[[1]] The old argument: there is immorality in the stones of the gods; ergo, the men must be the same, is a monotheist calumny. Books like Kingsley's Roman and Teuton, where all the vice is imputed to the Roman, and all the virtue to the Teuton, are merely an inversion of the fact. "The truth is," says Professor Lewis Campbell on Æschylus, "that while religious custom lay upon the Greeks with a weight almost as deep as life, the changing clouds of mythology rested lightly on their minds, and were in their very nature, to some extent, the sport of fancy and imagination." This is equally true of the Hindoos.
[[2]] The dictum of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, whose India is merely a misrepresented Anglo-India, that there ain't no Ten Commandments there, is superficially a truism, and essentially a foolish libel. No man has done more to caricature and misinterpret India, in the interests of military vulgarity, than this popular writer, to whom Hindoo India is a book with seven seals.
[[3]] The observations of Mr. Theophilus G. Pinches, on the means by which, in ancient Babylon, "an enlightened monotheism and the grossest polytheism could, and did, exist side by side," apply accurately to India. (The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical Records of Assyria and Babylonia, p. 10.)
[[4]] Olymp. vii.
[[5]] Apud Bocharti Phaleg. p. 184.
[[6]] James Mill's criticism of the Indian ethic is a criminal offence, a sin against literature. The coryphæus of the Inductive Philosophy, dogmatising on a language of which he could not even read a single word!
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