powers.  They have a conviction that every man who is in earnest about religion and even every student of philosophy must follow a discipline at least to the extent of observing chastity and eating only to support life.  Severer austerities give clearer insight into divine mysteries and control over the forces of nature.  Europeans are apt to condemn eastern asceticism as a waste of life but it has had an important moral effect.  The weakness of Hinduism, though not of Buddhism, is that ethics have so small a place in its fundamental conceptions.  Its deities are not identified with the moral law and the saint is above that law.  But this dangerous doctrine is corrected by the dogma, which is also a popular conviction, that a saint must be a passionless ascetic.  In India no religious teacher can expect a hearing unless he begins by renouncing the world.

Thirdly, the deepest conviction of Hindus in all ages is that salvation and happiness are attainable by knowledge.  The corresponding phrases in Sanskrit are perhaps less purely intellectual than our word and contain some idea of effort and emotion.  He who knows God attains to God, nay he is God.  Rites and self-denial are but necessary preliminaries to such knowledge:  he who possesses it stands above them.  It is inconceivable to the Hindus that he should care for the things of the world but he cares equally little for creeds and ceremonies.  Hence, side by side with irksome codes, complicated ritual and elaborate theology, we find the conviction that all these things are but vanity and weariness, fetters to be shaken off by the free in spirit.  Nor do those who hold such views correspond to the anti-clerical and radical parties of Europe.  The ascetic sitting in the temple court often holds that the rites performed around him are spiritually useless and the gods of the shrine mere fanciful presentments of that which cannot be depicted or described.

Rather later, but still before the Christian era, another idea makes itself prominent in Indian religion, namely faith or devotion to a particular deity.  This idea, which needs no explanation, is pushed on the one hand to every extreme of theory and practice:  on the other it rarely abolishes altogether the belief in ritualism, asceticism and knowledge.

Any attempt to describe Hinduism as one whole leads to startling contrasts.  The same religion enjoins self-mortification and orgies:  commands human sacrifices and yet counts it a sin to eat meat or crush an insect:  has more priests, rites and images than ancient Egypt or medieval Rome and yet out does Quakers in rejecting all externals.  These singular features are connected with the ascendancy of the Brahman caste.  The Brahmans are an interesting social phenomenon without exact parallel elsewhere.  They are not, like the Catholic or Moslem clergy, a priesthood pledged to support certain doctrines but an intellectual, hereditary aristocracy who claim to direct the thought of India whatever forms it may take.  All who admit this claim and accord a nominal recognition to the authority of the Veda are within the spacious fold or menagerie.  Neither the devil-worshipping aboriginee nor the atheistic philosopher is excommunicated, though neither may be relished by average orthodoxy.