on theology and worship, we can desire no better guides than these commentators, so exact in all respects, who follow their texts word by word, who, so long as even the semblance of a misconception might arise, are never weary of repeating what they have frequently said before, and who often appear as if they had been writing for us foreigners rather than for their own priestly alumni who had grown up in the midst of these conceptions and impressions. Here......they are in their proper ground. The case, however, is quite different when the same men assume the task of interpreting the ancient collections of hymns......... Here were required not only quite different qualifications for interpretation but also a greater freedom of judgment and a greater breadth of view and of historical intuitions. Freedom of judgment, however, was wanting to priestly learning, whilst in India no one has ever had any conception of historical development. The very qualities which have made those commentators excellent guides to an understanding of the theological treatises, render them unsuitable conductors on that far older and quite differently circumstanced domain. As the so-called classical Sanskrit was perfectly familiar to them, they sought its ordinary idiom in the Vedic hymns also. Since any difference in the ritual appeared to them inconceivable and the present forms were believed to have existed from the beginning of the world, they fancied that the patriarchs of the Indian religion must have sacrificed in the very same manner. As the recognized mythological and classical systems of their own age appeared to them unassailable and revealed verities, they must necessarily (so the commentators thought) be discoverable in that centre point of revelation, the hymns of the ancient Ṛishis, who had, indeed, lived in familiar intercourse with the Gods, and possessed far higher wisdom than the succeeding generations..... It has never occurred to any one to make our understanding of the Hebrew books of the Old Testament depend on the Talmud and the Rabbins, while there are not wanting scholars who hold it as the duty of a conscientious interpreter of the Veda to translate in
