Woven out of the old-time _sagas_ of a remarkable people, “the ancient Aryans of India, in many respects the most wonderful race that ever lived on Earth,”[2] the Sanskrit epics must have a permanent interest for educated people in every land; while all Indian studies must have an attraction for those who desire to watch, with intelligent appreciation, the wonderfully interesting transformations in religion and manners, which contact with Western civilization is producing in the ancient and populous land of the Hindus. Not less interesting will such studies be to those who are able to note the curious, though as yet slight, reaction of Hindu thought upon modern European ideas in certain directions; as, for example, in the rise of Theosophy, in the sentimental tendency manifested in some quarters towards asceticism, Buddhism and Pantheism; in the approval by a small class in Europe of the cremation of the dead, and in the growing fascination of such doctrines as those of metempsychosis and _Karma_. Although it is difficult for the Englishman of the nineteenth century to understand the intellectual attitude of modern India in respect to the wild legends of its youth, it may help towards a comprehension of this point if one reflects that had not Christianity superseded the original religions of Northern Europe, had the Eddas and Sagas, with their weird tales of wonder and mystery, continued to be authoritative scripture in Britain, the religious faith of England might now have been somewhat on a par with that of India to-day--an extraordinary medley of the wildest legends and deepest philosophy. It is a subject for wonder how the gods of the ancestors of the English people have entirely faded from popular recollection in Britain, how Sagas and Eddas have been completely forgotten, leaving only a substratum of old superstitions about witchcraft, omens, etc. (once religious beliefs), amongst the more backward of the populace. How many Englishmen ever think, how many of them even know, anything about Thor or Odin and the bloody sacrifices (often human sacrifices)[3] with which those deities were honoured? How many realize that the worship of these gods and the rites referred to had a footing in some parts of Europe as recently as eight hundred years ago?[4] The almost complete extinction of the ancestral beliefs of the European nations is a striking fact to which the religious history of India presents no parallel. In Europe the great wall of Judaic Christianity--too often cemented with blood--has been reared, in colossal dimensions, between the past and the present, cutting off all communication between the indigenous faiths and modern speculative philosophy of the Western nations; while diverting the affectionate interest of the devout from local to foreign shrines.