[235] The reader of Edward Beecher’s The Conflict of Ages, wherein the author attempts to explain the inequalities of earthly life by the theory of preëxistence, will be able to appreciate this effort of Indian philosophers to solve the same problem.
[236] Indian pessimism is doubtless to be attributed in part to the hot, depressing climate, but more largely to the burdensome caste system and an oppressive government, which made free and joyous life impossible to the masses, shutting them up, without hope, to an existence of ache and pain and wretchedness. “Politics and society, in our opinion,” says Dr. Hopkins, “had more to do with altering the religion of India than had a higher temperature and miasma” (The Religions of India (1895), p. 199). But cf. Bloomfield, The Religion of the Veda (1908), pp. 263 ff.
[237] Hopkins, The Religions of India (1895), p. 149.
[238] Ibid. p. 187.
[239] This Brahmanic notion of sacrifice, that the gods need food, is the underlying notion in all religions of which sacrifices form a part. “That the purpose of sacrifice was simply to feed the gods was admitted on all sides in the controversy which accompanied the diffusion of Christianity in the ancient world.... The altar, in the words of Dean Spenser, was merely the table on which food and drink were set before the languishing deity” (Payne, History of the New World called America (1892), vol. i, pp. xi f.). “It is on precisely the same principle that the Mexicans kept their great war-gods ... alive and vigorous by the blood of young human victims selected from their tributaries, and the Peruvians maintained the Creator, Sun, Moon, and Thunder, on whose favor their crops depended, in youth and vigor by the continual smoke of burnt llamas” (Ibid. vol. i, p. 484). Consult also Frazer, Adonis, Attis, and Osiris. All these were divinities of vegetation, which were believed to die and to come to life again, as with the revolution of the seasons vegetation died and was renewed. Along with this belief went the notion that by magical ceremonies the worshipers of the gods could aid them in recovering their wasted energies.
[240] Laws of Manu, i. 88–91.
[241] Ibid. i. 93.
[242] Ibid. ii. 32, 35.
[243] The Gentoo Code (1776), xvi. 1.
[244] Laws of Manu, iv. 80, 81.