waters under the earth

cats, serpents and other

reptiles, plants and flowers, rivers and fountains of waters, and especially the old prolific Nile with its ibises and crocodiles.

"Among the Egyptians," says Clement of Alexandria, "you find temples and porticoes, and vestibules and sacred groves; their halls are surrounded with numberless columns; the walls are resplendent with foreign stones and beautiful paintings; the temples are brilliant with gold and silver, and amber and many-colored gems from India and Ethiopia, while the adyta are curtained with gold embroidered hangings; but if you go into the deep interior of the place, and eagerly seek to see what you suppose will be most worth your attention, the statue which occupies the temple, a priest of dignified aspect, from among those who offer sacrifice in the most holy place, singing a pæan in the Egyptian tongue, lifts the veil a little aside, as if to show the god; then you find occasion for hearty laughter; for instead of the god you are seeking, you will find but a cat, a crocodile, a serpent of the country, or some other beast worthy only of some cavern, den, or marsh, rolling upon purple coverlets!" *

The vast and monstrous superstitions of the

* Pædagog. lib. iii. c. 2. For further information on the subject of Egyptian superstition, see Pritchard's Analysis of Egyptian Mythology, Iconographic Cyclopedia, vol. iv., art. Mythology:

Hindoo mythology are founded upon material pantheism, or nature-worship. Brahm, the supreme deity, written in the neuter gender to indicate his negative character, being simple existence without consciousness or will, all at once becomes prolific, and distributes himself" lying on eternity and the stars." The gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva are the result, being the creating, preserving, and destroying powers of Brahm or the Universe, adored, however, as separate and even contending divinities. Indeed, all things are deified in the Brahminic faith, men and devils, sun, moon, and stars, all mountains and valleys, all seas and streams, all hills and groves, all plants and animals, all insects and reptiles. These, in fact, are but the natural development of the supreme divinity. All the powers of nature, male and female, are adored with appropriate rites. Vice itself is deified and adored in endless forms, and the result is universal superstition, universal beast-worship; we might add viceworship, for Kalee, the goddess of murder, has myriad votaries. The Thugs or Stranglers are her sedulous devotees. They murder as an act of devotion.

In Brahminism the most hideous ceremonies,

Jablonsky's Pantheon Ægyptiorum; Wilkinson's Manners of the Ancient Egyptians; De Pauw, Recherches Philosophiques sur les Egyptiens et les Chinois; Kenrick's Egypt under the Pharaohs.

and even the most revolting crimes, are strangely mingled with sublime imaginings and thrilling fancies. God, as the absolute, is the beginning and end of all, an echo and exaggeration of the truth, but in this system a monstrous error. "His oneness," say the Shastres, "is so absolute, that it not only excludes the possibility of any other god, coördinate and subordinate, but excludes the possibility of aught else, human or angelic, material or immaterial." Thence he is conceived not only as in all and through all, but as positively and exclusively All, whether sun or star, weed or flower, reptile or man, vice or virtue. "Possessed of innumerable heads," says one of the Vedas, written, according to Sir William Jones, 1500 years before Christ, and according to Mr. Colebrooke even earlier than that, " innumerable eyes, innumerable feet, Brahm fills the heavens and earth; he is whatever was, whatever will be; he is the source of universal motion; he is the light of the moon, the sun, the fire, the lightning. The Veda is the breath of his nostrils, the primary elements are his sight, the agitation of human affairs is his laughter, his sleep is the destruction of the universe. In different forms he cherishes his creatures; in the form of air he preserves them, in the form of water he satisfies them, in the form of the sun he guides them in the affairs of life, and in that of the moon he refreshes them

in sleep; the progression of time forms his footsteps; all the gods to him are as sparks of fire. To him I bow, I bow."

Hence a return to Brahm, the silent, the unconscious, the eternal,- becomes the dream and desire of all. Utter absorption is the longing of the Brahmin and the Soudra, the philosopher and the peasant, the saint and the sinner. Through countless migrations from body to body, he hopes at last to reach the abyss.*

In Budhism the idea of the divine seems all but lost; but this, we doubt not, was its original foundation; though now the majority of its votaries deny the existence of an eternal, that is, of a conscious, ever-living God, and long for nigban, that is annihilation or absorption. Gaudama, or Budh, was once on earth, but passing away has himself reached annihilation, or the Burchan state. Budh, indeed, is properly a generic term, meaning the divinity, while Gaudama (among the Burmans, particularly) is the name of their last Budh, regarded by some of the Hindoos as the ninth incarnation of Vishnu, the same, there

*For a brief popular account of the Hindoo religion, see F. D. W. Ward's India and the Hindoos, pp. 267-277. Those who desire more extended information must consult Colebrooke's Essay, Miscellanies, &c., Sir William Jones's Works, Ward's View of the Hindoos, and The Journal of the Asiatic Society. Compare Van Bohlen's Das Alte Indien, and A. W. Schlegel on the Bhagavad Gita.

fore, as Krishna, who is supposed to have lived about the sixth century before Christ. Among the Burmans and others, he is simply a deified man, who has attained nigban. They expect another Budh many thousand years hence; in the mean while, they worship only images, and literally have no god. Here, then, amid forms and beliefs, which at first sight appear atheistic, we have the indestructible longing after infinite and eternal Being, which, in its reality, is God. The return to the All is but the dim shadow, perhaps the fatal corruption of the sublime idea of the soul's return to the "Father of spirits." It would seem, indeed, as if the entire Oriental mind revolved around this idea, and longed, blindly and instinctively, for this ineffable result. After all, their Burchan state is not absolute extinction, but impersonal repose in the bosom of God.

Another great element of the faith of the Orientals, which we find in many diversified forms, is the possible coming of God to man, as well as the

* Malcom's Travels, vol. i. pp. 241-248. Mr. Malcom endeavors to show that Budhism is older than Brahminism. But his arguments are not satisfactory. The probabilities are all in favor of its being the last result of material pantheism. It exists in different forms among the nations of Farther India. The best authorities represent it as a branch or a shoot of Brahminism. Its essential principle, namely, absorption, after endless changes, in Brahm, or the All, is the same. See Ritter, Hist. of An. Ph. i. p. 93; see also the second part of F. W. Schegel's Language and Wisdom of the Indians; Icon. Cyclo. vol. iv. p. 233.