It has been very wisely remarked by a philosophical traveller, Dr. Clarke, that "by a proper attention to the vestiges of ancient superstition, we are sometimes enabled to refer a whole people to their original ancestors, with as much, if not more certainty, than by observations made upon their language; because the superstition is engrafted on the stock, but the language is liable to change." Writing on the same subject, Sir William Jones remarks, "if the festivals of the old Greeks, Persians, Romans, Egyptians and Goths, could be arranged with exactness in the same form with the Indian, there would be found a striking resemblance among them; and an attentive comparison of them all, might throw great light on the religion, and perhaps on the history, of the primitive world."
The Egyptians described the source of the Nile as flowing from Osiris; so the Hindoos represent the holy stream of the Ganges as flowing from the head of Iswara, which Sir William Jones so beautifully describes in his hymn to Ganga:
"Above the reach of mortal ken,
On blest Coelasa's top, where every stem
Flowed with a vegetable gem,
Mahasa stood, the dread and joy of men;
While Párvati, to gain a boon,
Fixed on his locks a beamy moon,
And hid his frontal eye in jocund play,
With reluctant sweet delay;
All nature straight was locked in dim eclipse,
Till Brahmins pure, with hallowed lips
And warbled prayers restored the day,
When Ganga from his brow, with heavenly fingers free,
Sprang radiant, and descending, graced the caverns of the west."
For composing such fine metrical translations of idolatrous hymns, Mr. Foster finds fault with the conduct of Sir William Jones: he writes, "I could not help feeling a degree of regret, in reading lately the Memoirs of the admirable and estimable Sir William Jones. Some of his researches in Asia have no doubt incidentally served the cause of religion; but did he think the least possible direct service had been rendered to Christianity, that his accomplished mind was left at leisure for hymns to the Hindoo gods? Was not this a violation even of neutrality, and an offence, not only against the gospel, but against theism itself? I know what may be said about personification, license of poetry, and so on, but should not a worshipper of God hold himself under a solemn obligation to abjure all tolerance of even poetical figures that can seriously seem, in any way whatever, to recognise the pagan divinities or abominations, as the prophets of Jehovah would have called them? What would Elijah have said to such an employment of talents? It would have availed little to have told him, that these divinities were only personifications (with their appropriate representative idols) of objects in nature, of elements, or of abstractions. He would have sternly replied—'And was not Baal, whose prophets I destroyed, the same?'"
Dr. Stiles, President of Yale College in North America, was so highly impressed with the amazing antiquity of the Hindoo Shastras that he wrote to Sir William Jones, asking him to make a search among the Hindoos for the Adamic books. Had he not been a sincere Christian, he would have asked Sir William to send him a translation of a book written some two or three millions of years ago.
General Stewart, who lived in Wood Street, Calcutta, was said to have made a large collection of Hindoo idols, which he arranged in the portico of his house. He was so fond of them that, it was said, a Brahmin was engaged to perform the daily worship, while he himself led the life of a Hindoo rishi or saint, inasmuch as he totally abstained from the use of either wine or meat.
Such instances of partiality on the part of enlightened Christians towards heathenism, we do not see in the present day. In the early times of the British settlement in India, there was a strong mania for exploring the untrodden field of Braminical learning, and the unfathomable antiquity in which it was imbedded. The philosophical theories of the Munees and Rishis, their sublime conceptions concerning the origin of the world and the unity of God, their utter indifference to worldly concerns and sensual gratifications, their living in sequestered áshrums, the practice of religious austerities, the subjugation of passions, and above all, their pure, devotional spirit, lent an enchantment to their teachings, which was, in the highest degree, fascinating. It was not an ordinary phenomenon in the annals of the human intellect that Europeans, possessing all the advantages of modern civilization, should go so far as to entertain a sort of religious veneration for a system of polytheism, which even the natives of the country now-a-days denounce as puerile and absurd. Deeper researches have, however, subsequently dissipated the delusion, and thrown on the subject a great body of light, which the progress of Western knowledge is daily increasing.