sanctity. It became a sacred language, and sacred
became the Brahman, who alone possessed the key to it, who alone could
recite its sacred texts and perform the rites which they prescribed, and
select the prayers which could best meet every distinct and separate
emergency in the life of man.

In the Brahmanas we can follow the growth of a luxuriant theology for
the use of the masses which, in so far as it was polytheistic, tended to
the infinite multiplication of gods and goddesses and godlings of all
types, and in so far as it was pantheistic invested not only men, but
beasts and insects and rivers and fountains and trees and stones with
some living particle of the divine essence pervading all things; and we
can follow there also the erection on the basis of that theology, of a
formidable ritual of which the exclusive exercise and the material
benefits were the appanage of the Brahman. But we have to turn to a
later collection of writings known as the Upanishads for our knowledge
of the more abstract speculations out of which Hindu thinkers, not
always of the Brahmanical caste, were concurrently evolving the esoteric
systems of philosophy that have exercised an immense and abiding
influence on the spiritual life of India. There is the same difficulty
in assigning definite dates to the Upanishads, though many of the later
ones bear the post-mark of the various periods of theological evolution
with which they coincided. Only some of the earliest ones are held by
many competent authorities to be, in the shape in which they have
reached us, anterior to the time when India first becomes, in any real
sense, historical; but there is no reason to doubt that they represent
the progressive evolution into different forms of very ancient germs
already present in the Vedas themselves. They abound in the same
extravagant eclecticism, leading often to the same confusions and
contradictions that Hindu theology presents. The Sankhya Darshana, or
system, recognising only a primary material cause from which none but
finite beings can proceed, regards the universe and all that exists in
it and life itself as a finite illusion of which the end is
non-existence, and its philosophic conceptions are atheistic rather than
pantheistic. In opposition to it the Vedantic system of mystic
pantheism, whilst also seeing in this finite world a mere world of
illusion, holds that rescue from it will come to each individual soul
after a more or less prol