The part of man in the perpetual strife carried on between the two orders of superhuman beings is neither an ignoble nor a passive one. Man is not, as in most other religions, either the abject and unworthy recipient of gracious favours from the gods, or the unhappy victim of the malice of devils and demons. His position in the universe, as conceived by the authors of the Indian Epics, reflecting, no doubt, the prevailing ideas of their time, was a far higher one. Man is no nonentity in the struggle between the good and the evil forces of nature, but is rather a very important factor; for it is his especial duty to piously assist and _nourish_ the celestials by perpetual sacrifices, so that they on their part might have the strength to perform their respective duties in the government of the universe, and insure the repression of the forces of evil. Neither is man a merely useful but servile auxiliary of the celestials; since he may by austerities, sacrifices, and ceremonies, earn and acquire rights and power for himself, and use his accumulated store of energy at his own will and for his own purposes. Now it is a noteworthy fact that this high ideal of man’s dignity in the scale of beings has led in India to a degradation of the gods. It would seem as if you could not raise man without pulling down the deity; as if you could not exalt the human race without abasing the celestials. Hence we see the irreverent familiarity with which the highest gods, even Mahadeva, is personated by the Hindus in religious processions, or even on the occasion of the wild saturnalia of the _Holi_ festival, when a man painted white with a wig of long yellow hair on his head, a string of huge beads about his neck, and a trident in his hand--_the Supreme Deity personified_--is borne aloft amidst a crowd of excited men who are indulging in the grossest license of obscene speech and gesture. In regard to a life beyond the grave the writers of the Epics hold very decided opinions, a fact of great interest, if we remember that the Jews acquired their ideas about existence after death and of good and evil spirits for the first time in their Babylonian captivity, and passed them on as a heritage to Christianity; the conceptions of our great Christian poet, Milton, being strongly coloured by ideas which, undoubtedly, had their roots in Persian _Mazdeism_.