speculations were entirely uninfluenced by anything which the Christian
Church, recognises as revelation.[2] Yet we must not on that account
suppose that they were without religion, or pretended to explain
anything without reference to superhuman beings called gods and demons.
On the contrary, they, for the most part, shared, subject to such
modifications as were imperatively required by cultivated common sense,
the beliefs of their native land. But the difference between these men
and their unthinking contemporaries lay in this; that the former
conceived of one supreme and comprehensive divinity beyond the reach of
common thought, an ultimate and eternal Being which included gods as
well as nature within its unity. So, for them, Indra, Zeus, or Jove were
mere modes of the one Being also manifest in man and bird and tree.

[Sidenote: The Vedas and Related Literature.]

Every race possessing even the rudiments of culture has been impelled by
a happy instinct, which, if we like, we may call inspiration, to record
in more or less permanent form its experience of nature, of life, and
of what seemed the mysteries of both. To this inspiration we owe the
sacred books of the Jews. But it is now generally recognised that an
impulse not wholly dissimilar also moved prophetic or poetic minds among
other races, such, for instance, as the Egyptians, the Chaldaeans, and
the Aryan conquerors of India, to inscribe on papyrus or stone, or brick
or palm-leaf, the results of experience as interpreted by free
imagination, traditional habits of thought, and limited knowledge. Of
this ancient literature a considerable part is taken up by the mysteries
apparently involved in life, conduct, and death. Most notably is this
the case with the ancient Indian literature called the Vedas, and such
sequels as the Upanishads, Sutras, and--much later--the Bhagavad Gîtâ.
This collection, like our Bible, forms a library of writings issued at