Religious Conceptions and Feeling 199
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good gift and protection, with considerably more than one-eighth of one per cent. brokerage for the priestmthat, surely, is not the religious feeling in the souls of the composers of the Rig-Veda hymns. I have taken pains to show how constantly pres... out is this external side of their religion: may the religion that is free from all external considerations, the religion from which is absent every form of safe-guarding self, throw the first stone.
The contemplation of the glory of the gods as a matter of intellectual wonder is expressed times without end. It does not seem to me to have quite the true ring. It is perfunctory; it is told by rote. God after god steps into line and gets it. They each in turn establish the heavens and the earth; they start the sun on his course, almost indifferently well. Perhaps, as I have hinted before, their rotation in the ritual, rather than forgetfulness of the virtues of the preceding god, is the truth at the bottom of this kathenotheism or henotheism, as Max Muller called it. It is polytheism grown cold in service, and un» nice in its distinctions, leading to an opportunist monotheism in which every god takes hold of the sceptre and none keeps it. Anyhow it is very me— chanical. No one who reads in the hymns the end- less accounts of the wonderful performances of the gods will deny that the poets at times grow truly
