ne covers a duration of thousands of
millions of years. Each kalpa of creation is called a day of
Brahma; each kalpa of destruction, a night of Brahma. The belief
is that Brahma, waking from the slumber of his self absorbed
solitude, feels his loneliness, and his thoughts and emotions go
forth in creative forms, composing the immense scheme of worlds
and creatures. These play their parts, and run their courses,
until the vast day of Brahma is completed; when he closes his
eyes, and falls to rest, while the whole system of finite things
returns to the silence and darkness of its aboriginal unity, and
remains there in invisible annihilation through the stupendous
night that precedes the reawaking of the slumbering Godhead and
the appearance of the creation once more.

A little reflection makes the origin of this imagery and belief
clear. Each night, as the darkness comes down, and the outer world
disappears, man falls asleep, and, so far as he is consciously
concerned, every thing is destroyed. In his unconsciousness,
everything ceases to be. The light dawns again, he awakes, and his
reopened senses create anew the busy frame and phenomena of
nature. Transfer this experience from man to God; consider it not
as abstract and apparent, but as concrete and real, and you have
the Hindu doctrine of the kalpa. When we sleep, to us all things
are destroyed; and when we awake, to us they reappear. When God
sleeps, all things in themselves really end; and when he wakes,
they begin anew to be. The visible and experimental phenomena of
day and night, sleeping and waking, are universalized, and
attributed to God, It is a poetic process of thought, natural
enough to a rich minded, simple people, but wholly illegitimate as
a logical ground of belief, But being stated in books supposed to
be infallibly inspired, and in the absence of critical tests for
the discrimination of sound from unsound thought, it was
implicitly accepted by multitudes.

Closely allied to the foregoing doctrine, yet in several
particulars strikingly different from it, and evidently quite
independent in its origin, was the Great Year of the Stoics, or
the alternative blotting out and restoration of all things. This
school of philosophers conceived of God as a pure artistic force
or seed of universal energy, which exhibits its history in the
evolution of the kosmos, and, on its completion, blossoms into
fire, and vanishes. The universal periodical conflagration