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and defeat its young opponent. The counter-Reformation in Europe is a feeble type of the Brahmanical reaction in India. Roman Catholicism, though it could not expel from the Continent, drove back its vigorous but unorganized enemy; but revived Brahmanism swept from India the once-victorious Buddhism. The old system expanded to receive new and popular elements. The people loved the old gods, never knew or worshipped the abstract deity of the priesthood. Of the old Vedic Gods, Vishnu and Rudra had become the chosen of the people. They, joined with the sacerdotal Brahma, formed a new godhead, the famous Brahmanical Trimurtti. Then, if, according to the old mystical notion, the human could be absorbed in the divine, why not the divine manifested in the human? If man could become God, why not God man? Hence the Avatar-notion arose, and by a well-known mythical process the heroes of the old national epics, Rama and Krishna, were deified, and as at once incarnations of the popular deity and heroes of the popular songs, powerfully commended the old religion to the Hindu heart. Thus, on both the divine and human sides, the old faith was so modified as to suit, even better than the new, the mind and condition of India.

Our belief so shared in the general modification as

* Lassen, "Ind. Alterthumsk.,” i. 918 ff.; ii. 1087. But particularly Dr. Muir's "Sanskrit Texts," vol. iv., comparison of the Vedic with the after representations of the principal Indian deities.

+ Duncker, "Gesch. der Arier," p. 322; Muir, ut supra, ch. ii. sect. v.

to be in some respects improved, in others deteriorated. It receives fullest expression in the Bhagavad-Gita. The general conception is a crude Pantheism, with, on the one side, a final absorption, conditioned on knowledge, into deity, on the other a hideous moral indifferentism, which abolishes good and evil and inculcates action without any regard to consequences. Krishna says, 'Immortality and death, being and not being, am I, 0 Arjuna.”* He is everything, its source, its goal, father and mother of this world, whence all things and beings come, whither all return. The soul is immutable, impenetrable, incombustible, can neither be pierced by darts, nor burned by fire, nor drowned by water, nor dried by wind. It can wear out and lay aside old and assume new bodies, as the body can change its garments. § Souls are thus conceived as immortal, or, rather, eternal, without beginning or end, but as transmigrating through many bodies. Man can be born into nobler and happier forms of personal being,|| and between birth and death taste divine joys in the heaven of Indra.T Till final emancipation is obtained birth and death succeed each other, but when knowledge of the divine being is acquired, birth ceases, the soul attains deity.* Quiescence, the supreme beatitude, is realized, and to the Supreme the soul is joined.

**

* ix. 19.
|| vi. 41, 42.

† ix. 7—10; 16—18.

Tix. 20.

ii. 23-25. § ii. 22. ** ii. 51; iv. 9, 10.

Here, then, our inquiry into the Hindu belief in immortality may end. Its historical conclusion was the antithesis and contradiction of its historical beginning. Our purpose was to trace the several steps in this saddest, most extensive and injurious revolution of religious thought, and the lessons suggested the reader can best discover for himself. An exaggerated sacerdotalism turned the Hindu spirit from travelling along the only line on which it could have reached a right conception of God, and, without that, no right conception of man, as mortal or immortal, was possible. Our thoughts weave themselves more subtly than we imagine into consistency and form, and the unsystematized faith of a people will often be found more logical than any reasoned system. The belief in a personal immortality can live only when rooted in faith in a personal God.

"Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:

Thou madest man, he knows not why;
He thinks he was not made to die;

And Thou hast made him: Thou art just."

PART III.

THE BELIEF IN GREECE.

I. INTRODUCTORY,

THE
HE belief in Immortality, while a pre-eminent product

of Greek thought, was almost unknown to Greek religion. The gods of Olympos ruled the present; death was the limit of their dominion. Their worship neither awed by the fear, nor cheered with the hope, of a future life. In the later mythology which grew up within and around the mysteries, the gods of the underworld distributed rewards and punishments to the dead, but they exercised no actual government over the living. While of all ancient peoples the Greeks had the profoundest faith in the reign of moral Law, no ancient people seemed so little conscious of any religious connection between the present and a future life. Greece

was in this respect a contrast to almost all the other Indo-European nations. The Iranians founded on their ethical dualism a positive and intelligible theory of immortality-a theory which, passing first into Judaism and then into Christianity, has played so great a part in the religious history of the world. The Teutonic tribes so conceived the future as to reduce death to a "home-going," "a return to the Father." The Kelts believed in a metempsychosis which made the future life as active as the present. The Indian Aryans evolved, as already seen, from their early naturalism a religion whose distinctive characteristic was the continued existence of the transmigrating soul. But the Greek, whose conception of life was the most ethical, whose religious faith was the most beautiful, believed a religion which left him to live and die without the hope of an immortal hereafter.

The causes of this peculiarity in the religious development of Greece can be fully ascertained only by a minute study of its successive phases. Here, however, two may be specified: (1) the national mythology crystallized into permanent form before the national mind attained to full religious consciousness; (2) religious thought did not develop within, but without, this mythology.

The Greek mind lived long in the mythical and imaginative stages. Centuries after the Indians and

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