From the frequent mention of the books of Hindù sacred literature made in this work, the following short account of them, taken chiefly from Asiatic Researches, vol. i. No. 18, may be useful to the reader.

There are eighteen Vidyas or parts of true knowledge. The first are the four Vedas, a word signifying that which is known or revealed. They are distinguished by the names of Rich, Yajush, Saman, and Atharvan Vedas. Of these the Yajush is said to be the oldest or first written.

From these are deduced four Upavedas, or Vedas of less authority than the Vedas, but said to have been delivered to mankind by Brahma and seven other deities. They treat chiefly of sciences and arts. When said to have been delivered to man by the deities, it will be right to understand that they were taught in the schools or colleges of the priests of the gods.

Six Angas, or bodies of learning, are also derived from the Vedas. The subjects of these treatises relate to rites and ceremonies; to grammar and prosody; to astronomy, and expositions of difficult words and phrases in the Vedas.

There are four Upangas, called Purana, Nyaya, Mimansa, and Dherma s'astra; of which the first consists of tales instructive and entertaining. The second may be termed a book of logic. The third treats of moral philosophy. The fourth relates to law and the administration of justice.

These several books or treatises compose what is called the Sastra, a word signifying that which is ordained; that is, that which has received the sanction of the colleges or assemblies of the Brahmens, lawfully constituted. Whatever may be the errors and extravagances in these compositions, they most assuredly afford proofs of much ingenuity and of a high state of civilization.

In writing Hindù names and words, the orthography of Sir William Jones has been adopted. The reasons given by him, a person well acquainted with nearly thirty different languages, ought to receive due attention, or rather, ought to be decisive whenever a sanscrit word is to be expressed by English letters.

CHAPTER II.

ON ALTARS AND HIGH PLACES.

ADAM, when put in the Garden of Eden, was placed in a state of trial, and must have been subjected to the same laws, both moral and religious, as now are and ever have been obligatory on all his descendants. This is affirmed on the authority of holy writ, which declares that the worship of God and obedience to his will is required of all created beings, from the highest archangel to the lowest creature endowed with a competent degree of intellect. "Worship him, all ye gods," writes the inspired author of the book of Psalms. St. Paul writes, "When he (the Father) bringeth in the first-begotten into the world, he saith, Let all the angels of God worship him." If angels are required to pay such homage to the Son as to a God, inferior beings must owe the same also. The universality of this obligation is shewn by the following text of the prophetic Evangelist of the book of Revelation: "I saw an angel flying in the midst

h Heb. i. 6.

of heaven, having the everlasting Gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people, saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters." It will not, it is presumed, be contended that this worship was then first required, when the angel uttered the exhortation.

The creature having received life and existence from the hand of the Creator, is bound to exercise his faculties in obedience to his will. The neglect and refusal is an act of ingratitude, which is sin. Such being the obligation ever attending the gift of created life, it were most assuredly a strange and anomalous opinion, to suppose that Adam should have been exempt from it. After he had been made acquainted with the history of his creation, he must have been bound to worship his Creator; and he doubtless did worship him from the first, and during the whole of the time of his abode in the Garden of Eden.

This opinion is by no means new. It was affirmed by Hooker, the author of the treatise on the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, commonly distinguished by the epithet of the judicious. He writes, "Adam, even during the space of his small continuance in Paradise, had where to present himself before the Lord."k If Adam presented himself before the Lord, it must have been for the performance of religious worship: his attendance at the place without the performance of religious worship would have been idle, and even absurd.

Religious worship is of twofold performance; the one public and social, the other private and solitary. The former is necessarily accompanied with rites and ceremonies: the latter usually with few or none. Adam cannot be said to have performed worship properly called social, till after the k Hooker's Eccles. Polit. B. 5. §. 11.

Rev. xiv. 6, 7.

formation of his consort Eve; but yet he might, even from his earliest abode in the Garden, have performed certain acts of worship with greater solemnity than others, both in regard to time and place. His private worship might be performed daily or oftener in any part of the Garden, even in the midst of his ordinary occupation of dressing and keeping it. His public worship must have been performed in some appointed place, and at stated times, especially on the sabbaths. This worship, it were reasonable to suppose, would consist in prayer accompanied with rites and ceremonies, often of sacrifice, that is, by placing the thing sacrificed, perhaps to be consumed by fire, upon a raised structure, a mound or altar. This opinion is by no means new: it has been affirmed by the learned commentator Patrick, and vindicated by the pious Bishop Horne. Should it be contended that the abode of Adam in the Garden was so short as not to afford an opportunity or occasion for such solemn services, it must be replied that such opinion is an assumption contradicted by facts, for the acts done by Adam before the fall must have required a period of several years for performance.

trial.

The common fiction, that Adam, while in the Garden, was in such a state of innocence as to have been utterly incapable of sin before his fall, is certainly grossly erroneous. To take and eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge was declared to be death, that is, a sin unto death, subjecting the transgressor to damnation. The prohibition was a severe The knowledge which Adam had learned that the taste of that fruit would afford, was, as appears from the instantaneous effect, a miraculous prospect of the fortunes of himself and his descendants in succeeding ages of the world. This effect of tasting the fruit the man must have learned from the Creator himself. The forbearance from the taste was not only a test of obedience, but a proof of a continued 1 Patrick, Com.-Horne, Disc. 2.

E

reliance on the goodness and providential care of the great Being to whose bounty he owed life and every benefit, of the continuance of which he could not reasonably entertain a doubt.

Adam obeyed, and maintained his reliance on his Almighty Creator, till after the formation of Eve, and even after her pregnancy; for the words of her sentence after the fall, "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception,"" imply that she was about to become a mother. The desire to know what might in after times be the condition of themselves and their posterity, was doubtless a source of restless anxiety to both, but more especially with the woman. There can be no doubt that the prohibitory command was the frequent subject of discourse between them both; and the hope suggested by an evil spirit, "Ye shall not surely die," had been long entertained and cherished with a fearful curiosity. At length the suspicion that God deprived them of their just rights by withholding the knowledge of good and evil already enjoyed by gods, that is, by heavenly beings, entered their deluded minds. An evil spirit, figuratively signified in after times by the serpent, a symbol of artful delusion and deadly mischief, led them to imagine that their Creator was unjust, and that, in threatening them with death, he had been so base as to denounce a falsehood; in short, that the God of truth had uttered a lie. Giving way to this persuasion, the result of perverted sentiment and a wicked mind, the woman boldly took the fruit; allured, in part, by the pleasure the taste of it seemed likely to afford. She ate, and gave to her doubting and hesitating husband, and he did eat also. Such, it must be presumed, was the process of that temptation by which our first parents fell. To suppose that a good, wise, and gracious God would permit a serpent to speak and insinuate with, and compel the woman to believe that the great Creator, whose

m Genesis iii. 16.