refore, before opening the pages of the Veda, and giving you a
description of the poetry, the religion, and philosophy of the ancient
inhabitants of India, I thought it right and necessary to establish,
first of all, certain points without which it would be impossible to
form a right appreciation of the historical value of the Vedic hymns,
and of their importance even to us who live at so great a distance
from those early poets.

The _first_ point was purely preliminary, namely that the Hindus in
ancient, and in modern times also, are a nation deserving of our
interest and sympathy, worthy also of our confidence, and by no means
guilty of the charge so recklessly brought against them--the charge
of an habitual disregard of truth.

_Secondly_, that the ancient literature of India is not to be
considered simply as a curiosity and to be handed over to the good
pleasure of Oriental scholars, but that, both by its language, the
Sanskrit, and by its most ancient literary documents, the Vedas, it
can teach us lessons which nothing else can teach, as to the origin of
our own language, the first formation of our own concepts, and the
true natural germs of all that is comprehended under the name of
civilization, at least the civilization of the Aryan race, that race
to which we and all the greatest nations of the world--the Hindus, the
Persians, the Greeks and Romans, the Slaves, the Celts, and last, not
least, the Teutons, belong. A man may be a good and useful ploughman
without being a geologist, without knowing the stratum on which he
takes his stand, or the strata beneath that give support to the soil
on which he lives and works, and from which he draws his nourishment.
And a man may be a good and useful citizen, without being an
historian, without knowing how the world in which he lives came about,
and how many phases mankind had to pass through in language, religion,
and philosophy, before it could supply him with that intellectual soil
on which he lives and works, and from which he draws his best
nourishment.

But there must always be an aristocracy of those who know, and who can
trace back the best which we possess, not merely to a Norman count, or
a Scandinavian viking, or a Saxon earl, but to far older ancestors and
benefactors, who thousands of years ago were toiling for us in the
sweat of their face, and without whom we should never be what we
are--the ancestors of the whole Aryan race, the first framers of our
wo