both races were brave; but the Aryas added to their courage the fanaticism of religious propagandists, and perhaps also somewhat more of intellectual culture than the Dasyus possessed.

But it was not the warlike Dasyus alone with whom the Aryas had to contend. Their own race, following close on their heels, and attracted as they had been by the fertility and beauty of the peninsula, became in turn invaders, and it was only after long-protracted conflicts that peace at last prevailed, and there came a period when cities could be built, and the intellectual tastes so active in the Aryan race cultivated.

The Rig - Veda, their earliest poetical work, written, according to the best authorities, about 1400 B. C., has long and often highly poetical hymns, songs, and epics, narrating with abundant oriental embellishments incidents of these wars. From many passages in these poems it is evident that though their theological notions had become somewhat confused, yet they adhered with considerable tenacity to the main features of the early Aryan or Parsee theogony. The Brahmin was not yet the ascendant race, and the idea of caste had not obtained a foothold upon the mind of the Hindoo. Within the five hundred years which followed the composition of the Rig-Veda, however, the Brahmins, probably the invaders of a particular era, had succeeded in reducing the remainder of the Aryan inhabitants of India to subjection, and infusing the religious element into their despotism, they added the terrors of future punishment to the penalties of their laws, in order to deter those whom they had subjected from attempting to throw off the yoke.

History records no other instance in which a small aristocratic body of men have succeeded so effectually in humbling and degrading a large mass sprung originally from the same stock with themselves, and in which, for almost 3,000 years, they have maintained the ascendancy, and compelled the subject classes to accept and be contented with the disabilities of their inferior condition. But one attempt, in all that period, on the part of the inferior castes, to assert their rights, that of Buddha Sakyamuni, has been successful, and the leader of that revolt was a member of the Kshatriya, or Warrior caste, the next in rank to the Brahmin.

No more decisive evidence of the genius and intellectual superiority of the Brahmins could be given than the fact that they have thus accumulated in their own caste all power, temporal and spiritual, which they deem it desirable to retain; and it is proof alike of their astuteness and their selfishness, that in the Code of Institutes compiled by Menu, one of their own caste, they have so effectually guarded themselves from all familiarity on the part of the lower castes, and assumed to themselves everything in the way of license and privilege they desired, while forbidding under the severest penalties the same privileges to their inferiors.

The sacred books of the Brahmins are, I. THE VEDAS, four in number; namely, the Rig - Veda, of which we have already spoken, the oldest of the Vedas, and comprising not only the heroic poems, hymns, and triumphal songs of the early Aryan history, but also most of the ritual services and formulas of the other Vedas, which are mainly compilations from, or paraphrases of it; the Yajus Veda, or religious rites; the Sama Veda, or prayers in metrical form for chanting; and the Atharva Veda, or formulas of consecration, expiation, and imprecation.

II. The PURANAS, eighteen in number; historical and theological poems, giving the mythology and cosmogony of the system. There are also eighteen upa-puranas, or inferior puranas, devoted to secular science.

III. The JYOTISHA, or treatises on astronomy, attached to the Vedas.

IV. The MANAVA-DHARMA-SASTRA, or Institutes of Menu, to which we have already referred, a system of laws and cosmogony.

V. The ITIHASA, a collection of heroic poems, mostly epic. One of these, the Bhagvat-Gita, possesses high literary merit, and contains many excellent moral maxims, while it is free from obscenity; but its title to high antiquity, or to be considered one of their sacred books at all, is denied by many of the Brahmins. It has been translated into English by three oriental scholars, Sir C. Wilkins, Sir William Jones, and Mr. J. C. Thompson.

These sacred books, while they contain some moral precepts worthy of preservation, are, with the exception of portions of

the Vedas and the Itihasa, mainly composed of the most puerile, silly, and often obscene narratives. They were evidently written by Brahmins, and in the interest of their own caste; and but for the degraded and besotted condition of the lower castes, they could not have so long submitted, without resistance, to a religious system, all whose benefits came to an aristocratic caste, while all its hardships and penalties, here and hereafter, fall to the lot of the classes below.

The theogony developed in these books, though often contradictory in its details, yet bears indications of considerable ingenuity and knowledge of the early traditions of Eden, the Fall, and the Flood, and not improbably of the Pentateuch. The primal idea of this vast superstructure of error is, like that of the Parsee faith, one supreme being, incarnate, invisible, the origin of all existence. To this being, whom they call BRAHM, no temples are reared, no sacrifices offered. They represent him, his work of creation done, as wrapped in the contemplation of his own perfections, and unmindful of the creatures he has called into existence. The subtle, speculative mind of the Hindoo has delighted to indulge in theories and conjectures relative to this uncreate, supreme, yet passionless deity. The traditions of such a being could only have come to them from the revelations of Eden and its human inhabitants.

