It would be useless to seek for a complete exposition of Vedic thought in the _Rig-Veda_; all the hymns found in it are not ancient; the collection was made by the priests, and if they retained much that was useless for our purpose in their worship, yet we should be very grateful to them, as in this manner much has been preserved to us of the ancient poetry of India, and it is they who recount the pilgrimage undertaken by the Aryans in search of the invisible lodestone which attracted them beyond what they could see and hear. As they advanced they rejoiced, seeming to attain their desire; but cast down under the weight of their sadness, as at times they found themselves misled. It is said in the Bible, that for God a thousand years is as one day, and as I read the sacred books of India, not as a learned critic, but as a man who is rejoiced to discover his own thoughts in the writings of the Hindoo poets, the three or four thousand years appear to me as one day during which these poets have not ceased to pour themselves out in their hymns, and it would be possible to condense in one page the sentiments expressed in the first hymns and the last Upanishads. “Simple minded, not comprehending in my mind, I ask for the hidden places of the gods.”[113] “My ears vanish, my eyes vanish, and the light also which dwells in my heart; my mind with its far-off longings leaves me; what shall I say, and what shall I think?”[114] “There is no likeness of Him whose name is Great Glory. He is not apprehended of the eye, nor by the other senses, nor by speech; not by penance, or good works. We do not know, we do not understand, how anyone can teach it. It is different from the known, it is also above the unknown, thus we have heard from those of old who taught us this.” “You will not find Him who has created these things; something else stands between you and Him.”[115] These detached sentences acquire a very special value, when it is remembered that they are not quotations drawn from some modern works, which imitate the writings of another epoch; these exist nowhere but in the _Veda_, a literary work composed in the silence and shade, by writers who themselves were ignorant of the object of their desire. One point at last becomes clear in the mist; a thousand years probably before the coming of Christ in Palestine, this verse was pronounced in the north of India, “He who is above the gods alone is God.”[116] The Grecian, Roman, and German divinities disappeared before other beliefs; but the Hindoos who knew that their gods were nothing more than mere names, had no dawning religion within their reach that they could adopt; therefore they did not abandon their traditions, and they continued to grope, as one of their own poets says, “Enveloped in mist and with faltering voices.”