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(4) Eigveda; vol. 12; Br, Ency., p. 780; title, India. A QUESTION OF MIRACLES 153 was, he thought, simply the temporary husk or shell where the spirit or self made its abode for a time. But the spirit or soul was immortal and without body, but attached to the body like a horse hitched to a cart. (5) "It is with us," said Yajanavalkya, "when we enter into the Divine Spirit, as if a lump of salt had been fiung into the sea. It becomes dissolved into water, from which it was produced, and is not to be taken out again. As the water becomes salt, and the salt becomes water again, thus the Divine Spirit appears from out the elements, and disappears into them again. When we have passed away, there is no longer any name." (6) This was an extreme view which Buddha did not adopt. The Hindu was more wise than Job, for Job said : "Though after my skin, worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God. Mine eyes shall behold Him!" (7) As I have said, all of the Hindus did not believe that they would, at death, be like a lump of salt thrown into the ocean. Some of their thinkers anticipated Bishop Butler by more than three thousand years, for they taught that this life is as the life of an embryo in the womb that "death might put us into a higher and more enlarged state of life, as our birth does." (8) Section 2. Now I ought, without further delay, (5) 12th Khanda Upanishads — the Soul or Spirit was the Ego, the I, the self. (6) Max Miiller's Sanskrit Lit., p. 24. (7) Job, ch. 19, V. 26-27. (8) Butler's Analogy, written 1776. 154 A QUESTION OF MIRACLES to say a few words concerning the general character of the Indian people. They have heretofore been treated as a despised, good-for-nothing, cowardly race, clear down at the foot of the ladder. On the contrary, they were a learned and thinking people. They were a nation of philosophers. They delved into the science of language, and constructed a Vyakarana (grammar) with nouns and verbs, pronouns and adverbs, particles and conjunctions, syntax and prosody, and an exhaus- tive Niruka (etymology) all complete at a time when the Greeks had only learned the distinction between nouns and verbs. But all this labor to construct a grammar was probably brought about by the growth and progress of their language, which was changing the very idiom of their original speech. They studied Siksha (phonetics), letters, accents, etc., so as to give the same pronunciation to the Sacred texts as the sages of old. They did not invade and conquer distant nations; but, ignorantly, they were practicing the precepts of Buddha and Jesus, when they lived quietly at home, doing ill to no one. Students spent from twelve to forty-eight years memorizing and repeating the texts they had learned from their holy books. They claimed that all that has reference to virtue and final beatitude was taken from the Veda. They spent their whole lives in studying religion and philosophy. Had they been a war-like people, and marshalled mighty armies, they might have overrun and con- quered Europe. That would have given them a great A QUESTION OF MIRACLES 155 page in history ; possibly they might have changed the whole current of huifian affairs. They were not cowards and afraid to die, for death, they considered, was a release from a degrading bondage to the body. In the earlier stages of their religion they wor- shiped the sun, the earth, fire, water and heaven. They had gods, many of them, but their chief ones were Indra, Agni, Soma and Varuna; then Prajapati, the father of all the gods, and lastly Brahma (God). Back many thousands of years, they offered bloody sacrifices to their gods, and there is some evidence that this included human sacrifices. (9) But later on, as we have seen, a horse was substituted, then an ox, than a sheep, then a goat. At last all bloody sacrifices were put aside, and rice cakes, barley and clarified butter were offered to the gods, for they said : ''Who- soever exists, he is born owing a debt to the gods, to the Rishis, to the Fathers, and to Men." (10) Their rice-eating ceremony corresponded somewhat to ours concerning infant baptism. (11) Section 3. Buddha did not believe that God either ordered or desired any sacrifice whatever to be offered him, except a pure mind and a heart devoid of evil. After six years of study and penance, this unsur- passed genius attacked the infallibility of the old (9) I have said elsewhere that the man was Kimpurusha, a mock man or monkey. (10) Satapatha-Brahmana, p. 190, vol. 12, Sacred Books of the East. (11) Grihya-Sutras, and Max Miiller, anc. Sans. Lit., p. 50; also vol. 11, p. 1, S. B. E. 156 A QUESTION OF MIRACLES Brahmanic faith. His first onslaught was against the growing abuses of the Priests, as they legislated for their one Gati (caste), and to protect their own exclu- sive privileges. They said, "the very birth of a Brahmana is an eternal incarnation of the sacred law ; that he is born as the lord of all created beings ; that whatever exists in the world is the property of the Brahmanas; that other mortals subsist through his benevolence ; that he sanctifies any company which he may enter, and he alone deserves this whole earth." (12) They said, moreover, that by "Sruti" (revelation) is meant the Veda, and by "Smriti," the institutes of the sacred law; and these two must tiot be called in ques- tion in any manner; that he who treats with contempt those two sources of the law must be cast out as an atheist and a scorner of the Veda, Here then was the issue: for Gotama, in attacking those laws, flatly denied their divine origin. This made him, according to the Brahmanic code, an atheist and an outcast, whose conduct was reprehensi- ble in the extreme. The priests of the Veda did not crucify him, but they sought in every possible way to thwart him and to beat back the rising flood. They would overlook his doctrine of being and non-being and all other matters, if he would only admit the divine origin of the Veda. On one point, however, (12) Laws of Manu, ch. 1, sec. 98 to 105; also sec. 10 to 11, ch. 2, Laws of Manu. That work is at least 2,900 years old and possibly 3,300 years old. A QUESTION OF MIRACLES 157 there was no clashing of opinions between Buddha and the Brahmans, and that was as to the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul. Transmigration, according to Herodotus (2: 126), was an ancient belief, originating in Egypt. But as the Egyptians are the children of the Hindus, we may well ask : Were the first germs of that old faith trans- planted from the Ganges, or was it the creation of some philosophic mind on the banks of the Nile? Perhaps we shall never know to a certainty just where the doctrine originated, but philology may yet unlock the door; for while we can learn but little of the history of India from its literature, and but little from its inscriptions on carved temples, language comes to our aid. Those fugitive and airy sounds, which seem so fleeting and so changeable, prove to be more durable monuments than brass or granite. The study of the Sanskrit language has told us a long story concerning the origin of nations. It has taught us who were the ancestors of the nations of Europe; and has told us that one great family, the Indo- European, has done most of the work of the world. "It shows us that this great family consists of seven races — the Hindoos, Persians, Greeks and Romans, who emigrated southwest from their ancestral home, and the Celts, the Teutons and Slavonians, who en- tered Europe on the northern side of the Caspian Sea. A comparison of languages has made this too plain to be questioned." In these seven linguistic families, the roots of the 158 A QUESTION OF MIRACLES most common names are one and the same. The grammatical constructions are also the same (13), and no scholar longer doubts that those seven lan- guages all came from one ancestral tongue — the Aryan. The Laws of Manu, in existence at least five or six hundred years before Solomon built his temple, men- tioned all the lands from the Eastern or Indian Ocean to the Western Ocean, as the country of the Aryans. Manu adds: "Let the twice born man who seeks to dwell there sanctify his body, and purify it with holy rites, and make it fit for a union with Brahma." (14) I have said that the Egyptians were the children of the Hindus. They were certainly not Negroes.