prominent.  In Persia, where the original pantheon was almost the same as that of the Veda, this idea produced monotheism:  the minor deities became angels and the chief deity a Lord of hosts who wages a successful struggle against an independent but still inferior spirit of evil.  But in India the Spirits of Good and Evil are not thus personified.  The world is regarded less as a battlefield of principles than as a theatre for the display of natural forces.  No one god assumes lordship over the others but all are seen to be interchangeable—­mere names and aspects of something which is greater than any god.

Indian religion is commonly regarded as the offspring of an Aryan religion, brought into India by invaders from the north and modified by contact with Dravidian civilization.  The materials at our disposal hardly permit us to take any other point of view, for the literature of the Vedic Aryans is relatively ancient and full and we have no information about the old Dravidians comparable with it.  But were our knowledge less one-sided, we might see that it would be more correct to describe Indian religion as Dravidian religion stimulated and modified by the ideas of Aryan invaders.  For the greatest deities of Hinduism, Siva, Krishna, Rama, Durga and some of its most essential doctrines such as metempsychosis and divine incarnations, are either totally unknown to the Veda or obscurely adumbrated in it.  The chief characteristics of mature Indian religion are characteristics of an area, not of a race, and they are not the characteristics of religion in Persia, Greece or other Aryan lands[5].

Some writers explain Indian religion as the worship of nature spirits, others as the veneration of the dead.  But it is a mistake to see in the religion of any large area only one origin or impulse.  The principles which in a learned form are championed to-day by various professors represent thoughts which were creative in early times.  In ancient India there were some whose minds turned to their ancestors and dead friends while others saw divinity in the wonders of storm, spring and harvest.  Krishna is in the main a product of hero worship, but Siva has no such historical basis.  He personifies the powers of birth and death, of change, decay and rebirth—­in fact all that we include in the prosaic word nature.  Assuredly both these lines of thought—­the worship of nature and of the dead—­and perhaps many others existed in ancient India.

By the time of the Upanishads, that is about 600 B.C., we trace three clear currents in Indian religion which have persisted until the present day.  The first is ritual.  This became extraordinarily complicated but retained its primitive and magical character.  The object of an ancient Indian sacrifice was partly to please the gods but still more to coerce them by certain acts and formulae[6].  Secondly all Hindus lay stress on asceticism and self-mortification, as a means of purifying the soul and obtaining supernatural