the only religion which has ever commanded the personal reverence of men deserving the name of philosophers;-that it is, in fact, the only creed which has been able to maintain itself in co-existence with any extensive cultivation of the intellect of its disciples. I have shewn, and proof to any extent might be accumulated, that the master-minds of Greece and Rome utterly repudiated the superstition of their more ignorant and credulous countrymen, except as far as they regarded it as a valuable engine of policy, or wisely recognised the great truth, that there is no security for any social institutions, when once men's minds are practically released from the fear of future retribution. In no other idolatrous land has the expansion of mind been comparable to that which has given to Socrates, Plato, and the Stagyrite, to Cicero and Lucretius, and to many others of the same ages and countries, reputations which will expire only with the last generation of the great family of mankind; -for in this respect Polytheism has generally succeeded in perpetuating itself by the darkness which it has generated. Men become idolaters, because they are ignorant and besotted; and they remain for centuries in the latter miserable predicament, because they are idolaters. Still, doubtless, as I briefly hinted at the commencement of this Essay, there have been some few minds in every heathen land enlightened enough to feel the bitter mockery involved in the adoration of a stock or stone, fashioned by the hands of a rude artificer into a hideous caricature of the human form ;-in crying out "Deliver me, for thou art my God," to a mass of matter, devoid of sense and motion. But the religion of the Gospel enjoys this pre-eminent distinction, that whilst its scheme is level to the comprehension of universal man, whilst the simplicity of its doctrine invites and rewards the attention of childhood, and its ethical lessons are as practically addressed to the peasant in his cottage, as to the monarch on his throne,-it alone has maintained,-like the horizon to the traveller,-its position in advance of every progressive generation; it alone has manifested an inherent principle of expansion, which renders its mysteries as sublime and awful to the perceptions of the mightiest intellects which Christendom has produced, as to the humblest of her believing sons; and which has demonstrated that the God of the Bible is the God of civilization and knowledge, by the blessed compatibility that has been found to exist in countless instances, between the highest flights of genius or science, and the lowliest submission of the understanding to the absolute dictation of revelation.

It is but too true that Christendom has had,-as heaven had before her, apostate spirits amongst her children; and that some of these have employed magnificent talents, conferred for very different purposes, as instruments of rebellion against their Maker. But this fact in no degree invalidates my argument, because it is

equally certain that a very great majority of those who have been gifted, in Christian countries, with such distinguished genius as to render their names familiar to every ear throughout the civilized world, have paid the homage of implicit belief to a creed, which if it be not of Divine origin, if it be not a message of mercy from the almighty Father of Spirits, is a mere figment, devised, in the first instance, by a few Galilean fishermen, and principally preached and recommended by a poor tent-maker of Tarsus. There can be no third supposition:-either More, Erasmus, Bacon, Milton, Newton, Pascal, Locke, Boerhaave, Boyle, Fenelon, Butler, Warburton, Johnson, Walter Scott, and a thousand others of almost equal celebrity, have been grossly imposed upon in a matter which their earnest inquiries and recorded opinions prove them to have regarded as of the most vital importance, or the Bible is a revelation of the will of the Most High. Those great philosophers, however widely they have differed in regard to particular points of faith or doctrine, have all agreed that the same Almighty Being who endowed us with intelligent souls, has revealed life and immortality by the Gospel; they have all recognised its unspeakable value as a rule of conduct, and its paramount influence upon the temporal welfare of mankind.

Now I am far from advocating any blind subjection of the understanding to the authority of great names; such have often been found enrolled in the lists of error, and some stars even of that galaxy which I have collected to enforce my argument, are, in my judgment, utterly unsafe beacons to be implicitly followed by an inquirer after truth. But the base, even with the largest concessions on the score of fallibility, is amply wide enough to support the conclusion which I have built upon it; since my object is merely to demonstrate, that whilst votaries of all other religions have been confined to the credulous and illiterate, Christianity alone has numbered among her disciples the wisest members of the most enlightened communities; and attached them to her cause, not by mere vague assent to an indifferent matter, nor by the prejudice of education, but by the bonds of sincere conviction, founded, in the great majority of instances, upon an intense application of the understanding to those evidences on which the faith or unbelief of rational beings must depend. I ask no more from the rising generation of intelligent Hindoos, than the same candid and patient examination of the claims that the Bible sets up, which the intellectual giants, whose names I have recited, deemed them entitled to receive. Can they reasonably reject Christianity as a fable or a fraud, until inquiry at least as deep and earnest as that by which the fathers and champions of European Philosophy arrived at the persuasion of its Divine origin, have led them to the opposite conclusion?

One more remark and I have done. I entreat my Hindoo readers, when they are endeavouring to form an estimate of the value of Christianity as a temporal boon to mankind, to be upon their guard against the fallacy which rests upon the assumption that the moral truths which it inculcates and enforces are little better than self-evident propositions, which unaided reason would have discovered and rendered imperative upon men's consciences and actions, though no pretensions to special revelation had ever been advanced. Now, I am by no means disposed to deny that many of those modern writers, who have disparaged Christianity in these or similar terms, have laid down very pure and sublime ethical principles; nay, I will even admit that many of their moral sentiments bear such a stamp of divinity as to require that those who maintain the superior excellence and efficiency of the Gospel, in this point of view, should support their position. And truly this is a task of no great difficulty, when it is discovered that not one of the treatises to which I allude is any thing more than an ingenious paraphrase of that blessed volume, from which these authors have first drawn all that renders their moral systems admirable, and then repaid the obligation by reviling the victim of their plagiarisms. We may say of these writings, as the Duchess D'Abrantes wittily observed of the orations of the Theo-philanthropists, a sect which appeared in France during the great revolution,-that nothing but the fact that the Gospel had made the same discoveries in ethics some eighteen hundred years ago, can deprive them of their originality and value. But till the very light of the sun afford proof that the sun is not the source of light, there can be no validity in those arguments which would urge us to discard the Bible, because men with the Bible before them know a small,-a very small,-part of what it is calculated to teach them, and are blind or ungrateful enough to deny their preceptor.

