So much, then, for the age of the Vedic literature.  It passed, and we come to an age when that literature had become sacred.  It seems to me that in the natural course of things it would take a very long time for this to happen.  You may say that in the one analogy we have whose history is well known,—­the Koran,—­we have an example of a book sacred as soon as written.  But I do not believe the analogy would hold good here.  The Koran came as the rallying-standard of a movement which was designed to work quick changes in the outer fabric of the world; it came when the cycles had sunk below any possibility of floating spiritual wisdom on to the world-currents;—­and there were the precedents of Judaism and Christianity, ever before the eyes of Mohammed, for making the new religious movement center about a Book.  But in ancient India, I take it, you had some such state of affairs as this:  classes there would be, according to the natural differences of egos incarnating; but no castes; religion there was,—­that is to say, an attention to, an aspiration towards, the spiritual side of life; but no religions,—­no snarling sects and jangling foolish creeds.  Those things (a God’s mercy!) had not been invented then, nor were to be for thousands of years.  The foremost souls, the most spiritual, gravitated upward to the headship of tribes and nations; they were the kings, as was proper they should be:  King-Initiates, Teachers as well as Rulers of the people.  And they ordained public ceremonies in which the people, coming together, could invoke and participate in the Life from Above.  So we read in the Upanishads of those great Kshattriya Teachers to whom Brahmans came as disciples.  Poets made their verses; and what of these were good, really inspired, suitable—­what came from the souls of Poet-Initiates,—­ would be used at such ceremonies:  sung by the assembled multitudes; and presently, by men specially trained to sing them.  So a class rose with this special function; and there were other functions in connexion with these ceremonies, not proper to be performed by the kings, and which needed a special training to carry out.  Here, then, was an opening in life for men of the right temperament;—­so a class arose, of priests: among whom many might be real Initiates and disciples of the Adept-Kings.  They had the business of taking care of the literature sanctioned for use at the sacrifices,—­for convenience we may call all the sacred ceremonies that,—­at which they performed the ritual and carried out the mechanical and formal parts.  It is very easy to imagine how, as the cycles went on and down, and the Adept-Kings ceased to incarnate continuously, these religious officials would have crystallized themselves into a close corporation, an hereditary caste; and what power their custodianship of the sacrificial literature would have given them;—­how that literature would have come to be not merely sacred in the sense that all true poetry with the inspiration