There are some considerations, however, which render it probable that it was in India where its earliest manifestations were exhibited. Whatever impurities and abominations may have clustered round it in comparatively modern times, the fact must not be lost sight of, that in its earlier phases in that country nothing was associated with it that was calculated to cause any offence to the most refined and modest of minds. Very little judgment is needed to understand that the tendency of practices thus appealing to the most easily excited of the animal passions would be downward rather than upward, that instead of growing pure and free from the taint of lustful desires, the almost inevitable fruit would be impurity and licentious indulgence; it is not likely therefore that the more respectable worship of early India would be the product of the gross practices of the other nations we have named. We can see clearly enough, we think, the origin of this worship resting upon the highest aspirations of the human soul. In endeavouring to frame a theological system and arrange a method of worship to meet the cravings of the mind for intercourse with the creative powers of the universe, men would be sure to fix their thoughts upon those means and agents by which living beings and things were brought into existence, and which, to say the least of it, acted as secondary causes in the creative work. These, of course, would be the generative organs of men and animals in general, and for want of better and more exalted teaching, they would easily enough persuade themselves that it was a proper thing to worship the power symbolized by such objects, if they did not actually worship the objects themselves. Perhaps originally, the first of these two ideas was all that was intended or contemplated, for it is undeniable that many cases have come under our notice in which men were really rendering adoration to an unknown spiritual power when they appeared to be doing nothing but worshipping a graven image. There is no doubt the religious system of the Hindus is very ancient, and it has been supposed by some that it was formed about the same time as that of the Egyptians, from which that of the Greeks and other western nations was in some measure derived. Many points of resemblance have been observed between them, too many, and too striking, to have been fortuitous. Even some of the inhabitants of Ethiopia appear to have been of the same origin with those of Hindostan, and both the Ethiopians and Egyptians seem to have had some connection or intercourse with the Hindoos; but of what kind it was, or when it subsisted, we have no certain account; and they appear to have been so long separated, that at present they are in total ignorance of each other.