It has been truly said, by one of the first modern authors, that' "because men have more light than their fore-fathers, they are apt to imagine that they have better eyes;" and the clue which this aphorism affords, duly followed up, will suffice for the exposure of the fallacy on which I am commenting. How happened it, if man's duty to his fellow-creatures, in all its grand outlines, at least, be either an innate and involuntary perception of the understanding, or a problem capable of being worked out and demonstrated by the mere energies of unassisted reason, that the master-spirits of Greece and Rome,-standing as they do in the very foremost ranks of intellectual excellence,-failed so completely in their attempts to frame a consistent system of ethics, that many of their opinions and maxims are utterly irreconcilable with the first principles of essential justice, and those doctrines of morality which now form the axioms of school-boys? Was Aristotle wanting in acuteness; was the

F F

mind of Plato,—the great pupil of the, perhaps, still greater Socrates, circumscribed in point of natural endowments and ratiocinative powers, within narrower limits than those over which any modern faculties are privileged to expatiate? I trow not: and yet the former philosopher maintained that nature intended all who were not Grecians to be slaves, and that the forgiveness of injuries was meanness and pusillanimity; and they both concurred,—as I have stated in a former passage of this Essay,-in recommending that steps should be taken to prevent weak children from being brought up. With regard to sensual indulgences again, and those too, of the grossest and most revolting descriptions, as well as in relation to that offence, which, with its counterpart prostitution, causes, perhaps, more misery and demoralization than any other offence that man can possibly commit against his species, Plato, Xenophon, Solon, Diogenes, Cato and Cicero,-not to mention poets and historians,-avowed sentiments which the most filthy debauchee would not dare to whisper, at the present day, in the ear of his abandoned companion. Why then did these mighty minds stumble and fall so often and so lamentably in their enunciations of a science which modern writers,-assuredly not their superiors, -have cultivated with such success; why are those great primary truths, which were concealed from the penetrating inquiries of Aristotle or Cicero, now recognised as principles too common and self-evident either to admit of doubt, or to be received, as a gift, with thankfulness? Why but because, through God's mercy, the blessed light of the Gospel, which never illuminated their horizon, has risen upon our understandings, and dispelled the mists of ignorance and error which find a congenial resting-place in the human heart. Why but because the Sermon on the Mount, and those beautiful parables, which overflow with moral instruction, and the Epistles of the inspired Apostles, were never addressed, in the mysterious providence of God, to those sages whose wonderful talents were only insufficient to conduct them to conclusions which He who bestowed those talents reserved, in His jealousy, to be the heritage of "the children of light," of the worshippers of that Jehovah, who will not share the homage of his creatures either with the idol of the savage, or the abstract phantasms of the philosopher.

III. A comparison of the Evidence which can be adduced for the Divine Origin of the Religion of the Vedas with that by which Christianity is proved to be a Divine Revelation.

IN a former paper*, 66 on the Connection between the Vedas and Vedánta," it was shewn, that the Vedas were written when the Sanskrita language was but in its infancy, while the Upanishads, the Gitá, the Vedánta Sára, and other works containing the doctrines of the Vedánti School, were the productions of a period, at which the language had arrived at the same state of maturity we find it in the Puranas and other modern compositions. It was farther shewn, that the doctrines of the Vedas and Vedánta appeared to be different; that while the authors of the Upanishads and Gitá have not had the hardihood altogether to set aside the Vedas, they have seemingly endeavoured to render them contemptible, by asserting that they can neither lead to the supreme place of felicity, nor teach the true knowledge of the soult. It is true that more modern Vedánti writers, as the author of the Vedanta Sára, translated by Ram Mohun Roy, taking advantage of the prevailing ignorance of the ancient language of the Vedas, profess that their system is founded on those ancient writings; and indeed at the present day the Vedas are held up by all the followers of the Brahmunical religion, of whatever sect they may be, as the foundation of their faith. It is our intention, therefore, at present to examine the principal arguments which can be adduced for their Divine inspiration, and compare these with the proofs by which Christians show the Divine origin of the Bible.

In order to avoid prolixity, we shall confine our attention, for the present at least, principally to the first in order, and most celebrated of those ancient writings, the Rik-Veda, and compare the evidences adducible for its divine authority with those which have been brought forward for some of the principal books of the Old and New Testaments.

The Rik-Veda consists of two parts; the Sanhita, a collection of hymns, containing prayers and eucharistic addresses to various divinities; and the Brahmana, containing precepts connected with the right performance of the Hindú ritual. "The prayers," as is observed by Colebrooke in his Essay on the Vedas," are properly the Veda, and apparently preceded the Brahmanat." It is with the collection of prayers, then, or Sanhita, we have more particularly to do at present.

*See C. C. Observer, No. 10, p. 116.

The soul means both the human soul and the Supreme Spirit, in those compositions; for in them these two are asserted to be one and the same. Asiatic Register, vol. viii. note at p. 381.