duties; and even the souls of worms and insects and vegetables attain heaven by the power of devotion. But especially great is the sanctifying influence of the Vedas. He who can repeat the whole of the Rig-Veda would be free from guilt, even if he had killed the inhabitants of three worlds.

The twelfth and last book of Menu is on transmigration and final beatitude. The principle is there laid down that human action, word, and thought bear their appropriate fruit of good or evil Out of the heart proceed three sins of thought, four sins of the tongue, and three of the body; to wit, covetousness, disobedience, and atheistic thoughts; scurrilousness, falseness, frivolousness, and unkind words; and actions of theft, bodily injuries, and licentiousness. He who controls his thoughts, words, and actions is called a triple commander. There are three qualities of the soul, giving it. a tendency to goodness, to passion, and to darkness. The first leads to knowledge, the second to desire, the third to sensuality. To the first belong the study of scripture, devotion, purity, self-command, and obedience. From the second proceed hypocritical actions, anxiety, disobedience, and selfindulgence. The third produces avarice, Atheism, indolence, and every act of which a man is ashamed to be guilty. The object of the first quality is virtue; of the second, worldly success; of the third, pleasure. The souls in which the first is supreme rise after death to the condition of deities; those in whom the second predominates pass into the bodies of other men; while those ruled by the third become beasts and vegetables. This law of transmigration is propounded in detail. For certain great sins men are condemned to pass a great number of times into the bodies of dogs, insects, spiders, snakes, or grasses. The change has relation to the crime; thus: He who steals grain shall be born a rat; he who steals meat, a vulture; those who indulge in the forbidden pleasures of the senses shall have the acuteness of their senses so intensified as to suffer painfully.

The greatest of all virtues is disinterested goodness, performed from the love of God, and based on a knowledge of the Veda. A religious action, performed from a hope of reward in this world or the next, will give one a place only

in the lowest heaven. But he who performs good actions without hope of reward, "perceiving the supreme soul in all beings and all beings in the supreme soul, fixing his mind on God, approaches the divine nature.”

Lot every Brahman, with fixed attention, consider all nature as existing in the divine spirit; all worlds as seated in him; he alone is the whole assemblage of gods, and the author of all human actions.

Let him consider the supreme omnipresent intelligence as the sovereign Lord of the universe, by whom alone it exists, an incomprehensible spirit, pervading all beings in five elemental forms, and causing them to pass through birth, growth and decay, and so to revolve like the wheels of a car.

Thus the man who perceives in his own soul the supreme soul present in all creatures, acquires equanimity towards them all, and shall be absolved at last in the highest essence, even that of the Almighty himself.

To a man contaminated by sensuality, neither the Vedas, nor liberality, nor sacrifice, nor strict observances, nor pious austerities, will procure felicity.

He whose sins are mostly coporeal will assume after death a vegetable or mineral form; for sins mostly verbal he will assume the form of a bird or beast; for sins merely mental he will again assume a human form, but in some of its lower conditions. An unauthorized teacher of the sacred books will return into a dumb body. He who steals a lamp will be born blind.

If a wife speak unkindly to her husband she may be superseded by another without delay.

A man untainted with covetousness may be sole witness, and may have more weight than many women, because the female understanding is apt to waver.

He who mentions a Brahman with contumely should have an iron style ten fingers long thrust red-hot into his mouth. He who through pride attempts to give instruction to the Brahmans concerning their duty should have hot oil dropped into his mouth and ears.

Somewhat profuse quotations from the Institutes of Menu are given for the reason that the code is among the most important of the Hindoo sacred writings, and is the basis upon which Brahmanism was built. The code is both ancient and authentic, and contains the bright consummate flower of the Brahmanic system before it became corrupted or began to decay. In these laws, however, will be found the source whence the castes, which for three thousand years have been a curse to that county, were derived. The Brahmans, who in the code are held up to be such a superior and worthy caste, have long since proved to be a worse than worthless incubus upon the people-one of the worst forms of the priesthood the world has ever known.

OTHER SACRED BOOKS.

