all the virtues that human malice cannot vilify?"

Here, finally, is a truth for all time: "It is easy to persuade the
ignorant, still easier to persuade the very wise; but he who hath a
commencement of wisdom Brahma himself could not cajole."

Indian literature continued to be productive, though losing much of its
fecundity, until the fifteenth or sixteenth century of our era. Without
exaggeration, it is permissible to conject that its scope extended over
twenty-five centuries. It possesses the uniquely honourable trait that it
is, assuredly, the only one which owes nothing to any other and is
literally indigenous.




CHAPTER II


HEBRAIC LITERATURE

The Bible, a Collection of Epic, Lyric, Elegiac, and Sententious
Writings. The Talmud, Book of Ordinances. The Gospels.


THE BIBLE.--The Hebrew race possessed a literature from about 1050 B.C.
It embodied in poems the legends which had circulated among the people
since the most remote epoch of their existence. It was those poems,
gathered later into one collection, which formed what, since
approximately the year 400, we call the Bible--that is, the Book of