The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-02-24


 It will not clearly appear to him just
 what profit is to be derived from mak-
 ing accessible this huge collection of
 ancient hymns and incantations. They
 are, in fact almost without trace Of
 poetical elevation, grossly superstitious
 and for the most part about as obscure
 in English as they were in the San
 skrit. Let us admit that this is not the kind of scholarship of which our universities at present are in greatest need. Yet in that patient taskWoFk Of
 the student, who, without ceasing and without looking much to the end, gath CTS and sits and arranges the brute
 material of knowledge, this must be Ireckoned a notable achievement. And more than that; one of the great re-
 volutions of human thought has come
 from the understanding of these reli-
 gious books of the Orient which have been made accessible by just this kind
 of self-forgetting toll. And no one can
 tell, in the years that are now upon us,
 what new light may be thrown upon
 our religious confusion by larger &C.,
 quaintance with the East. Certainly
 no Christian can deny the old saying,
 EX oriente lux.
 And there Is, too, the natural curios- ity of the historical sense to throw
 glamour over the Atharva-Veda.
 This great book of Indian magic is one
 of the oldest recorded documents of
 that branch of the human family to
 to which we belong. And if some would
 scoff at its outworn follies-well, Look
 to the hole of the pit whence ye are
 digged," as saith the prophet Esaias.
 And are they really 50 outworn as they
 might at first appear? We confess
 that, as we turned over the pages of
 this manual of an old faith, the lines
 of Emerson's mystic "Brahma" were
 continually in our ears
 They know not we'll the subtle ways
 I keep, and pass, and turn again.
 so elusive and so persistent Is the
 spirit of superstition. A large mum
 Der of the hymns are incantations to use either alone or with some herb for
 healing diseases. As a specimen we may take a few scatetred verses from !, a hymn which seems to have been a
 panacea against against all the ills of human flesh
 Headache, head-ailment, earache, anaemia, every headdisease of thine. do we expel out of thee by incantation. Whatever makes Q man dumb, !. makes him blind-every head-disease, etc, etc
 "The yaksma that creeps along the thighs, that goes also to the groins, from thy limbs within we expel, etc., etc.
 Forth from thy feet, knees, hips, buttock, spine, nape the bangs, from thy head the diseases have made dis : appear"
 The hymn was the property of the educated Brahmin, and the cure was ; Ieffected by the patients faith in the 1, healer, who no doubt sat beside him and mumbled over the mysterious : words. And there Is no reason to doubt : that many ailments were cured in this way. The force employed was pre- cisely the same as that which the 2 Christian Science healer calls to his . aid on a like occasion. The words , employed, whether three thousand years ago in the Hindu jungle or to- day in New York apartment, are of the slightest significance Their appeal is to the same faculty In the nearer, to the same belief that the acceptance of some particular religious formula : will bring the desired belief, 1. But Christian Science is being swal- flowed up of it's offspring. There lies Ebefore us at the present moment a : whole heap of magazines exploiting under various names the new thought l: process of healing disease. Some, like 1. the Verdic hymn quoted, depend on mere words or belief; others, to judge , by the advertisements, are like the ma : jority of the Hindu incantations in joining faith with some incredibly silly specific. The avowed number of !: Christian Scientists joined to the eli 2 entele of these magazines and similar s books, must reach up into the millions { And if to these be added the people who are ready to flock to any such \ bare-faced fraud as the recently expos : ed Force of Life" the mind is almost , sickened at the thought of the weter- ing mass of superstition that stnl ex- : ists. One may doubt whether the sum !: of it has really diminished at all since the Brahmins of India first grew fat : on their monopoly of the Vedas. Now {: as then, the degradation lay not in be- lieving that certain cures were effected by extra-physical means, but in the :. self-deceit and the spiritual jpgslery which has always accompanied the pro. S cess.
 !: There Is a certain enlightenment ir :. reading the Atharva-Veda side by side 5 with the literature of the "new. s thought. "-New York Evening Post.