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They said the Gods and the devils all sprang from Prajapati, the father of the Gods; and at one time the Rakshas defeated the Gods and were about to divide up the world. (9) But the Gods regained it by a trick : they brought forward Vishnu, a dwarf, and asked for as much earth as he could lie down upon. This being assented to, Vishnu stretched himself until he covered the entire world. (10) Those Brahman priests made a rule, as did the He- brews later on, that no one must make an oblation without a dakshina — that is, a gift to the officiating priests. If a sacrificer disobeyed this rule, the guilt was wiped off upon hiui. Moses must have heard of this law and approved it when he said, "None shall appear before the Lord empty handed." (11) The priests of India when they abandoned animal (9) If God created all beings, then did he not create Satan also? if there is such a being. Vol. 12, p. 59 and 144, Sacred Books of the East. (10) This contending of the Gods is exemplified in Milton 'g Paradise Lost. But this stretching of Vishnu over the earth, is it not, as Kuhn says, ' ' simply a legend of the struggle btweea light and darkness." (11) Exodus 23, V. 15. i88 A QUESTION OF MIRACLES sacrifices told the people that rice cakes possessed all the efficacy of the sacrificial animal ; that the beard of the rice represented the hair ; that when water was poured on rice it became the skin ; when mixed it be- came the flesh ; when baked it was the bone ; and sprinkling it with butter furnished the marrow. ( 12) At all sacrifices, the priest made use of a straight wooden sword (sphya), about twenty inches long, and when he raised it he said it became a thunderbolt against the Rakshas and all enemies. "I take it," he said, "with the hand of Pushan, not with my own; for it is a thunderbolt, and no man can hold it." (13) The Asuras, though vanquished at the sacrifice, re- turned to the strife continually. It was the same old battle in India seven or eight thousand years ago, that is waged against evil in America, and in fact all over the world today; except that the Hotri (priest) prayed that whoever had evil designs against the sacrificer, or hated him, might be put down and tied with a hundred fetters. And the Hotri added, ''O Divine Savitri ! ("God) him who hates us, and whom we hate, tie him down to the farthest end of the earth, and do not re- lease him." (14) Section 4. Who were those Rakshas and Asuras that had evil designs against the sacrificers ? And how (12) Satapatha, Vol. 12, p. 51, Sacred Books of the East. (13) Pushan was the distributor to the Gods, p. 53, vol. 12, Sacred Books of the East. (14) The Hebrew devil was only bound for 1,000 years, ch. 20, Eevelations. A QUESTION OF MIRACLES 189 did a belief in them so possess the Indian mind that they filled the Veda with it ? They not only filled the Veda (15) but their belief reached Persia and Baby- lon, where Ezra and Nehemiah, while prisoners, learned it, and carried it to Palestine. Thence it slow- ly filtered into the Jewish mind, and is now thoroughly embedded in the pages of the New Testament. This belief was first taught, we might say preached, in the land of the seven rivers, in the Punjab, in north- western India, exactly how many centuries back the Hindus themselves cannot tell. They think the first Aryan man lived millions of years ago. But if the first Aryans were in the Punjab eight or ten thousand years ago, that is a long time. The proof is strong and convincing that the Aryans entered India from the Northwest ; that then they were a fair-skinned, handsome people, greatly superior in intelligence and civilization to the aborigines, a dark or black race, which they found occupying the country. Here at once began a race war, and it had the same ending that all such wars have had since that day. The lower types were flat-nosed, hideous looking crea- tures, who battled for their homes, but without suc- cess. The all-conquering Aryan pushed them to the hills. He called them "Dasyus," "enemies," and to distinguish them further, used the word "varna" — color. In contempt they were called flat-nosed, and (15) The Veda is the oldest book in the world. Max Miiller, Bans. Lit., p. 557. It was memorized by many generations, but flnally printed. 190 A QUESTION OF MIRACLES noseless. Tliey were twitted of eating raw flesh, and later on were called monsters and demons. They disturbed the Aryan sacrifices, and wherever in any quarter they obtained a slight advantage, they would not permit the Aryans to worship. In short, they forbade it. And because they forbade (raksh) they were called Rakshas, "forhiddcrs." (i6) The Asuras were of the same piece. They were ene- mies of the Aryans, and so worked in conjunction with the Rakshas that they were likewise branded as "demons," "monsters," "goblins," "fiends," "devils." The Asuras must have been a tribe friendly to the Rakshas, for they joined them in confronting the Aryans everywhere. The Aryans, as a punishment, and in revenge, reduced some of the natives to slavery. This controversy or struggle between the Aryans and the aborigines in Punjab was freighted with a great and lasting influence upon millions and millions of people and on nations then unborn. For here, beyond all question, devils — personal devils — make their first appearance in history. The imagina- tions of some Aryan poets transformed those flat- nosed, unsightly looking, black-skinned, despicable human beings, from enemies into demons, monsters, devils. (17) (16) Forbade, in Hindu, is "Eaksh," hence Rakshas or "for- bidders." (17) The serpent, or devil, mentioned in Genesis, is a later arrival. The Hebrew devil does not actively appear until long after the exile, and until we reach the Apocrypha. The Hindu demons traveled West, and in the New Testament they cut a great figure. A QUESTION OF MIRACLES 191 Possibly if the Aryans, on their migration into India, had found a handsome, white-skinned, friendly race, the world might still be without a devil. This unhappy meeting of those two races took place in northwestern India, probably much more than six thousand years ago, and it may have been two or even four thousand years beyond that period. Those Aryan lords, in their lofty sneers at the dark visaged Dasyus, little dreamed that they were canoniz- ing them in history. Zoroaster must have heard of them, for his devils are simply reproductions of the fiendish Dasyus. Section 5. Whence came those flat-nosed Dasyus who have furnished prototypes, if not actual devils, for all our religions for all these centuries ? They were in India both before and after Noah landed in the moun- tains of Ararat. Were they the feeble remnants of ex- piring prehistoric man, or were they "made" in an Eden so far beyond Adam's day that all traces of it are buried forever beyond recovery? This, let the anti- quarians answer. The Dasyus had no Gods, or if they had, they made no mention of them. On the other hand, the early Aryans worshipped numerous Gods. But they said, "in the beginning" Prajapati (18) alone existed ; that he created all the Gods, and all the races of men; that of these, Indra was the greatest; that (18) There is a line in the TJpanishads that the Asuraa •wor- shipped the body, and they decked the body of their dead with flowers, 8th Khanda Prapathaka. Some translators make it that Prajapati was this universe. Vol. 12, S. B. E., page 384. 192 A QUESTION OF MIRACLES Soma was filched from heaven by a falcon. (19) Rudra was the God of the roaring storm ; Agni was fire; Varuna was the Lord of punishment, (20) and they propitiated him with songs. Vashnu and Siva were later Gods, and that they might not lack for num- bers, the Aryans invented, all told, thirty-three Gods. But finally all these were merged in Brahma, and that merging of Gods took place thousands of years before Buddha was born. (19) Soma was the juice of the moon plant from which the Aryans made a pleasant drink. (20) Varuna holds the scepter over Kings, Manu, 9:245. CHAPTER XVII Mode of Worship of the Jews : What Jesus Saw IN Jerusalem. Section i. We have seen in the preceding chapter that India practiced some of the most fooHsh and pre- posterous modes of worship imaginable. Let us now march forward to a period much later, and observe what the Jews were doing in Palestine nineteen hun- dred years ago.