possibly escape this fate;--flight from the world; the voluntary acceptance of the most severe unbroken torture imposed upon the body; the annihilation of the body and finally of the soul by absorption through meditation into Brahman. Did a man really arrive at the goal by this rough way?--did he by inexorable persecution of himself to the extremest limits become elevated above a new birth, and so above a new torture of life? The conception of such endless torment must have pressed the more heavily upon the people as the hot climate in which they lived naturally awaked in them the desire for repose, a desire which increased with the increasing oppression of the state and religious duties, and was strengthened by the fact that these causes at the same time allowed the resistance which every healthy and strong nation can make to such oppressions and demands to slumber. But complaint was inadmissible. All the misfortune which a man had to bear now and expect in the future was not an unmerited disaster, but a just ordinance of the righteous arrangement of the world, the verdict and expression of divine justice itself. Whether any one was born as a man or an animal, his position and caste, and the conditions of his birth, the fortune he experienced, were consequences, the reward or punishment, of actions done in a previous state of existence; they were the sentences of a justice which none could escape, of the divine order of the world, to which a man must submit without murmurs. The Brahmans were right, the world was full of evils; life was a chain of miseries, and the earth a vale of misery. Pity and grace were nowhere to be found, only justice and punishment, only righteous retribution. In past days, indeed, the Aryas had cried to Varuna to be gracious, to pardon and blot out the offences which men had committed against the gods, intentionally or involuntarily, from an evil heart or from weakness and seduction (p. 53). But the theory which the Brahmans had subsequently elevated to be the highest duty was without sympathy or pity; it could only allot to every man, in the alternation of birth and decay, the fruits of his deeds. No doubt the people, impelled by the necessity to have above them conceivable, comprehensible, helpful spirits, elevated Vishnu and Çiva from among the faded and dishonoured forms of the ancient deities to be the protecting powers of their life in opposition to the god of the Brahmans; but though these gave rain and increase to the pastures and the fields, though they cherished kindly feelings towards men, they were powerless against the punishments after death, against regenerations, or the existing order of the world, against the merciless justice of the gods, which recompensed every one inexorably according to his works, and caused every one to be born again without end to new torments. The old healthy pleasure in life which would live for a hundred autumns, and