CHAPTER II.

RELIGION AND LAW.

THE most ancient of the books containing the sacred laws of the Hindus appear to me to throw little light on the absolute origin of law. Some system of actual observance, some system of custom or usage, must lie behind them; and it is a very plausible conjecture that it was not unlike the existing very imperfectly sacerdotalised customary law of the Hindus in the Punjab. But what they do show is, if not the beginning of law, the beginning of lawyers. They enable us to see how law was first regarded, as a definite subject of thought, by a special learned class; and this class consisted of lawyers who were first of all priests. There are signs of the ancient identity of the two professions in the earliest recorded usages of several races, Celts, Romans, and Greeks. Nobody, for example, will understand the ancient Roman lawyer, with that obstinate adherence of his to texts which has characterised his profession during so many centuries, and that method of stating his facts in

inflexible formulas which has only just died out in this country, unless it is realised that the jurisconsult sprang from the pontiff or priest. All through the Middle Ages the lawyer who was

avowedly a priest held his own against the lawyer who professed to be a layman; and ours is the only country in which, owing to the peculiar turn of our legal history, it is difficult to see that, on the whole, the canonist exercised as much influence on the course of legal development as the legist or civilian. If the Roman Empire had merely transmitted its administrative system to Western Europe, and if it had not bequeathed to it a coherent body of codified secular law making considerable approach to completeness, it is very doubtful whether the general law of the West would not even now reflect a particular set of religious ideas as distinctly as the Hindu law reflects the sacerdotal conceptions of the Brahmans.

It is necessary, first of all, to observe how the priestly character of the Brahmanical authors of the law-books affected their view of conduct, a word which must be used at the outset in preference to 'law.' Shortly, this view is intimately affected throughout by their belief as to the lot which awaits human beings after death. This lot will be made up of various experiences, some of which correspond to direct reward or punishment in Heaven or Hell, as conceived by the Western religions. But the Hindu

belief concerning the posthumous state of man, and the Buddhist belief which has mainly sprung from it, differ from the most widely diffused Western beliefs in that the Transmigration of Souls fills as large a space as direct reward and punishment, and in that rewards and punishments in all their forms are regarded, not as eternal, but as essentially transitory. It is beside my purpose, I should observe, to consider what may have been the most ancient faith or faiths of the Hindus, and still more how far the religious ideas reflected in the books before us represent their existing religious doctrine. In the works of which I have been speaking, the early manuals of law, belief has reached a definite stage, which may be examined by itself and which seems to me extremely instructive. Hindu theology, from very remote times, appears to have regarded the universe as having been destroyed and again created, and as destined to be destroyed and again created; but during the enormous intervals between these destructions and creations the aggregate of existence is conceived as indestructible and as incapable of increase or diminution. The sum of life, in particular, is always constant. This essence, life or soul, is regarded as running in a continuous stream through all animate, perhaps we might say through all organic, nature; but it is always returning on itself-never ending, still beginning. This stream of life is divided into portions or parcels,

which are temporarily detained in external forms, but which are constantly passing from one form to another without losing their identity. Men, animals, holy sages, and the gods themselves, are not essentially different from one another. The same life or soul pervades them all, clothing itself in one form after another. Existence itself does not end, but its successive stages are terminable and transitory. When a man still contaminated by impurity dies, his spirit passes through a series of purgatories; from the last of these it escapes to clothe itself with one animal shape after another, and at last it finds embodiment in a human frame, which at first will probably be frail or sickly. But, after a second birth through the study of the Scriptures, the virtuous at death pass straight into Heaven, where their stock of virtue will keep them for long ages; but it will gradually wear out, until some remnant of it carries them back to earth, to reappear among the prosperous and the powerful. Men of all castes, if they fulfil their assigned duties, enjoy in Heaven the highest imperishable bliss. Afterwards, when a man who has fulfilled his duties returns to this world, he obtains by virtue of a remainder of merit birth in a distinguished family, beauty of form, beauty of complexion, strength, aptitude for learning, wisdom, wealth, and the gift of fulfilling the laws of his caste or order. Therefore in both worlds he dwells in

happiness, rolling like a wheel from one world to the other' (Apastamba, II. i. 2. 2 and 3). Even the gods in Heaven, who are looked upon as not much more than men of extraordinary virtue, will in time exhaust their store of merit and pass out of blessedness. 'It is by favour of the Brahmans,' says Vishnu (XIX. 22), 'that the gods reside in Heaven.'

The Wheel mentioned in the above passage from Apastamba is a favourite image with these writers. They figure existence as a wheel spinning round. Religious pictures, representing the circle of life with its various compartments, with Heaven at the top and Hell at the bottom, and with human and animal existence at the sides, are common in the East; but though they are not unknown to Hindus, they are more frequently found among Buddhists,' who must have borrowed the symbol of the Wheel from an older Hinduism, and who appear to attach to it a special spiritual significance. In the Buddhistic Wheel-pictures, Buddha is depicted outside the circumference, in the attitude of benediction. He only has escaped from the weary cycle of existence, and stands alone in Nirvana, apart from gods and men. The assumption of such a possibility would doubtless be regarded by orthodox Hindus as atheistic. Exalted religious feeling takes with them the form of meditation on Brahma, the Atman, the Infinite, the

1 See Note A at the end of this chapter, Wheel-pictures.'