with far better prospect of success, try to excite active motions of reverence and gratitude in the hearts of the millions of Europe towards Japhet our great progenitor. It is the dread of his avenging power, or the flaming sword of his justice, that drives multitudes to fear a Superior Power. It is the belief and felt experience of a benign and generous propension to crown with loving-kindness and tender mercies, that impels multitudes more to admire, venerate, and love. A constant and present benefactor, however humble his rank, must be regarded with far livelier emotions of esteem and grateful remembrance, than the monarch at a distance who rules over us-preserving the peace of the realm-enforcing obedience to the laws-and maintaining unimpaired our civil and religious immunities. An active, living monarch, who enshrines himself in every heart as the father of his people, will call forth far more sensible manifestations of reverence and esteem, than all the Arthurs and Alfreds of a distant age united ;-and one British Alfred will kindle emotions of enthusiastic regard, which cannot be excited by the entire roll of Roman emperors, who, in swaying the sceptre of a conquered world, may have conferred the greatest benefits on our own remote ancestry. He who is born and brought up in a den of the earth, will value his tiny lamp far beyond the sun, whose direct rays he never saw, and whose direct benefits he never experienced,-even though we should describe the luminary of day in the most brilliant colours, and endeavour to assure him, that the light of his own lamp has been perpetuated for ages from a flame originally derived from the sun. So it would be found with mankind in general in reference to the Creator. If no feature in his character could be distinctly realized beyond an act of production in the depths of past time, gratitude to the most ordinary earthly benefactor would speedily overshadow, or wholly extinguish all remembrance of a mere Creator,-a Creator, who had no moral attributes that could render him a moral governor, and the object of moral sentiment,-a Creator, whose natural attributes were speedily withdrawn from the control and superintendence of the universe!

To present a people with such a being as their supreme object of worship, were tantamount to robbing them of a god altogether. But the notices of some superior and invisible power are so universal and instinctive, as to prove that they have a firm root and foundation in our common nature. There must, then, be a god, whether true or false, for the outletting of tendencies which are inseparable from humanity. The profession of belief in a god, merely to escape from the imputation of atheism, cannot long be the profession of a whole people. And since it is impossible that a frigid passionless abstraction like Brahm can ever be the god of the populace, who need wonder that gods should be demanded by the cravings of their spiritual nature, endowed at least with moral attributes, however perverted in their exercise?

In the delineation of Brahm, what a conception is presented to us of the nature, attributes, and felicity of the Supreme Being! Yet it is the highest that has been attained by reason in the East, when unfavoured by the light of revelation ;-the reason not of one man, but of thousands; -thousands, not of ignorant savages, but of proud philosophers, many of whom have been endowed with intellects as subtile and acute as any ever bestowed upon the children of men ;-intellects not confined to one unhappy age of peculiar mental inertness, but whetted and uninterruptedly exercised through successive ages during the long period of three thousand years! What an emphatic comment on the declaration of the apostle,-that "the world by wisdom knew not God;" but, "professing themselves to be wise, they became fools?" In the bloody and brutal rites of the popular idolatry, there may be something more calculated to harrow the feelings and summon forth the active sympathies in behalf of its deluded votaries. But to calm contemplative spirits, what spectacle can appear more affecting than that of thousands systematically engaged, age after age, in stultifying superior intellects, which, if properly cultivated and directed, might render them discoverers in art and science, the benefactors of the human race, and their guides.

to immortality? What more affecting than to behold thousands intensely occupied in the investigation of the noblest of truths, and only accumulating heaps of the vilest error!strenuously attempting to soar to the heights of true wisdom, and only plunging the deeper into the abyss of monstrous folly!-laboriously exercising the acutest reason, only to demonstrate how perversely unreasonable man may become, when wholly left to his own unaided efforts! Verily, man, in the pride of his heart, may strive to be wise without God; and in the confidence of his own wisdom, he may aim at building for himself an habitation on high among the clefts of a towering fancy ;-saying, who shall bring me down to the ground?"Though thou exalt thyself as the eagle, and though thou set thy nest among the stars, thence will I bring thee down, saith the Lord."

