The “Adept” therefore has little, if anything, to do with difficulties presented by Western history.  To his knowledge—­based on documentary records from which, as said, hypothesis is excluded, and as regards which even psychology is called to play a very secondary part—­the history of his and other nations extends immeasurably beyond that hardly discernible point that stands on the far-away horizon of the Western world as a landmark of the commencement of its history.  Records made throughout a series of ages, based on astronomical chronology and zodiacal calculations, cannot err. (This new “difficulty”—­ palaeographical, t his time—­that may be possibly suggested by the mention of the Zodiac in India and Central Asia before the Christian era, is disposed of in a subsequent article.)

Hence, the main question at issue is to decide which—­the Orientalist or the “Oriental”—­is most likely to err.  The “English F.T.S.” has choice of two sources of information, two groups of teachers.  One group is composed of Western historians with their suite of learned Ethnologists, Philologists, Anthropologists, Archeologists and Orientalists in general.  The other consists of unknown Asiatics belonging to a race which, notwithstanding Mr. Max Muller’s assertion that the same “blood is running in the veins (of the English soldier) and in the veins of the dark Bengalese,” is generally regarded by many a cultured Western as “inferior.”  A handful of men can hardly hope to be listened to, specially when their history, religion, language, origin and sciences, having been seized upon by the conqueror, are now disfigured and mutilated beyond recognition, and who have lived to see the Western scholar claim a monopoly beyond appeal or protest of deciding the correct meaning, chronological date, and historical value of the monumental and palaeographic relics of his motherland.  It has little, if ever, entered the mind of the Western public that their scholars have, until very lately, worked in a narrow pathway obstructed with the ruins of an ecclesiastical, dogmatic Past; that they have been cramped on all sides by limitations of “revealed” events coming from God, “with whom a thousand years are but as one day,” and who have thus felt bound to cram millenniums into centuries and hundreds into units, giving at the utmost an age of 1,000 to what is 10,000 years old.  All this to save the threatened authority of their religion and their own respectability and good name in cultured society.  And even that, when free themselves from preconceptions, they have had to protect the honour of the Jewish divine chronology assailed by stubborn facts; and thus have become (often unconsciously) the slaves of an artificial history made to fit into the narrow frame of a dogmatic religion.  No proper thought has been given to this purely psychological but very significant trifle.  Yet we all know how, rather than admit any relation between Sanskrit and the Gothic, Keltic, Greek, Latin and old Persian,