The St. Johns herald., 1895-03-28
OisCoNTENTED WITH THE GODS
Hindoos Constantly Struggling Between
 Polytheism and MOnotheism.


 Polytheism and Monotheism.
 ! The gods of India are everywhere, and yet they seem to be nowhere. The religion has been one long winter of discontent; one prolonged struggle on the part of the people to worship many gods under. many shapes, while ai- ways on the point of believing in one single divine essence as the cause and creator of all things; a hand to hand fight between polytheism and monothe- ism, in which the priests have contin- ually endeavored to play the part ot conciliators. Vishnu and Siva are now the chief contending parties, and the i priests have tried to make them agree by adding third supreme deity in the shape of Brahma Of this fact ingen- ious searchers after collateral evidence of Christianity have made capital, say l ing that Brahma, Vishnu and Siva are inseparable, and that the Hindoos are evidently in possession of the dogma of the trinity, says a writer in the Gen. ! tury. As a matter of fact this is pure nonsense, and contains as much truth as the parallels that have been drawn between Christ and Buddha, Christ and l Krishma, Napoleon the Great and Apollo. Archbishop Whately, in his great squib, showed once and for all the absurdity of such demonstrations. For the chief of Buddhist institutions was the monastery, and in no Catholic country have the mendicant and priest l ly orders ever hourished in such num- bers, ir such wealth or in such power as they did in India during the eight or nine hundred years which elapsed from the rise to the extinction of Budd- hism.
 The monks took the vows ot poverty and mendicancy as individuals, but the order, as body, owned vast estates, magnificent buildings and untold riches. Their error lay in severing themselves too much from the people, in making their religion too abstract for popular comprehension, in leading i lives which were too secluded to admit of any breadth of view and too well provided with good things for any great 1! intellectual activity. They have left but little behind them worthy to be ranked as literature. In countries where people live much in the open air, dress simply when they dress at all and eat what they can get, it requires little effort of imagination or skill of pen to make them seem as primitive as one pleases. As matter of fact, where 1t is very easy to live, or, at least, where little thought or labor is requisite to obtain the means of living, a nation en- dowed with any natural activity is very likely to devote its energies to intel lectual pursuits; and the result is sure to be state of national thought which, in despite of scanty clothing and rice for breakfast, dinner and supper, will turn out the very reverse of primitive. India is such country, and, so far as the Aryans are concerned, always has been. What it was before the Aryan conquest we have no means of know ing, but it is not at all likely that the modern religions and customs belonged to the nborigines prior to that date. 1t seems much more natural to suppose that the Vedic hymns and the Vedic faith-if we may so call it-were at all times the exclusive property of the higher class of Aryans and that popu- lar religions existed among the masses. as they do now, simultaneously with the highly-civilized belief of the Vedic Brahmans. The word brahmana, as designating a member of the priestly caste distinguished from the brahman, the officiating priest and singer of the sacred verses), is found only in the very latest of the hymns, showing that no such distinction was necessary before the fusion of the classes which proba- bly accompanied the sonthward migra- tion.