As long as my health allows me to do so I shall be quite willing to continue what has been a labour of love to me during many years of my life. It was not always an easy task. The constant correspondence with my fellow-workers has taxed my time and my strength far more than I expected. The difficulty was not only to select from the very large mass of Sacred Books those that seemed most important and most likely to be useful for enabling us to gain a correct view of the great religions of the East, but to find scholars competent and willing to undertake the labour of translation. I can perfectly understand the unwillingness of most scholars to devote their time to mere translations. With every year the translation of such works as the Veda or the Avesta, instead of becoming easier, becomes really more perplexing and more difficult. Difficulties of which we formerly had no suspicion have been brought to light by the ever-increasing number of fresh students, and precautions have now to be taken against dangers the very existence of which was never dreamt of in former years. I do not exaggerate when I say that the translation of some of the hymns of the Veda, often clearly corrupt in the original, has become as difficult as the deciphering of hieroglyphic or cuneiform inscriptions, where at all events the text may be depended on. What critical scholars like is to translate a verse here and a verse there, possibly a hymn or a whole chapter with various readings, critical notes and brilliant conjectures; but to translate a whole book without shirking a single line is a task from which most of them recoil. Nor have the labours of those who have hitherto ventured on a more complete translation of the Rig-veda, such as Wilson, Grassmann, Ludwig and Griffith, been received as they ought to have been, with gratitude for what they have achieved, and with allowances for what they failed to achieve. I therefore remarked in the Preface to the first volume of this collection, p. xlii: