m walk, and
he will not go wrong."

In the same manner then in which, out of the bright powers of nature,
the Devas or gods had arisen, there arose out of predicates shared in
common by the departed, such as p i t _r i_ s, fathers, p r e t a, gone
away, another general concept, what we should call _Manes_, the kind
ones, _Ancestors_, _Shades_, _Spirits_, or _Ghosts_, whose worship was
nowhere more fully developed than in India. That common name, P i t _r
i_ s or _Fathers_, gradually attracted toward itself all that the
fathers shared in common. It came to mean not only fathers, but
invisible, kind, powerful, immortal, heavenly beings, and we can watch
in the Veda, better perhaps than anywhere else, the inevitable, yet most
touching metamorphosis of ancient thought--the love of the child for
father and mother becoming transfigured into an instinctive belief in
the immortality of the soul.

It is strange, and really more than strange, that not only should this
important and prominent side of the ancient religion of the Hindus
have been ignored, but that of late its very existence should have
been doubted. I feel obliged, therefore, to add a few words in support
of what I have said just now of the supreme importance of this belief
in and this worship of ancestral spirits in India from the most
ancient to the most modern times. Mr. Herbert Spencer, who has done so
much in calling attention to ancestorship as a natural ingredient of
religion among all savage nations, declares in the most emphatic
manner,[277] "that he has seen it implied, that he has heard it in
conversation, and that he now has it before him in print, that no
Indo-European or Semitic nation, so far as we know, seems to have
made a religion of the worship of the dead." I do not doubt his words,
but I think that on so important a point, Mr. Herbert Spencer ought to
have named his authorities. It seems to me almost impossible that
anybody who has ever opened a book on India should have made such a
statement. There are hymns in the Rig-Veda addressed to the Fathers.
There are full descriptions of the worship due to the Fathers in the
Brahma_n_as and Sutras. The epic poems, the law books, the Pura_n_as,
all are brimful of allusions to ancestral offerings. The whole social
fabric of India, with its laws of inheritance and marriage,[278] rests
on a belief in the Manes--and yet we are told that no Indo-European
nation seems to have made a religion of the worship