"In the hoary past India had mighty religious leaders and authors who laid claim to divine authority. Religious systems were announced, and voluminous, erudite verses were published for the guidance of the people, or rather the Brahmins or priests, which writings are still the Bibles of the Hindoos. The most important of these books are called 'Vedas,' 'Shastras,' and 'Puranas.' The lively imagination of the authors and the religious enthusiasm of the people were not content with a few deities, therefore their number has been increased from time to time, until they now amount to thirty-three million gods and goddesses. The most important of the former are Brahma, Visnu and Shiva, and of the latter Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati. The former are worshiped as the creating, preserving and destroying powers, and from these three all the others have originated; at first considered as representatives of certain attributes and principals of the three chief deities, but later as independent, individual deities. Many of these gods are represented by images and pictures, which originally the whole people, but at present only the learned, regard merely as representations of certain divine principals and attributes. Later on these were put in the place of the things which they represented, so that the stone image, the river, the tree, or the animal is regarded as the god himself by the ignorant multitude. "According to the Hindoo doctrine of creation the earth rests on the back of a tortoise, and the human race was originally created members of four different classes or castes. Thus the class or caste distinction of India is closely incorporated with its religion, and shows that the priests have been very shrewd in founding a religious system which secured for themselves not only salvation after death, but, above all, an abundance of the good things of this world. Brahma was from the beginning, and from him emanated Vishnu and Shiva. Thereafter Brahma created first water, then the earth, then from out of his head a man who was the _Brahmin_, and became the chief of the caste of priests, or the highest class. After this he let a _Kshatriya_ issue from out of his arms, a _Vaisya_ from his loins and a _Sudra_ from his feet, and which became respectively the progenitors of the three other castes, the warriors, the craftsmen and merchants, and the common laborers. These castes have gradually been divided into many subdivisions, but the four principal ones still remain with all their rigid distinctions. Through certain misdemeanors, which may be very insignificant, a person belonging to a higher may be degraded to a lower caste, but one of a lower caste can never rise to a higher, not even by the most meritorious achievements."