But, to return to our more immediate theme, the question now recurs, how came the universe,-this universe of visible external forms and invisible cognitive existences, which at first existed as an ideal form or image in the divine mind:--how came it to be called forth into actual manifestation? This is a result which, in words, is constantly ascribed to the Divine volition,-to the forth-putting of omnipotent energy. Wherein then does this manifestation of the universe really consist? Is it a creation of material substance out of nothing? Or, is it an organization of pre-existent matter into every variety of visible form? It is neither the one nor the other. The description already given of Brahm, which is that of the sound interpreters of the Vedas, precludes the possibility of the latter supposition. The former has never found a place in any exposition of the system of Hinduism.

It has been remarked by Coleridge, that extremes appear to generate each other; but that, if we look steadily, there will most often be found some common error that produces both, as its positive and negative poles. The difficulties attending a system of pure materialism, or that which would

deduce all phenomena, intellectual and moral as well as physical, from rude unformed matter alone, might be said to drive men to the opposite extreme of spiritualism. The difficulty of reconciling with the dictates of reason the notion of the origin of material substance from a source purely spiritual might, in turn, be said to drive men into the opposite extreme of materialism. In the case of the Hindus, the common error, which in the orthodox and heterodox schools has produced both of these extremes, as its positive and negative poles, has been the constant and universal belief in the maxim "ex nihilo nihil fit,"-of nothing, nothing comes. Of all maxims, this seems the only one that has ever passed unchallenged and unchallengeable in every school of Indian theology,-sound or heretical, orthodox or unorthodox,-as if it were of all truisms the most undisputed and indisputable. The testimony of the senses, the testimony of consciousness has been assailed;—but never the validity of this maxim.

The mean between total materialism and total spiritualism has been the maintenance, of two primary, absolute, infinite, independent, eternal principles, one active, the other passive,-spirit and matter,-essentially different in essence, and irreconcileably opposed to each other. This has been designated the dualistic system, to distinguish it from the adualistic, or that which pronounces the all (To Tav) to be the one (ro év) sole existing essence, either all spirit, or, all matter;-and from that intermediate theory which regards matter and spirit as mysteriously comprehended in one great universal whole,-either intermingled in an undistinguishable mass, whence, by the energy of the inhering, active, spiritual principle, matter gradually rises into form and beauty, -or simply united, though intimately inseparably and eternally, in the form of an animated being,—

"Whose body nature is, and God the soul,"

Now the dualistic system, as well as the intermediate theory, the orthodox Hindus uniformly reject. They equally repudiate every scheme of pure materialism; while they

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scout the notion of a creation out of nothing. All this they profess to do, not so much on principles of human reasoning, as on the authority of revelation. What, then, it may be asked, is, in their view, the revealed scheme of the origin and manifestation of the universe? After the statements now made, what can it be supposed to be, unless an adualistic scheme, founded on a basis purely spiritual? a scheme which acknowledges spirit, as the one sole existing essence? Such, in point of fact, is declared to be the scheme propounded in the Vedas and other sacred writings. But these writings have been variously interpreted; hence the origin of diverse systems. Of these, it will suit our limited design to glance at the four leading ones, which are essentially marked and distinct; and which constitute so many trunks whence shoot out numberless subordinate branches, varying in minute details, and in the specific application of general principles. There is first, what may be termed spiritual pantheism, properly so called.—Secondly, a combination of spiritualism and idealism, which from want of a better term, we may designate the psycho-ideal system. Thirdly, a combination of spiritualism with a peculiar modification of spirit, which modification, for the sake of distinction, may, however improperly, be denominated, material, this we may characterize as the psycho-material system. Fourthly, a combination of the latter with the popular mythology. Of these systems, the two former altogether deny, while the two latter admit in a certain qualified sense, the real existence of an external material universe.

According to the two former, all seemingly external things are merely illusory appearances. Such denegation of the existence of sensible objects is not new in the annals of philosophy. In the classic ages of Greece and Rome, Parmenides was accused of "having taken away fire and water, the precipice and the city, that is, of having reduced all things in nature to the delirious and spectral phantasms of the sick." In modern times, Berkeley laboured to expose the fallacy of "the opinion strangely prevailing among men, that houses, mountains, rivers, &c., in a word, all