“Before thy mystic altar, heavenly truth,
    I kneel in manhood, as I knelt in youth. 
    Thus let me kneel, till this dull form decay,
    And life’s last shade be brightened by thy ray,
    Then shall my soul, now lost in clouds below,
    Soar without bound, without consuming glow.”

Since the days of Sir William Jones immense progress has been made in the study of Sanskrit literature, especially within the last thirty or forty years, from the time when the Schlegels led the way in this department.  Now, professors of Sanskrit are to be found in all the great European universities, and in this country we have at least one Sanskrit scholar of the very highest order, Professor William D. Whitney, of Yale.  The system of Brahmanism, which a short time since could only be known to Western readers by means of the writings of Colebrooke, Wilkins, Wilson, and a few others, has now been made accessible by the works of Lassen, Max Muller, Burnouf, Muir, Pictet, Bopp, Weber, Windischmann, Vivien de Saint-Martin, and a multitude of eminent writers in France, England, and Germany.[31]

Sec. 2.  Difficulty of this Study.  The Complexity of the System.  The Hindoos have no History.  Their Ultra-Spiritualism.

But, notwithstanding these many helps, Brahmanism remains a difficult study.  Its source is not in a man, but in a caste.  It is not the religion of a Confucius, a Zoroaster, a Mohammed, but the religion of the Brahmans.  We call it Brahmanism, and it can be traced to no individual as its founder or restorer.  There is no personality about it.[32] It is a vast world of ideas, but wanting the unity which is given by the life of a man, its embodiment and representative.

But what a system?  How large, how difficult to understand!  So vast, so complicated, so full of contradictions, so various and changeable, that its very immensity is our refuge!  We say, It is impossible to do justice to such a system; therefore do not demand it of us.

India has been a land of mystery from the earliest times.  From the most ancient days we hear of India as the most populous nation of the world, full of barbaric wealth and a strange wisdom.  It has attracted conquerors, and has been overrun by the armies of Semiramis, Darius, Alexander; by Mahmud, and Tamerlane, and Nadir Shah; by Lord Clive and the Duke of Wellington.  These conquerors, from the Assyrian Queen to the British Mercantile Company, have overrun and plundered India, but have left it the same unintelligible, unchangeable, and marvellous country as before.  It is the same land now which the soldiers of Alexander described,—­the land of grotto temples dug out of solid porphyry; of one of the most ancient Pagan religions of the world; of social distinctions fixed and permanent as the earth itself; of the sacred Ganges; of the idols of Juggernaut, with its bloody worship; the land of elephants and tigers; of fields of rice and groves of palm; of treasuries filled with chests of gold, heaps of pearls, diamonds, and incense.  But, above all, it is the land of unintelligible systems of belief, of puzzling incongruities, and irreconcilable contradictions.