The Religions of India (An Old and Rare Book)

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THE following sketch of the Religions of India appeared originally in 1879 as an article in the Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, which is published in Paris under the editorship of Professor Lichtenberger. My aim in com- posing it was to present, to that class of readers who take interest in questions of historical theology, but who happer to have no special acquaintance with Indianist studies, a résumé, which should be as faithful and realistic as possible, of the latest results of inquiry in all provinces of this vast domain. At first I thought I might comprise all I had to say in some fifty pages; but I soon saw that within a space so limited, the work 1 had undertaken, and which I intended should assume the form of a statement of facts rather than of a series of speculative deductions, would prove absolutely superficial and be sure to give rise to manifold misapprehensions. This first difficulty was easily got over through the friendly liberality of the Editor of the Encyclopédie, for, as soon as aware of it, he handsomely offered to concede to me whatever space I might need. Other difficulties remained, however, besides those connected with the subject in itself which is one of boundless extent and intricacy, and which no special work, so far as I knew, had as yet treated at once as a whole. and in detailed particularity-those, viz., which arose out of the general plan of the work in which my sketch was to appear as an article. The Encyclopédie admitted only of a small number of divisions into chapters, and no notes.

INDIA has not only preserved for us in her Vedas the most ancient and complete documents for the study of the old religious beliefs founded on nature-worship, which, in an extreraely remote past, were common to all the branches of the Indo-European family; she is also the only country where these beliefs, in spite of many changes both in form and fortune, continue to subsist up to the present time. Whilst everywhere else they have been either as good as extinguished by monotheistic religions of foreign origin, in some instances without leaving behind them a single direct and authentic trace of their presence, or abruptly cut short in their evolution and forced to survive within the barriers, henceforth immovable, of a petty Church, as in the case of Parsecism, in India alone they present up to this time, as a rich and varied literature attests, a conti nuous, self-determined development, in the course of which, instead of contracting, they have continued to enlarge their borders.