Now, what may this indicate?  To my mind, this:  that you are not to take these Sanskrit Sacred Books as the fruitage of a single literary age.  They do not correspond with, say, the Elizabethan, or the Nineteenth-Century, poetry of England; but are rather the cream of the output of a whole period as long (at least) as that of all English literature; the blossoming of a Racial Mind during (at least) a manvantara of fifteen hundred years.  I do not doubt that the age that gave birth to the Katha-Upanishad, gave birth to all manner of other things also; flippancies and trivialities among the rest;—­just as in the same England, and in the same years, Milton was dictating Samson Agonistes, and Butler was writing the stinging scurrilities of Hudibras. But the Sanskrit Hudibrases are lost; as the English one will be, even if it takes millenniums to lose it.  Full-flowing time has washed away the impermanencies of that ancient age, and left standing but the palaces built upon the rock of the Soul.  The Soul made the Upanishads, as it mide Paradise Lost; it made the former in the Golden Age, and the latter in this Age of Iron; the former through men gifted with superlative vision; the latter through a blind old bard.  Therein lies the difference:  all our bards, our very greatest, have been blind,—­Dante and Shakespeare, no less than Milton.  Full-flowing Time washed away the impermanencies of that ancient age, and left standing but the rock-built palaces of the Soul; and these,—­not complete, perhaps;—­repaired to a degree by hands more foolish;—­a little ruinous in places,—­but the ruins grander and brighter than all the pomps, all the new-fangled castles of genii, of later times, —­come down to us as the Sacred Books of India, the oldest extant literature in the world.  How old?  We may put their epoch well before the death of Krishna in 3102 B. C.,—­well before the opening of the Kali-Yuga; we may say that it lasted a very long time;—­and be content that if all scholarship, all western and modern opinion, laughs at us now,—­the laugh will probably be with us when we have been dead a long time.  Or perhaps sooner.

They count three stages in this Vedic or pre-classical literature, wherefrom also we may infer that it was the output of a great manvantara, not of a mere day of literary creation.  These three, they say, are represented by the Vedas, the Brahmanas, and the Upanishads.  The Vedas consist of hymns to the Gods; and in a Golden Age you might find simple hymns to the Gods a sufficient expression of religion.  Where, say, Reincarnation was common knowledge; where everybody knew it, and no one doubted it; you would not bother to make poems about it:  —­you do not make poems about going to bed at night and getting up in the morning—­or not as a rule.  You make poems upon a reaction of surprise at perceptions which seem wonderful and beautiful,—­ and in a Golden Age, the things that would seem wonderful