We hold, therefore, in this regard, that the new school, valuable and suggestive as its work has been, is gone already farther than is judicious. The Rig Veda in part is synchronous with an advanced ritualism, subjected to it, and in some cases derived from it; but in part the hymns are "made for their own sake and not for the sake of any sacrificial performance," as said Muller of the whole; going in this too far, but not into greater error than are gone they that confuse the natural with the artificial, the poetical with the mechanical, gold with dross. It may be true that the books of the Rig Veda are chiefly family-books for the _soma_-cult, but even were it true it would in no wise impugn the poetic character of some of the hymns contained in these books. The drag-net has scooped up old and new, good and bad, together. The Rig Veda is not of one period or of one sort. It is a 'Collection,' as says its name. It is essentially impossible that any sweeping statement in regard to its character should be true if that character be regarded as uniform. To say that the Rig Veda represents an age of childlike thought, a period before the priestly ritual began its spiritual blight, is incorrect. But no less incorrect is it to assert that the Rig Veda represents a period when hymns are made only for rubrication by priests that sing only for baksheesh. Scholars are too prone to-day to speak of the Rig Veda in the same way as the Greeks spoke of Homer. It is to be hoped that the time may soon come when critics will no longer talk about the Collection as if it were all made in the same circumstances and at the same time; above all is it desirable that the literary quality of the hymns may receive due attention, and that there may be less of those universal asseverations which treat the productions of generations of poets as if they were the work of a single author.