Now, the Vedic Aryans appear in history at just the period when they are on the move southwards into India; but they are no irrupting host.  The battles led the warriors on, but the folk, as a folk, moved slowly, not all abandoning the country which they had gained, but settling there, and sending onwards only a part of the people.  There was no fixed line of demarcation between the classes.  The king or another might act as his own priest—­yet were there priestly families.  The cow-boys might fight—­yet were there those of the people that were especially ‘kingsmen,’ r[=a]janyas, and these were, already, practically a class, if not a caste[6].  These natural and necessary social divisions, which in early times were anything but rigid, soon formed inviolable groups, and then the caste system was complete.  In the perfected legal scheme what was usage becomes duty.  The warrior may not be a public priest; the priest may not serve as warrior or husbandman.  The farmer ‘people’ were the result of eliminating first the priestly, and then the fighting factors from the whole body politic.  But these castes were all Aryans, and as such distinguished most sharply, from a religious point of view, from the “fourth caste”; whereas among themselves they were, in religion, equals.  But they were practically divided by interests that strongly affected the development of their original litanies.  For both priest and warrior looked down on the ‘people,’ but priest and warrior feared and respected each other.  To these the third estate was necessary as a base of supplies, and together they guarded it from foes divine and mortal.  But to each other they were necessary for wealth and glory, respectively.  So it was that even in the earliest period the religious litany, to a great extent, is the book of worship of a warrior-class as prepared for it by the priest.  Priest and king—­these are the main factors in the making of the hymns of the Rig Veda, and the gods lauded are chiefly the gods patronized by these classes.  The third estate had its favorite gods, but these were little regarded, and were in a state of decadence.  The slaves, too, may have had their own gods, but of these nothing is known, and one can only surmise that here and there in certain traits, which seem to be un-Aryan, may lie an unacknowledged loan from the aborigines.

Between the Rig Veda and the formation or completion of the next Veda, called the Atharvan, the interval appears to have been considerable, and the inherent value of the religion inculcated in the latter can be estimated aright only when this is weighed together with the fact, that, as is learned from the Atharvan’s own statements, the Aryans were now advanced further southwards and eastwards, had discovered a new land, made new gods, and were now more permanently established, the last a factor of some moment in the religious development.  Indications of the difference in time may be seen in the geographical and physical limitations of the older