repose it encouraged. The dominion which the Brahmins possessed is thus to be immediately connected with its results in relation both to its possessors and its subjects. There was a tendency to stagnation in the Brahmin civilization, as its own theology acknowledged. “I make myself evident," said the god Krishna, "as often as there is a decline of virtue and an insurrection of vice and injustice in the world; and thus I appear from age to age."55 It was a greater want of progress than the Brahmins themselves desired, that thus needed to be supplied by divine appearances on earth. But none the less universal was their desire to invest their institutions, religious and civil, with eternity. To this end, laws and doctrines without number were heaped together, as if to barricade the way to truth; and there, within the strange fortification, the priests stood sentinels, with quick-eyed watchfulness against the occupations, the affections, and the passions 56 by which they seemed fearful of being surprised. It was not long either necessary or possible for them to keep their post. The subjects or the assailants whom they dreaded soon ceased to try the guarded way, and crept among the narrower paths yet left them free; while the priesthood garrison relapsed into scorn and negligence from which 55 Bhagvat-Gheeta, p. 52. 56 The intellectual, not the sensual, passions; for debauchery and effeminacy were tolerated, sometimes encouraged. It is a great puzzle, however, to reconcile the actual lethargy of the Brahmins with their recommendations (addressed, indeed, to themselves) to activity. See the Bhagvat-Gheeta, pp. 43, 44, 53, 58, 60, or the Appendix to Robertson's Ancient India. there was not a desire or a fear to rouse them forth. 9957 Within the repose, as they termed it, which ensued, there lay the principles which bound the priests one to another, and the other castes to them, by lassitude as well as by superstition. The promise of the same god Krishna, that, "if one whose ways were ever so evil served him [and, of course, his ministers] alone, he would be as respectable as the just man," could be believed and acted upon only by men whose intellectual and moral natures were composed to uninterrupted slumber. It may be, that progress from the state they had already reached was the more difficult, because their civilization had been so early founded and so rapidly settled; for almost any error in faith or in government would be natural to early times and to an imaginative and a warm-blooded people. To do the Brahmins full justice, their laws ought to be more fully transcribed; 59 although 58 57 Bhagvat-Gheeta, p. 82. Cf. the Vishnu Pur., Book III. ch. 11. "Let him [the wise man] abstain from virtuous or religious acts, if they involve misery or are censured by the world." See also Book VI. ch. 5. 58We may so far accede," says the historian of British India, "to their [the Hindoos'] claims of antiquity, as to allow that they passed through the first stage in the way to civilization very quickly, and perhaps they acquired the first rude form of a national polity at fully as early a period as any portion of the race. It was probably at no great distance from their time, etc., that those institutions were devised," etc. Mill's History, Book II. ch. 1. 59 See Sir William Jones's translation of Menu, Colebrooke's Digest, and Mill's History, with Wilson's notes, Book II. ch. 4. These laws go farther than any general description, to explain the progress from an earlier condition of things. third book of the Vishnu Purana contains the laws in all their absurdity of detail. The there is nothing in them which does not easily correspond with the outlines of their system, as they have here been drawn. The character and the influences of their religion need be no further told. In this, as in the laws we have actually read, there is but the beginning of civilization; and the purity of which a true religion permits the expression, and the vigor of which a true freedom allows the exercise, could no more exist in this beginning, than the air can be soft or the sunshine perfect when clouds trail heavily through a winter sky. The trouble was, that the Brahmins would have hindered the heavens from clearing; they threatened an eternity of gloom in their metempsychosis, which kept the souls of men afar from the great substance into which they hoped to be received; and taught, as if too obvious to threaten, an eternity of subjection in the different heavens to which each of the castes was separately summoned.60 Some words, at least, there are which would persuade us to believe that the spiritual life of the more thoughtful was not bereft of holy visions and upward hopes. Again we trace the influences of the outward world, to whose magnitude and luxuriance the Brahmin was so apparently alive. He could not behold the effulgence of the skies, the serenity of the mountains, or the various clothing of the plains belong 60The heaven of the Pitris is the Vaisyas who are diligent in their the region of devout Brahmins. occupations and submissive. Sudras The sphere of Indra, of Chatriyas are elevated to the sphere of the who fly not from the field. The Gandharbas." Vishnu Pur., Book region of the winds is assigned to I. ch. 6. ing to his land, without an aspiration after the truth, to him imperfectly and sensuously known. The common drama describes a man, "the treasure of manly virtues, intelligent, liberal, and upright, who in the plenitude of his virtues might be said to live, while others merely breathed."61 With greater solemnity the poem of diviner authorship acknowledged a "spiritual application of the soul, exceeding even the word of Brahma." 62 Above all, the law, by which heaven and earth were believed to be secure, confessed, that," of all duties, the principal is to acquire a knowledge of one supreme god," as "the most exalted of all sciences," the only one which "insures immortality." 63 Perhaps the real explanation of the brighter gleams in all the ancient systems is, that they are the twilight of the evening to some day that was passed, or of the morning to another day that was yet to come. But be this as it may, the Brahmin, who alone was able to remember, was utterly unable to hope.65 61 The Mrichchakati, Act I. 62 Bhagvat-Gheeta, p. 67. 64 and internally bewildered, man knows not whence he is, who he is, whither 63 Menu, XII. 85. Compare the he goeth, or what is his nature; Bh.-Gheeta, pp. 45, 55, 115. 64 The apxaîós Tis λóyos kaì ñáTрios пâσι ȧveparois, which Aristotle describes, De Mundo, VI., ed. Bekker. Cf. Cic., Tusc. Quæst., 1. 13. And see Leland, Christ. Rev., Part I. ch. 2. 65 The following passage needs no comment; it is from the Vishnu Purana, Book VI. ch. 5. "Enveloped by the gloom of ignorance, by what bonds he is bound; what is cause, and what is not cause; what is to be done, and what is to be left undone; what is to be said, and what is to be kept silent; what is righteousness, what is iniquity; in what it consists, or how; what is right, what is wrong; what is virtue, what is vice." Such is the epilogue to the liberty of a heathen hierocracy! "Time CHAPTER III. EGYPT. indeed innovateth greatly, but quietly, and by degrees scarce to be per ceived." - BACON, Of Innovations. "Regiam civitatem Ægyptii... invenere."-PLINY, Nat. Hist., VII. 57. THE narrow valley of the Nile, encompassed on either side by desolate mountains and encroaching deserts, was crowded full of inhabitants in the earliest times of which the memory has been preserved. Nowhere had the human race more rapidly multiplied; yet nowhere, also, were the common resources of labor more inadequate to its subsistence, than in a country of such moderate extent and such slender soil. Every year, however, witnessed the return of an almost miraculous relief to the wants of the people, who would have perished, had they depended upon the labors of their own hands alone. In summer and autumn, the river by which they dwelt poured, as at the same season it still pours, its overflowing waters above the level lands upon its banks, not only moistening the seeds in the ground, but increasing the soil with fertilizing deposits from its own channel. The feverish air was cooled; the exhausted earth was strengthened; and the whole people betook themselves to festivals,' while waiting 1 Of which Herodotus gives a quaint account, II. 59 et seq. |