Next after the Institutes of Menu, the most ancient and venerated of the Hindoo sacred books, are two epic poems called the "Ramayana " and the "Mahabharata." The extreme antiquity of both is proved by sculptures on temples of very great age, carved in solid rock. The subject of the Ramayana is the victory of the divine hero Rama over his antagonist Ravana, prince of the wicked genii called Rakshasas. It is represented that the wicked spirits or demons came near gaining the ascendancy over the good deities, because the latter had bound themselves by a promise to make their adversaries invulerable, and this promise they could not violate. Therefore none but a mortal could subdue the prince of evil, and it had to be a mortal of superhuman endowments. In this alarming state of things the gods besought Vishnu to become a man and engage with the great adversary. In compliance, he divided himself into four parts, and took the shape of four brothers, of whom Rama was the chief. But notwithstanding he thus assumed the form of the four brothers, he still retained his own form in heaven-the second person of the Trinity, and discharged there his appropriate functions of divine preserver in the celestial regions. In the course of his adventures on the earth he was banished by the king and took refuge in a forest with his brother Lakshman and his wife Sita. There they all led the lives of holy renitents, and achieved great renown for the miracles they performed. After various contests with evil spirits the good man at last destroyed their prince Ravana, and brought them all into subjection. After this great achievement he returned in glory to his heavenly abodes, taking with him those who had been. his co-laborers on earth. The Ramayana is principally occupied in detailing the battles and miracles of Rama, but moral maxims are occasionally thrown in. Here is a marked one: "The sacrifice of a thousand horses has been put in the balance with one true word, and the one true word weighed down the thousand horses. No virtue surpasses that of veracity. It is by truth alone that men attain to the highest mansions of bliss. Men faithless to the truth, however much

they may seek supreme happiness, will not obtain it even though they offer a thousand sacrifices. There are two roads which conduct to perfect virtue: to be true and to do no evil to any creature."

The primitive city, founded by Menu (not he who wrote the Institutes), is thus described in the Ramayana: "It abounded with merchants of all sorts, male and female dancers, elephants, horses, and chariots. It was filled with riches, decorated with precious stones, abundantly supplied with all manner of provisions, beautified with temples and palaces, whose lofty summits equaled the mountains, adorned with baths and gardens, and thickly planted with mango trees. The air was fragrant with the perfume of flowers, with incense, and the sweet-smelling savor of sacrificial offerings. It was inhabited by twice-born men [the regenerated], who were profoundly learned in the Vedas, endowed with excellent qualities, full of sincerity, zeal, and compassion, and perfectly masters of their passions and desires. There was no covetous person in the city, no liar, no deceiver, no one of an evil or implacable disposition. None of the inhabitants lived less. than one thousand years, and all left a numerous offspring' None of them went without earrings, necklaces, garlands, perfumes, and richly ornamented garments. No one gave the Brahmans less than one thousand rupees; and none flinched from performing the duties appropriate to their respective situations." Indeed, that was a city so remarkable as to exist nowhere save in the imagination of an oriental dreamer.

The sacred book Mahabharata commemorates a later incarnation of Vishnu in the person of Christna, supposed to be somewhat later in date than the Ramayana; though according to learned Brahmans it is attributed to Vyasa, and claimed to have been written before at the commencement of the Cali Yug, consequently more than five thousand years ago. Wilkins, the learned oriental scholar, thinks there is satisfactory evidence of its being four thousand years ago. Sir William Jones placed the date seven hundred years later, while Max Muller brings the date later still. For a pretty full account of the advent and teachings of Christna see Vol. I., p. 97. From the sculptures on the old rock temples it is

pretty evident that the date of the appearance of Christna in the world is not placed too far in antiquity, or to either of the poems named. They abound with the adventures of gods, goddesses, and heroes, described with great minuteness and a vast accumulation of incidents abounding in a glittering redundancy of metaphor so characteristic of Asiatic writings. The veneration in which they were held introduced many new ceremonies into their worship and greatly added to the complications of theological machinery. Heeren says: "The Vedas were the real source of Hindoo religion, but their mythology came from the later epic poems.

The Mahabharata contains the account of the contest between two branches of the royal family, the Coras and the Pandas, during which Christna sustains his relatives, the Pandas. This event is said to have been as famous in the ancient Hindoo traditions as was the Trojan war among the Greeks. The poem contains a celebrated episode, called the Bhagavat Gita, which contains lengthy metaphysical discourses and dialogues between Christna and his favorite disciple Arjuna. It has been styled the Hindoo New TestaSome quotations will be found from its moral teachings in the sketch of Christna in Vol. I., as above alluded to. It dwells largely on the subjugation of the passions and desires as a means of attaining to complete holiness.

ment.

Heeren says: "The poetry of no other nation exhibits the didactic character in such a striking manner as that of the Hindoos, for no other people were so thorougly imbued with the persuasion that to give and receive instruction was the sole ultimate object of life."

The Puranas, eighteen in number, and containing in the aggregate, as stated by some authorities, one million six hundred thousand lines, are thought to have been written at a somewhat later date than the two epics, but still a few centuries before the Christian era. They are in the form of dialogue. They were undoubtedly written by Brahmans and were derived from the same system as the epic poems, and carry out farther the same ideas and the same philosophy contained in them. Vishnu and Siva are almost the only gods named in them, and these are adored in the highest