the Panjab. The emperor Aurangzeb undertook to crush them; the ninth Guru, Teg Bahadur, fell into his power and died in prison at Delhi in 1675. His son, Govind Singh, completed the transformation of the church into a fanatical host, and laid the foundations of a nation. He organised an inner circle, the Khalsa, whose members were admitted by a sacramental initiation, and received individually the surname Singh ("lion"); they were always to wear steel upon their persons; to these companions of the sword God himself was the "All-Iron One"; they were never to return the salutation of a Hindu, and to kill every Moslem at sight. Govind Singh composed a new Granth, fitter to inspire soldiers to heroic deeds than, like the old Granth, to guide saints to Nirvana. He had the worse of the unequal struggle with Aurangzeb, and was fain at last to give it up and take service under his lifelong foe; he died in 1708 by the hand of a Pathan assassin. Before his death he declared that the succession of Gurus was closed; henceforth the Granth should be the only teacher.

The long and bitter strife with the Moslems had the natural effect of making the Sikhs more complacent toward Hinduism; Govind Singh himself paid homage to Durga, the savage consort of Çiva; Banda, who became the leader of the army, undertook to prohibit the eating of meat and the drinking of spirituous liquors, but these innovations did not survive him. As in Hinduism itself, the pantheistic god of the thinkers becomes the personal god of the masses; and probably the conception of Hari entertained by the ordinary Sikh does not differ much from that of a Vishnuite. But the simplicity of worship has been maintained. Amritsar is their one holy place; in their temples are no images nor offerings; the services consist in reciting and singing texts from the sacred book and the distribution of a sacramental cake made of butter, flour, and sugar. The religious observances with which Hinduism surrounds life and death are all forbidden in the Granth, as well as worship in the Hindu temples. Truthfulness and kindness to the poor are espe

cially emphasised; falsehood, fraud, theft, slander, and fornication are deadly sins.

Numerous sects and schisms have at different times arisen among the Sikhs, some of which have been formally cut off from the church, while others are recognised as within its pale. The oldest, the Udasis ("indifferent," i. e., to the world) have for their founder a son of Nanak; they are ascetics, and observe numerous Hindu customs, such as the Craddha. Of the others it is sufficient to mention the Akalis (worshippers of the Timeless), said to have been founded by Govind Singh; they were the zealots of Sikhism, fanatically resisting all innovations, and a constant cause of apprehension to the Sikh rulers. Since the end of the Sikh nation as a political power, they have lost their importance.

Another theistic sect, which arose in the seventeenth century, are the Dadupanthis, whose founder, like Nanak, traced his spiritual lineage through Kabir to the Ramananda branch of the Vishnuites. Their religious principles are in many ways similar to those of the Sikhs, but they have never played a part on the political stage. They have no temples nor images, and wear no sectarian mark on their foreheads; their worship consists chiefly in adoration of God under the name Rama and the invocation of the sacred name itself. Unlike the Sikhs, they do not eat flesh, and otherwise strictly observe the principle of "non-injury." The founder did not demand that the seekers of salvation should abandon their families or their ordinary occupations; but those who, like himself, have this vocation may do so. Besides ascetics and householders, there were formerly many adherents of this sect who took service as soldiers under the Hindu princes; the Rajah of Jaypur is said at one time to have had ten thousand of them in his army. The extracts from their sacred books which have been published make a highly favourable impression. The stiffening up of Hindu theism by contact with Mohammedanism is very plain; there is even a certain strain of determinism in the sayings attributed to Dadu. It does not appear that the veneration for the Guru,

or teacher, and the slavish submission of mind and body to his authority ran to such extravagant lengths as among the Sikhs and in many other reforming sects. There were several other reform movements of the same general character in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which cannot here be more particularly described.

The theistic reformers of the nineteenth century felt the influence of Protestant Christianity as well as of Islam. The first of these was Rammohun Roy (1774-1833), a Bengali Brahman, the founder of the Brahma-Samaj (Theistic Society), organised in 1830. The object of the association, as expressed in the deed of trust, was the worship of the one eternal, unsearchable, and immutable Being, the author and preserver of the universe; the promotion of piety, morality, and charity, and the strengthening of the bonds of union among men of all religious classes and creeds. Images and sacrifices were excluded. The ritual consisted of readings from the Veda and Upanishads, an address, and the singing of hymns. Upon this simple platform and in this spiritual worship it was thought theists of all opinions could unite. The movement thus inaugurated has grown, but its adherents have repeatedly split upon social, ritual, and theological issues, so that there are now three Samajes. After the founder, the most conspicuous names in the history are those of Debendra Nath Tagore and Keshab Chandra Sen (died 1884). The members of the societies have been chiefly drawn from the educated classes, and their influence through the press and by public speech has been greater than their numbers, but they can hardly be said to have made any visible impression on the masses.

A reforming movement of a more distinctly Hindu type is represented by the Arya-Samaj, whose founder was Swami Dayanand Sarasvati (1824-83). Like Rammohun Roy, his watchword was, "back to the Veda," but whereas the Brahma-Samaj early gave up the infallibility of the Vedas, for Dayanand they are the sole revelation, the fountainhead not only of religion but of science for all mankind. The

hymns of the Rig-Veda, as interpreted by Dayanand, foreshadow the most recent inventions-steam-engines, for example. The theology of the Aryas is essentially that of the Sankhya-Yoga.

Apart from these organised bodies, of which it is impossible to speak here at greater length, it is evident from many signs that a spirit of revival is at work in Hinduism, in part at least a concomitant of the rising race-consciousness. Those who are animated by this spirit recognise that revival involves reform; but while the reformers of the last century avowed, sometimes in sensational utterances, their admiration for Christianity, or at least for Christ, and regarded the Christianisation of India as its manifest destiny, the face of the present-day revival is not turned to the West: India has much to learn from Europe and America in material things, but nothing in religion, is the prevailing attitude. Many, indeed, go farther: India is to be teacher of the Western nations in the higher doctrine and practice of religion and in the true goal and method of human life.

CHAPTER XV

ZOROASTRIANISM

ORIGIN AND HISTORY

The Iranians-Their Religion-The Zoroastrian Scriptures-The Prophet Zoroaster-His Message-The Mazdæan Confession-Character of the Religion-The Achæmenian Kings-Readmission of Popular Deities-Mithra and Anahita-Worship of the Amesha SpentasMacedonian and Arsacidan Rulers-The Sassanian Revival-The Moslem Conquest-The Modern Parsis.

THE ancestors of the Aryo-Indians and of the Iranians before their migrations lived side by side on the high plateau north of the Hindu Kush. Thence the former made their way into the valleys of Kabul and the Indus and southward to the Panjab, while the latter spread from their old seats westward into Media and Persia. The age of these movements is not certainly known. In the fifteenth century B. C. rulers of Mitanni, on the upper Euphrates and eastward, bear Iranian names, and names of the same origin appear about the same time in the Amarna despatches among the invaders of Palestine. At Boghaz Keui in Asia Minor, a Hittite capital, the names of Aryan gods, Mitra and Varuna, Indra and Nasatya, have been found in Mitannian documents dating from the beginning of the fourteenth century. The mass of the population in these countries was, however, plainly not Aryan. Beyond this fragmentary evidence of the presence of Aryans in the West in the great upheaval of nations between the fifteenth century and the thirteenth, the Iranians first appear on the stage of history in the ninth century, when the Assyrian king Shalmaneser made a campaign in Media (836 B. C.). His successors were fre