one is not persuaded by the examples given that this esoteric knowledge is intellectually valuable.  But with the Upanishads there comes the antithesis of inherited belief and right belief.  The latter is public property, though it is not taught carelessly.  The student is not initiated into the higher wisdom till he is drilled in the lower.  The most unexpected characters appear in the role of instructors of priests, namely, women, kings, and members of the third caste, whose deeper wisdom is promulgated oftentimes as something quite new, and sometimes is whispered in secret.  Pantheism, sams[=a]ra,[1] and the eternal bliss of the individual spirit when eventually it is freed from further transmigration,—­these three fundamental traits of the new religion are discussed in such a way as to show that they had no hold upon the general public, but they were the intellectual wealth of a few.  Some of the Upanishads hide behind a veil of mystery; yet many of them, as Windisch has said, are, in a way, popular; that is, they are intended for a general public, not for priests alone.  This is especially the case with the pantheistic Upanishads in their more pronounced form.  But still it is only the very wise that can accept the teaching.  It is not the faith of the people.

Epic literature, which is the next living literature of the Brahmans, after the Upanishads, takes one, in a trice, from the beginnings of a formal pantheism, to a pantheism already disintegrated by the newer worship of sectaries.  Here the impersonal [=a]tm[=a], or nameless Lord, is not only an anthropomorphic Civa, as in the late Upanishads, where the philosophic brahma is equated with a long recognized type of divinity, but [=a]tm[=a] is identified with the figure of a theomorphic man.

Is there, then, nothing with which to bridge this gulf?

In our opinion the religion of the law-books, as a legitimate phase of Hindu religion, has been too much ignored.  The religion of Upanishad and Ved[=a]nta, with its attractive analogies with modern speculation, has been taken as illustrative of the religion of a vast period, to the discrediting of the belief represented in the manuals of law.  To these certainly the name of literature can scarcely be applied, but in their rapport with ordinary life they will be found more apt than are the profounder speculations of the philosophers to reflect the religious belief taught to the masses and accepted by them.

The study of these books casts a broad light upon that interval between the Vedic and epic periods wherein it is customary to imagine religion as being, in the main, cult or philosophy.  Nor does the interest cease with the yield of necessarily scanty yet very significant facts in regard to eschatological and cosmogonic views.  The gods themselves are not what they are in the rites of the cunning priests or in the dogmas of the sages.  In the Hindu law there is a reversion to Vedic belief; or rather not a reversion, but here one sees again, through the froth of rites and the murk of philosophy, the under-stream of faith that still flows from the old fount, if somewhat discolored, and waters the heart of the people.