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The ll ieratic Religion 8 5

fawn}: pictures Greek: religion when it confronts in final struggle, already in the throes of death, the growing belief of the future, as etill the Homeric theology; that is, crude nnthropomorphism, dashed with oeensionnl hut trmlhled visions of better things. The real rivals-3 of Chrintlnnity in the Gen» turies after Christ were Persian forms of religion: Mithrnisrn and Mnnieheism. Of Mithrnism Ernest Rennn once snid that if the world had not been Christianised it wtmld have been Mithraised; and Mnnieheism, tluulistic, exhaustively Gnostic, with its superb colouring and its appealing asceticism, proved for n time an even more dangerous rival of Christinnity.

We know from the history of the later classical Sanskrit literature that India’s climate and physio.- grnphy have kept her poets in touch with nature to a degree unknown elsewhere, until we come to the modern nnture poets. Even so, the transparency of h the Vedic .inntheon as a Whole remains surprising. This results in whet we may cell arrested personifiu cation, or arrested nnthropomorphism, and this is the very genius of Vedic religion, and more especially of the religion of the Rig-Veda... Nothing so much as this has enabled the early Hindu thinkers to think out anew, a second end a third time, what had been apparently settled to everybody’s final satisfaction,