The piety of the old Aryans admits of no doubt. We are told that the consciousness of sin is a prominent feature in their religion. The poet of the Veda searches eagerly for his sin, and finds it not in his will but in his condition, which even in his dreams holds up evil before his eyes, and at last he turns to his God, the God of Grace who enlightens the simple. He believes in the power of the gods to take away from man the heavy burden of his sins. “Varuna is merciful to him who has committed.” One more point should be noticed in any attempt, however slight, to give a sketch of the religion of the Veda. Max Müller tells us that it knows of no idols. This is the more remarkable when we think of the innumerable idols of savage and revengeful Gods by which Indian, Chinese and Japanese temples are degraded; all the nightmares of later monks who knew nothing of the pure and clean-minded Aryans, whose Gods, as Oldenberg tells us, in contrast to others, were bright and friendly beings without malice, cruelty and deceit. It has been well said that the highest value of the sacred poems of the Aryans is historic, and that value has been revealed by the comparatively recent study of Sanskrit. That is in the school in which we learn who the Aryans were, what was the manner of their lives, their religion and their thoughts; and we can, in a measure, trace much of what, after many centuries, led to the development of a Hindu school of metaphysics, in comparison with which the much vaunted Pythagoreans and Greek thinkers were as babes and sucklings. The very name Arya tells us that this ancient people was a race of husbandmen and tillers of the soil, the root _ar_ from which the word is derived being found again in the Latin _arare_, to plough, _aratrum_, a plough, and in the Greek ἄροτρον; and when we talk of our “daughters,” it is well that we should remember that our ancestors on the Steppes, many thousand years ago, themselves invented the word “duhitar,” the milk-maid, the very word with which we Europeans, in one shape or another, caress our women-children. The hymns and prayers of the Vedas abound in allusions to the herds and flocks of these old farmers, whose best friends—and therefore the objects of their adoration—were the sun, the stars, the rains of heaven; just as their enemies—therefore to be propitiated—were the storms, the snow and the cruel winds: these were—the life-givers and death-givers. The life of the lonely watcher of the Steppes was of its essence one of contemplation, reflection and introspection.