the Jerusalem Delivered. The Ramayon, of seven Cantos, has
twenty-five thousand verses, and the hero, Rama, in his
wanderings and misfortunes, is not unlike Ulysses. The
Mahabharata records the doings of gods, giants, and heroes, who
are all fighting against each other. It contains two hundred
thousand verses, embodied in eighteen Cantos, and is thought to
be not the work of one man; but different songs sung from the
earliest ages by the people, and gradually blended into one poem.
In it we find the ancient traditions which nearly all people
possess, of a more free, active and primitive state of nature,
whose world of greatness and heroism has been suppressed in later
ages. Among the Hindustans there exists a religion resembling in
part that of Greece, with traces of the Egyptian; and yet
containing in itself many ideas, both moral and philosophical,
which in spite of dissimilarity in detail, is evidently akin to
our doctrines of the Christian religion. In fact, the resemblance
between the Hindu and Christian religion is so remarkable that
some scholars think the Hindu was taken from the Christian. It is
more probable that it was of greater antiquity, and that the
similarity between them springs from the seed of all truth and
all Nature implanted in man by God. Indian and Christian both
teach regeneration. In the Indian creed, as soon as the soul is
touched with the love of divine things it is supposed to drop its
life of sin and become "new born."

In a higher region all these truths in the lower world which have
to do with divine things, are mysteriously akin to each other. It
needs only the first spark of light from above to make them
instinct with life.