The writing down of these invocations and the possession of the sacred books formed a new bond to unite the Brahmans into an order distinct from the others. The superior knowledge of the priestly families became of still greater importance. By appealing to these writings, which in the first instance were only accessible to the members of their order, they were enabled to find a considerable support in asserting their claims against the kings, Kshatriyas and Vaiçyas, though their contents told against rather than for the new doctrine. Strong though the impulse might be, which the variety of these invocations had supplied to advance the new conception of god, this body of ritual, with the exception of a few later pieces, was strongly opposed to the new doctrine. It was filled with praise of those very gods, which, in the view of the Brahmans, had given way to their new god. The way in which the Brahmans harmonised the songs of the Veda, where Varuna, Mitra, Agni, and Indra are each praised in turn as the highest deity, with their new idea of god, was a matter for their modes of interpretation and their schools. For the nation the chief object was to remove or conceal the striking discord between the doctrine of the new god and the old faith, a task all the more difficult, as the nation clung more closely to the old forms of the gods, though some, as has been remarked, were almost obliterated by the natural characteristics of the land of the Ganges, and the novel conditions of life in the new states. Small as the space was which the battles of Indra could claim in the eyes of the Brahmans beside their own Brahman, they could not resist the Veda, which testified to his existence in every part of the work, nor the belief of the nation, so far as to set aside either this deity or the rest. On the other hand, it was easy to subordinate the old gods to Brahman on the system of the emanation of everything in the world from Brahman. They were degraded into a class of higher beings, which had emanated from Brahman before men, _i.e._ immediately before the Brahmans. From Brahman the Brahmans first allowed a personal Brahman to emanate, unless indeed this personification had already proceeded from Brahmanaspati (p. 128), and was in existence beside the sacred world-soul, the impersonal Brahman. The personal Brahman was a deity like the old gods, but far more full of life. To him neither shrines were dedicated nor sacrifices offered,[194] yet before meals corns of rice were to be scattered for him as for the rest of the gods, and spirits. The personal Brahman, like the impersonal, was the result of theory and meditation; in both Brahman was a product of reflection, without life and ethical force, without participation in the fortunes of men and states, without love and anger, without sympathy and pity: a colourless, abstract, super-personal and therefore impersonal being, the strictest opposite of that mighty