Thus early in the history of the Indian people emerged that sacerdotal institution which was to exercise so powerful and eventually so sinister an influence upon their religious progress. In Vedic times the father of the family and the rajah of the clan were the celebrants of the religious rites, but as life became more complicated ceremonies became more laborious, and men who had preserved the knowledge of the old hymns, and the religious formularies which had died out from the common people, gradually took the rajah’s place. As thought widened, men refused to be satisfied with guardian deities that could be fed with rice and butter. The sense of human law reflected itself in the conception of divine rulers governing men, and penalties inflicted by man for wrong-doing suggested expiation for the infringed laws of deity. This idea of sacrifice, of which there is said to be no trace in the flesh feasts of earlier times, becomes prominent in the offerings of the period. “The shedding of blood, the burning of a limb of the victim in the fire, by some at least was believed to atone for transgression, and it is probable that at one time the religious instinct expressed itself in human sacrifice.[95]” In any case, the development of the idea of the great efficacy of sacrifice as a means of compelling the gods to do the will of the worshipper—yea, of elevating the worshipper to their privileges and rank,—must soon have had the effect of making a priesthood, at first only helpful, to be necessary as the sole agents between man and deity. By preserving the memory of what had faded from the vulgar, by transmitting to their families a lore which became the more sacred the more it was forgotten, the professional liturgists or sacrificers, at first satirised by the poets as was the Romish friar by the minstrel in the middle ages, imperceptibly grew into an order whose privileges were more exclusive and whose pretensions were higher than were ever asserted in Israel by the descendants of Aaron. Among the Hebrews the priesthood was never allowed to gain complete ascendency. Its representatives were subordinated to the king, who was the fountain of all law, and they were kept in check by the prophets as the ministers of Divine revelation; but the Brahmans came to be regarded as not only the guardians of religion, but the teachers of all knowledge and the source of all authority. They owned no superior, were subject to no law in the state: each one was a pope in himself, more independent of the crown and the commonwealth than a Christian pope ever pretended to be, and had a faith in his personal infallibility which no Christian pope affected to have. In India there resulted from the ascendency all the evils that were manifested in Judaism and in Latin Christianity; and in India far worse results were produced. For, left to themselves as superior beings apart from the actual world, who never could err, they