While the earliest light that falls upon our ancestors reveals them as a religious people, whose worship, simple and rudimentary as it was, indicated a sense of inferiority, and also, as one who ought to know informs us, “some sense of flaw in the relationship, some concept of sin and guilt,”[91] to the deities worshipped, it is to be noted that gods and men were felt to be too much akin to allow of spiritual aspiration, or of high moral significance in man’s religious acts. The ethical or rather spiritual elements so vital to the Biblical conceptions of religion may not be quite foreign to the earliest Veda, but they are scantily, if at all, represented in it. No prayer can be said to have ever been directed to obtain forgiveness, or growth in goodness, in the Bible sense. The sinner was for the most part only a defaulter in respect of offerings, and his guilt was that of a person who refused to render homage. That the gods might be able to watch over and enrich mankind, they had to be fed and sustained. The worshipper was thus in a certain degree necessary to the worshipped. The sense of submissive gratitude to the Deity which meets us in the earliest fragments of the Bible is not expressed, for religion was conceived of as a kind of exchange in which men purchased a right to divine help by service rendered, and “each man satisfied his higher instinct according to his own conception of the character of the being on whose favour his welfare was thought to depend.”[92] Centuries later, in another strata of sacred literature, composed in prose, dogmatic and liturgic in character, and designated Brahmanas,[93] we behold the same branch of the Aryan family in a further stage of their history. Their patriarchal age has vanished, and their heroic seems passing into the aristocratic and hierarchic. Caste has appeared as the invariable attendant upon conquest, when the victor is separated from the vanquished by language, complexion, and religion. It is not so much caste, however, in the ordinary sense of the word, as class, sternly prohibiting marriage not only with the aboriginal tribes, but between persons of unequal rank, and anticipating the organisation of European society in the middle ages. In the nobles, who were subordinate only to the Church, the burghers or merchants socially distinct from and inferior to the nobles, and in the villeins or serfs of the conquered territories, we have an exact parallel to the old Indian system, in which Sudra, Vaisya, Kshatrya, all formed steps in a social pyramid, on the top of which the Brahman was throned.[94]