accordingly, for a time, in high repute, among
people who knew very little about them. Even Dr. Adam Clarke was so far
led away with the spirit of the age, as to pollute his valuable
commentary by the insertion of the _Gitagovinda_, after the Chaldee
Targum on the Song of Solomon; where the curious reader can satisfy
himself as to the scientific value of such Pantheistic dotings. By the
Infidels of Britain and America they were appealed to as standard works
of undoubted authority; and hundreds, who declared that it was
irrational credulity to believe in the Bible, risked their souls on the
faith of the Vedas, _of which they never had read a single sentence_!

Now, when we remember that these veracious chronicles reach back through
_maha yugs_ of 4,320,000 years of mortals, a thousand of which, or
4,320,000,000, make a _kalpa_ or one day of the life of Brahma, while
his night is of the same duration, and his life consists of a hundred
years of such days and nights, about the middle of which period the
little span of our existence is placed; that among the facts of the
history are the records of the seven great continents of the world,
separated by seven rivers, and seven chains of mountains, four hundred
thousand miles high (reaching only to the moon); of the families of
their kings, one of whom had a hundred sons, another only ten thousand,
another sixty thousand, who were born in a pumpkin, nourished in pans of
milk, reduced to ashes by the curse of a sage, and restored to life by
the waters of the Ganges; and that among the astronomical observations,
by which the accuracy of these extraordinary facts is confirmed, are
accounts of deluges, in which the waters not only rose above the tops of
earth's mountains, but above the seven inferior and three superior
worlds, _reaching even to the Pole Star_[218]--we may well wonder at the
faith which could receive all this as so true, that on the strength of
it they rejected the miracles of the Bible as false. Even Voltaire
ridiculed these stories.

But a visionary man, named Baillie, calculated the alleged observations
backward, and found them sufficiently correct to satisfy him that all
the rest of the story was equally true. It never seems to have occurred
to him, that if he could calculate eclipses _backward_, so could the
Hindoos. It is just as easy to calculate an eclipse, or the position of
a planet, backward as forward. If I watch the motion of the hands of a
clock accur