take their rank in accordance
with it, will become the principle holding together a vast
agglomeration of utterly diverse elements within the elastic bounds of
Catholic Brahmanism.

But as yet this condition of things has not arrived. The Brahmans are
still comparatively pure in blood and homogeneous in doctrine, and
they have as yet sent forth no colonies south of the Vindhya. They are
established in the lands of the Ganges and Jamna as far to the east as
Benares, and they look with some contempt on their kinsmen in the
western country that they have left behind. They are busily employed
in working out to logical conclusions the ideas and principles of
their Rigvedic forefathers. They have now three Vedas; for to the old
Rig-veda they have added a Yajur-veda for the use of the sacrificant
orders of priests and a Sama-veda or hymnal containing Rigvedic hymns
arranged for the chanting of choristers. The result of these labours
is that they have created a vast and intricate system of sacrificial
ritual, perhaps the most colossal of its kind that the world has ever
seen or ever will see. What is still more remarkable, the logical
result of this immense development of ritualism is that the priesthood
in theory is practically atheistic, while on the other hand a certain
number of its members have arrived at a philosophy of complete
idealism which is beginning to turn its back upon ritualism.

The atheist is not so much the man who denies the existence of any god
as the man to whom God