(to ovtws ov), they could not believe in the existence of this passing world. If the one existed, the other could only seem to exist ; if they lived in the one, they could not live in the other. Their ex- istence on earth was to them a problem, their eternal life a cer- tainty. The highest object of their religion was to restore that bond by which their own self (atman) was linked to the eternal Self (paramatman) ; to recover that unity which had been clouded and obscured by the magical illusions of reality, by the so-calleH ]\[aya of creation."
In order to show " How largely this idea of the Atman, as the Divine Spirit, entered into the early religious and philosophic^.! speculations of the Indians," he quotes fi'om one of the Vedas a Dialogue in which, among other things, one of the speakers says : " Whosoever looks for this world, for the gods, for all beings, for this universe, elsewhere than in the Divine Spirit, should be aban- doned by them all. This Brahmahood, this kshatra-power, this world, these gods, these beings, this universe, all is the Divine Spirit." 1 The illustrations used by the speaker to show the relation of the phenomenal universe to God, are derived from the sounds issuing from a drum or a lute, smoke rising from a fire, vapour from the sea. He adds, " It is with us, when we enter into the Divine Spirit, as if a lump of salt was thrown into the sea ; it becomes dissolved into the water (from which it was produced), and is not to be taken out again. But wherever you take the water and taste it, it is salt. Thus is this great, endless, and boundless Being but one mass of knowledge. As the water becomes salt, and the salt becomes water again, thus has the Divine Spirit appeared from out the elements and disappears again into them. When we have passed away, there is no longer any name." ^
There can therefore be no reasonable doubt that Pantheism lies at the foundation of all the religion of India. There is, indeed, the same difference between the present complex and corrupt polythe- ism of the Hindus and the teachings of the Vedas, that there is between the Roman Catholicism of our day and primitive Christian- ity. There is, however, this important distinction between the two cases. Popery is a perversion of Christianity by the introduction of incongruous elements derived from Jewish and heathen sources, whereas the religion of modern India is the legitimate and logical result of the principles of the earliest and purest of the Hindu sacred writings.
The most accessible sources of information on the literature and
1 Eiitory of Ancient Sanskrit Ldieratwre, etc., p. 23. ^ Ibid. p. 24.
318 PAKT L — THEOLOGY. [Ch. m. — Antx-Theism.
religion of India, are the writings of Sir William Jones ; the writ- ings of Colebrooke ; the Journal of the Asiatic Society ; the works of Prof. Wilson of Oxford, specially his " Essays and Lectures on the Religion of the Hindus " ; Max Miiller's work just quoted. Dr. Duff's "India and Indian Missions, "and the histories of India, by Macaulay, Elphinstone, et al.
C. G-7'eeian Pantheism.
The remark of Max Miiller, that " Greece and India are the two opposite poles of the development of the Aryan man," is strikingly correct. The Greek believed in, and lived for the present and the visible ; the Indian believed in, and lived for the invisible and the future. Nevertheless there was a tendency in the higher minds among the Greeks to adopt the same speculative views as to God and the univei'se, the Infinite and the Finite, as prevailed in India. With the Greek, however, it was a matter of speculation ; with the Hindu, it was a practical religious belief.
Speaking in general terms, the different forms of Grecian philos- ophy are characterized by the effort to reduce all the forms of ex- istence to unity ; to discover some one substance, principle, or power, to which all modes of manifestation of being could be re- ferred. Sometimes this one substance was assumed to be material ; sometimes spiritual ; sometimes the obvious incompatibility between the phenomena of mind and those of matter, forced the admission of two eternal principles : the one active, the other passive ; the one spiritual, the other material. The fundamental principle or idea, therefore, of the Grecian philosophy was pantheistic, either in its materialistic, spiritualistic, or hylozoistic form.
The Ionic School. The earliest school among the Greeks was the Ionic, represented by Thales the Milesian, Anaximander and Anaximenes also of Miletus, and Heraclitus of Ephesus. These philosophers flourished from about 600 to 500 b. c. They were all materialistic in their theories. With Thales the one 'primal universal substance was water; with Anaximenes it was air; with Heraclitus it was fire. " It was the endeavour of this oldest of the Ionic philosophies, to jeduce the origin of all things from one simple radical cause, a cos- mical substance, in itself unchangeable, but entering into the change of phenomena; and this was why these philosophers had no room in their doctrine for gods, or transmundane beings, fashioning and