nothing is plainer, from this very epic, than that the priests, although united as a caste, were sharply distinguished in their lives.  The ascetic described above represents the fourth period of the priestly life.  Below these stood (apart from students)[11] hermits and householders.  The householders, or such of them as the epic unfortunately is busied with, the royal priests, seem to be those that are in reality priests only in name.  In the king’s palace, his constant advisors, his most unscrupulous upholders in wickedness, they gave themselves up to quest of wealth and power.  But one would err if he thus dismissed them all.  There were others that had no preferment, who lived in quiet content in their own houses, and deserved none of the opprobrium rightly bestowed upon their hypocritical brothers.  The hermits, too, appear to have been a mild and inoffensive race, not presuming too much on their caste-privileges.

To offset rapaciousness there are tomes of morality of the purest sort.  Even in the later additions to the epic one reads:  “Away with gifts; receiving gifts is sinful.  The silkworm dies of its wealth” (xii. 330. 29).  One should compare, again, the exalted verse (Buddhistic in tone) of ib. 321. 47:  “The red garment, the vow of silence, the three-fold staff, the water-pot—­these only lead astray; they do not make for salvation.”  There were doubtless good and bad priests, but the peculiarity of the epic priest, rapacious and lustful, is that he glories in his sins.

The chief objects of worship (except for the influence of the sectarian religions) were priests, Manes, and, for form’s sake, the Vedic gods.  These gods, with the addition of the Hindu Plutus (Kubera, the god of riches), are now called the eight ‘world-guardians,’ viz., Indra, Yama, Varuna, Kubera, Agni, S[=u]rya, V[=a]yu, Soma, and are usually simple and shadowy subordinates of the greater new gods.

In the shifting of religious opinion and in the development of theological conceptions what difference can be traced between the same gods as worshipped in the Veda and as worshipped in the epic?  Although the Vedic divinities have been twice superseded, once by the Father-god and again by the [=a]tm[=a], Lord, they still remain adorable and adored, active in many ways, though passive before the great All-god.  It is, indeed, extremely difficult, owing to the superstruction of sectarian belief, to get down to the foundation-religion of the epic.  The best one can do is to see in what way the old gods differ, as represented in the poem, from their older selves of the Rig Veda.  From this point of view alone, and entirely irrespective of the sects, manifold changes will be seen to have taken place.  Great Soma is no more.  Soma is there, the moon, but the glory of the Vedic Soma has departed.  His lunar representative is of little importance.  Agni, too, is changed.  As Fire in the Rig Veda is not only the altar-fire, but also