d comforts with substantial joys
the spirits guided there by Agni (this points to cremation which was
frequent but not universal) or by Pushan. There the Pitris or fathers
sit at the same tables with the gods, and are eternally happy.
Brahmanaspati, lord of prayer, is a god of another type, a
personification of the act of ritual, and his presence in the Vedas,
beside the elemental deities, shows how early speculation had begun.

To what Stage does this Religion belong?--Our sketch of this system
is necessarily brief; we have now to inquire as to the place it
occupies in the religious growth of India. It is held, on the one
hand, that it is a primitive religious product, that it shows us some
of the very first efforts men made to have a religion; while on the
other hand it is held that the Vedic hymns and the Vedic system are
sacerdotal, and are due to an advanced organisation of worship and to
a special set of men who were much in advance of their age.

1. It is Primitive.--Mr. Max Mueller[1] says that "the sacred books of
India offer the same advantages ... for the study of the origin and
growth of religion ... which Sanscrit has offered for the study of
the origin and growth of human speech." Dr. Muir[2] claims that the
Vedic hymns illustrate the natural workings of the human mind in the
period of its infancy. In the Vedas, these writers consider, we are
able to watch the process by which the earliest men rose to the
belief in gods, and the naive and simple methods by which man's first
intercourse with gods was carried on. The undoubted antiquity of
these pieces favours this view; the Rigveda is admitted on all hands
to be the earliest part of Indian literature, and many of the hymns
were written about 1500 B.C.[3] The pure and simple nature of the
Vedic religion may also appear to favour this view. It is a religion
singularly free from the lower elements of man's early faith. Savage
legends and especially immoral stories of the gods are markedly
absent from the hymns; they are also free from the element of magic
and fetishism; the gods are great beings, and religion consists in
intercourse with these great beings. Now the later religious
literature of India, the brahmanas or commentaries on the Rigveda and
the other later Vedas, contain a variety of legends and a religion by
no means free from magic. It may be maintained therefore that the
pure religion of the Aryans afterwards became contaminated by contact
with t