reappeared. Posterior to the
Vedic hymns, it is not mentioned in them. Instead is the revelation of a
being purer than purity, excelling excellence, dwelling apart from life,
apart from death, ineffably in the solitudes of space. He alone was. The
gods were not yet. They, the earth, the sky, the forms of matter and of
man, slept in the depths of the ideal, from which at his will they arose.
That will was love. The _Mahabharata_ is its history.

There, succeeding the clamor of primal life, come the songs of shepherds,
the footfall of apsaras, the murmur of rhapsodies, of kisses and harps.
The pages turn to them. Then follow eremites in their hermitages, rajahs
in their palaces, chiefs in their chariots, armies of elephants and men,
seas of blood, gorgeous pomps, gigantic flowers, marvels and enchantments.
Above, on thrones of lotos and gold, are the serene and apathetic gods,
limitless in power, complete in perfection, unalterable in felicity,
needing nothing, having all. Evil may not approach them. Nonexistent in
infinity, evil is circumscribed within the halls of time. The appanage of
the gods was love, its revelation light.

That light must have been too pure. Subsequent theology decomposed it. In
its stead was provided a glare intolerably crude that disclosed divinities
approachable in deliriums of disorder, in unions from which reason had
fled, to which love could not come, and on which, in a sort of radiant
imbecility, idols semi-Chaldaean, polycephalous, hundred-armed, obese,
monstrous, revolting, stared with unseeing eyes.

In the Vedas there is much that is absurd and more that is puerile. The
_Mahabharata_ is a fairy-tale, interminable and very dull. But in none of
these works is there any sanction of the pretensions of a priesthood to
degrade. It was in the name of waters that slake, of fire that purifies,
of air that regenerates, of gods dwelling not in images but in infinity,
that love was invoked. It was in poetry, not in perversions, that marriage
occurred. In the Laws of Manu marriage is defined as the union of
celestial musicians,--music then as now being regarded as the food of
love.

The Buddhist Scriptures contain passages that were said to charm the birds
and beasts. In the Vedas there are passages which, if a soudra overheard,
the ignominy of his caste was abolished. The poetry that resided in them,
a poetry often childish, but primal, preceding the Pentateuch, purer than
it, chronologically ant