up the church” as is described in a missionary report delivered at the last meeting of the Missionary Union of the Classis of New York for the current year:  “A man is sent to ride on a bicycle as fast as he can through the different streets.  This invariably attracts attention.  Boys and men follow him to the church, where it is easy to persuade them to enter.”  But this is an admission of our position in regard to the classes affected.  The rabble may be Christianized by this means, but the intelligent will not be attracted.]

[Footnote 44:  After the greater part of our work had passed the final revision, and several months after the whole was gone to press, appeared Oldenberg’s Die Religion des Veda, which, as the last new book on the subject, deserves a special note.  The author here takes a liberal view, and does not hesitate to illustrate Vedic religion with the light cast by other forms of superstition.  But this method has its dangers, and there is perhaps a little too much straining after original types, giant-gods as prototypes and totemism in proper names, where Vedic data should be separated from what may have preceded Vedic belief.  Oldenberg, as a ritualist, finds in Varuna, Dawn, and the Burial Service the inevitable stumbling-blocks of such scholars as confuse Brahmanism with early Vedism.  To remove these obstacles he suggests that Varuna, as the moon, was borrowed from the Semites or Akkadians (though be frankly admits that not even the shadow of this moon lingers in Vedic belief); explains Dawn’s non-participation in soma by stating that she never participates in it (which explains nothing); and jumps over the Burial Hymn with the inquiry whether, after all, it could not be interpreted as a cremation-hymn (the obvious answer being that the service does imply burial, and does not even hint at cremation).  On the other hand, when theoretical barbarism and ritualism are foregone, Oldenberg has a true eye for the estimation of facts, and hence takes an unimpeachable position in several important particulars, notably in rejecting Jacobi’s date of the Rig Veda; in rejecting also Hillebrandt’s moon-soma; in denying an originally supreme Dy[=a]us; in his explanation of henotheism (substantially one with the explanation we gave a year ago); and in his account of the relation of the Rig Veda to the (later) Atharvan.  Despite an occasional brilliant suggestion, which makes the work more exciting than reliable, this book will prove of great value to them that are particularly interested in the ritual; though the reader must be on his guard against the substitution of deduction for induction, as manifested in the confusion of epochs, and in the tendency to interpret by analogy rather than in accordance with historical data.  The worth of the latter part of the book is impaired by an unsubstantiated theory of sacrifice, but as a whole it presents a clear and valuable view of the cult.]

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