aru_n_a, sits down among his people; he, the wise, sits there to
govern. From thence perceiving all wondrous things, he sees what has
been and what will be done.'[104] But in these very hymns, better than
anywhere else, we learn that the idea of supremacy and omnipotence
ascribed to one god did by no means exclude the admission of other
gods, or names of God. All the other gods disappear from the vision of
the poet while he addresses his own God, and he only who is to fulfil
his desires stands in full light before the eyes of the worshipper as
the supreme and only God.

[Footnote 104: 'History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature,' by M. M., p.
536.]

The Science of Religion is only just beginning, and we must take care
how we impede its progress by preconceived notions or too hasty
generalizations. During the last fifty years the authentic documents
of the most important religions of the world have been recovered in a
most unexpected and almost miraculous manner. We have now before us
the canonical books of Buddhism; the Zend-Avesta of Zoroaster is no
longer a sealed book; and the hymns of the Rig-veda have revealed a
state of religion anterior to the first beginnings of that mythology
which in Homer and Hesiod stands before us as a mouldering ruin. The
soil of Mesopotamia has given back the very images once worshipped by
the most powerful of the Semitic tribes, and the cuneiform
inscriptions of Babylon and Nineveh have disclosed the very prayers
addressed to Baal or Nisroch. With the discovery of these documents a
new era begins in the study of religion. We begin to see more clearly
every day what St. Paul meant in his sermon at Athens. But as the
excavator at Babylon or Nineveh, before he ventures to reconstruct the
palaces of these ancient kingdoms, sinks his shafts into the ground
slowly and circumspectly lest he should injure the walls of the
ancient palaces which he is disinterring; as he watches every
corner-stone lest he mistake their dark passages and galleries, and as
he removes with awe and trembling the dust and clay from the brittle
monuments lest he destroy their outlines, and obliterate their
inscriptions, so it behoves the student of the history of religion to
set to work carefully, lest he should miss the track, and lose himself
in an inextricable maze. The relics which he handles are more precious
than the ruins of Babylon; the problems he has to solve are more
important than the questions of ancient chro