ill be, depends on the character of the race which
elaborates it, its surroundings in nature, and its experience in
history.

Now we may seem to know a great many religions--I speak here, of
course, of ancient religions only, of what are sometimes called
national or autochthonous religions--not of those founded in later
times by individual prophets or reformers.

Yet, among those ancient religions we seldom know, what after all is
the most important point, their origin and their gradual growth. The
Jewish religion is represented to us as perfect and complete from the
very first, and it is with great difficulty that we can discover its
real beginnings and its historical growth. And take the Greek and the
Roman religions, take the religions of the Teutonic, Slavonic, or
Celtic tribes, and you will find that their period of growth has
always passed, long before we know them, and that from the time we
know them, all their changes are purely _metamorphic_--changes in form
of substances ready at hand. Now let us look to the ancient
inhabitants of India. With them, first of all, religion was not only
_one_ interest by the side of many. It was the all-absorbing interest;
it embraced not only worship and prayer, but what we call philosophy,
morality, law, and government--all was pervaded by religion. Their
whole life was to them a religion--everything else was, as it were, a
mere concession made to the ephemeral requirements of this life.

What then can we learn from the ancient religious literature of India,
or from the Veda?

It requires no very profound knowledge of Greek religion and Greek
language to discover in the Greek deities the original outlines of
certain physical phenomena. Every schoolboy knows that in _Zeus_ there
is something of the sky, in _Poseidon_ of the sea, in _Hades_ of the
lower world, in _Apollo_ of the sun, in _Artemis_ of the moon, in
_Hephaestos_ of the fire. But for all that, there is, from a Greek
point of view, a very considerable difference between _Zeus_ and the
sky, between _Poseidon_ and the sea, between _Apollo_ and the sun,
between _Artemis_ and the moon.

Now what do we find in the Veda? No doubt here and there a few
philosophical hymns which have been quoted so often that people have
begun to imagine that the Veda is a kind of collection of Orphic
hymns. We also find some purely mythological hymns, in which the Devas
or gods have assumed nearly as much dramatic personality as in the