his best friends.  It is a sublime conservatism; as wide as the world, and as unwearied as time; preserving the universe with Asiatic anxiety, in that state in which it appeared to their minds.  These philosophers dwell on the inevitability and unchangeableness of laws, on the power of temperament and constitution, the three goon or qualities, and the circumstances of birth and affinity.  The end is an immense consolation; eternal absorption in Brahma.  Their speculations never venture beyond their own table-lands, though they are high and vast as they.  Buoyancy, freedom, flexibility, variety, possibility, which also are qualities of the Unnamed, they deal not with.  The undeserved reward is to be earned by an everlasting moral drudgery; the incalculable promise of the morrow is, as it were, weighed.  And who will say that their conservatism has not been effectual?  “Assuredly,” says a French translator, speaking of the antiquity and durability of the Chinese and Indian nations, and of the wisdom of their legislators, “there are there some vestiges of the eternal laws which govern the world.”

Christianity, on the other hand, is humane, practical, and, in a large sense, radical.  So many years and ages of the gods those Eastern sages sat contemplating Brahm, uttering in silence the mystic “Om,” being absorbed into the essence of the Supreme Being, never going out of themselves, but subsiding farther and deeper within; so infinitely wise, yet infinitely stagnant; until, at last, in that same Asia, but in the western part of it, appeared a youth, wholly unforetold by them,—­not being absorbed into Brahm, but bringing Brahm down to earth and to mankind; in whom Brahm had awaked from his long sleep, and exerted himself, and the day began,—­a new avatar.  The Brahman had never thought to be a brother of mankind as well as a child of God.  Christ is the prince of Reformers and Radicals.  Many expressions in the New Testament come naturally to the lips of all Protestants, and it furnishes the most pregnant and practical texts.  There is no harmless dreaming, no wise speculation in it, but everywhere a substratum of good sense.  It never reflects, but it repents.  There is no poetry in it, we may say nothing regarded in the light of beauty merely, but moral truth is its object.  All mortals are convicted by its conscience.

The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality; the best of the Hindo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality.  The reader is nowhere raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta.  Warren Hastings, in his sensible letter recommending the translation of this book to the Chairman of the East India Company, declares the original to be “of a sublimity of conception, reasoning, and diction almost unequalled,” and that the writings of the Indian philosophers “will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it