Below this supreme being, as created by him, yet possessing vast powers and being the proper objects of worship, the sacred books of the Brahmins reveal a Trimurtti, or Trinity, composed of Brahma, the creator of all worlds, Vishnu, the preserver and benefactor, and Siva, the destroyer. To Brahma and Siva they have also assigned wives, Maja or Maya, the Maia as well as the Juno of the Greeks, as the companion of the creating Brahma, and Doorga, the Astarte of the Phenicians and the Venus of the Greeks, as the helpmeet of the destroying Siva.

A dim idea of an incarnation of the Divine nature, for the benefit of fallen humanity, had found its way to the minds of the Hindoo theogonists, and hence they describe their preserving and beneficent deity as undertaking ten successive avatars, or incarnations, each having in view some advantage to men or animals. These avatars represent his existence in the form

of the fish, the tortoise, the hog, the lion, and the dwarf; and subsequent incarnations, as Purushu, Ram, Krishnu or Krishna, Buddha, and the last (not yet commenced) of Kulkee. In the first avatars, Vishnu is represented as assuming forms half human, half the animal whose body he had taken; in the fifth he appears as a dwarf. In the sixth, crowned and with battleax in hand, ready to defend his chosen; in the seventh, crowned and with bow and quiver, the Apollo of the Greeks; in the eighth, a sceptered monarch; in the ninth, a devotee wrapt in contemplation; in the tenth, crowned and with one foot in the stirrup, ready to mount a winged horse, and with the sacred umbrella, the insignia of power, overshadowing the saddle. These avatars are distinctly described in the sacred poems, and the corrupt nature which prompted the theogony appears in the licentious amours of this, their most beneficent of deities.

The first, or fish avatar, is evidently a tradition of the flood. Vishnu having determined to destroy men for their wickedness, excepted from this general destruction King Satyavrata and his queen, together with the seven Rishis and their wives, who alone were pious and holy, and he accordingly prepared an ark (Cahitra) in which he placed them, and transformed himself into a huge fish, to which the ark was moored and which guided it during the flood.

In the second avatar he appeared as a tortoise, and supported on his back the great mountain Mandara and its inhabitants when it was about to sink into the sea of milk.

The next five avatars or incarnations were so many conflicts with giants who sought to destroy the earth or the chosen people, and whom in the form of a boar, a man-lion, a dwarf, and a commander of the warlike family of Rama, he overthrew and subdued. Philologists trace such resemblances in the names of these giants and their conqueror with the conflicts of the Israelites with the gigantic inhabitants of Canaan, as to lead to the conjecture that these avatars are but the Scripture narratives orientalized. The eighth incarnation is that of Krishna, in which Vishnu appears in human form and attacks a terrible serpent who was making havoc of the human race. In the strife the serpent bites his heel, but he finally succeeds in crushing its head and thus destroying it. That this was

the tradition of the promise to Eve of the Messiah cannot be doubted.

In regard to the ninth avatar, that of Buddha, now passing, there seems to be much confusion, occasioned in part, probably, by the claims of Buddha Sakyamuni, the present divinity of the Buddhists, to be that incarnation, a claim which the Brahmins resist. The last incarnation of Vishnu, that of Khulke, is yet to come. When it comes he will appear mounted on a white horse, and armed with shield and sword, the terrible sword of Brahma, which takes speedy vengeance on all his foes, and condemning the wicked to fearful and protracted punishment, will receive the good into paradise. The sun and moon will lose their light, and the earth tremble to its center; the stars will fall from heaven, and the earth and all it contains perish by fire. Then a new heaven and a new earth will be created, and an age of purity and happiness succeed.

Siva, the destroyer, seems to have been a prior conception, probably of the earliest races inhabiting India, and must, we think, have been at first identical with the Ahriman of the Parsees, though their later books distinguish carefully between him and Mahasur, the prince of evil spirits. His place in the Hindu trinity seems inappropriate, and there is evidence that they themselves so regarded it.

Below this trinity, yet possessing great power for good or ill over the human race, are the dewtas or devitas, demons, good and bad, who are in constant conflict; the good aided by Vishnu and Siva, and the evil led on by Mahasur the prince of malignant spirits. These dewtas are objects of worship, as are also innumerable other gods, representing not only almost the entire animal creation, but a vast number of abstract ideas. The masses render their homage and sacrifices to these numberless idols, many of whom are worshiped with rites whose obscenity no mind less corrupt and depraved than that of the Hindu could fathom.

The Brahmins, however, boast that Brahminism has its inner shrine, its esoteric doctrine, which resorts to no idol worship, but which, to the initiated, (and these are only of the Brahmin caste,) reveals a purer faith and loftier objects of reverence. This esoteric doctrine is taught in the systems of philosophy of the three most celebrated Hindu schools. The first and most