change, decay and rebirth—in fact all that we include in the prosaic
word nature. Assuredly both these lines of thought—the worship of nature
and of the dead—and perhaps many others existed in ancient India.

By the time of the Upanishads, that is about 600 B.C., we trace three
clear currents in Indian religion which have persisted until the present
day. The first is ritual. This became extraordinarily complicated but
retained its primitive and magical character. The object of an ancient
Indian sacrifice was partly to please the gods but still more to coerce
them by certain acts and formulae[6]. Secondly all Hindus lay stress on
asceticism and self-mortification, as a means of purifying the soul and
obtaining supernatural powers. They have a conviction that every man who
is in earnest about religion and even every student of philosophy must
follow a discipline at least to the extent of observing chastity and
eating only to support life. Severer austerities give clearer insight
into divine mysteries and control over the forces of nature. Europeans
are apt to condemn eastern asceticism as a waste of life but it has had
an important moral effect. The weakness of Hinduism, though not of
Buddhism, is that ethics have so small a place in its fundamental
conceptions. Its deities are not identified with the moral law and the
saint is above that law. But this dangerous doctrine is corrected by the
dogma, which is also a popular conviction, that a saint must be a
passionless ascetic. In India no religious teacher can expect a hearing
unless he begins by renouncing the world.

Thirdly, the deepest conviction of Hindus in all ages is that salvation
and happiness are attainable by knowledge. The corresponding phrases in
Sanskrit are perhaps less purely intellectual than our word and contain
some idea of effort and emotion. He who knows God attains to God, nay he
is God. Rites and self-denial are but necessary preliminaries to such