ispered in secret. Pantheism, _sams[=a]ra_,[1] and the eternal bliss
of the individual spirit when eventually it is freed from further
transmigration,--these three fundamental traits of the new religion
are discussed in such a way as to show that they had no hold upon the
general public, but they were the intellectual wealth of a few. Some
of the Upanishads hide behind a veil of mystery; yet many of them, as
Windisch has said, are, in a way, popular; that is, they are intended
for a general public, not for priests alone. This is especially the
case with the pantheistic Upanishads in their more pronounced form.
But still it is only the very wise that can accept the teaching. It is
not the faith of the people.

Epic literature, which is the next living literature of the Brahmans,
after the Upanishads, takes one, in a trice, from the beginnings of a
formal pantheism, to a pantheism already disintegrated by the newer
worship of sectaries. Here the impersonal _[=a]tm[=a]_, or nameless
Lord, is not only an anthropomorphic Civa, as in the late Upanishads,
where the philosophic _brahma_ is equated with a long recognized type
of divinity, but _[=a]tm[=a]_ is identified with the figure of a
theomorphic man.

Is there, then, nothing with which to bridge this gulf?

In our opinion the religion of the law-books, as a legitimate phase of
Hindu religion, has been too much ignored. The religion of Upanishad
and Ved[=a]nta, with its attractive analogies with modern speculation,
has been taken as illustrative of the religion of a vast period, to
the discrediting of the belief represented in the manuals of law. To
these certainly the name of literature can scarcely be applied, but in
their rapport with ordinary life they will be found more apt than are
the profounder speculations of the philosophers to reflect the
religious belief taught to the masses and accepted by them.

The study of these books casts a broad light upon that interval
between the Vedic and epic periods wherein it is customary to imagine
religion as being, in the main, cult or philosophy. Nor does the
interest cease with the yield of necessarily scanty yet very
significant facts in regard to eschatological and cosmogonic views.
The gods themselves are not what they are in the rites of the cunning
priests or in the dogmas of the sages. In the Hindu law there is a
reversion to Vedic belief; or rather not a reversion, but here one
sees again, through the froth of rites