“If I were to look over the whole world to find out the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power, and beauty that nature can bestow--in some parts a very paradise on earth--I should point to India. If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant--I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we, here in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human, a life not for this life only, but a transfigured and eternal life--again I should point to India.”[1] Further, of the culture of this ancient people of India Sir Monier-Williams, sometime Boden Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Oxford, famous translator of Sanskrit drama, and author of many works on history and literature, speaks from an intimate knowledge of India derived from long residence in the country when he writes: “Indeed, I am deeply convinced that the more we learn about the ideas, feelings, drift of thought, religious and intellectual development, eccentricities, and even errors of the people of India, the less ready shall we be to judge them by our own conventional European standards--the less disposed to regard ourselves as the sole depositories of all the true knowledge, learning, virtue and refinements of civilized life--the less prone to despise as an ignorant and inferior race the men who compiled the laws of Manu, one of the remarkable productions of the world--who composed systems of ethics worthy of Christianity--who imagined the _Ramayna_ and _Mahabharata_, poems in some respects outrivalling the Iliad and the Odyssey--who invented for themselves the sciences of grammar, arithmetic, astronomy, logic, and six most subtle systems of philosophy. Above all, the less inclined shall we be to stigmatize as benighted heathen the authors of two religions, however false, which are at this moment professed by about half the human race.”[2]