Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/242

Here, I think, is where the good Brahman, of whom Professor Garbe will not hear, comes in. The Brahman authors of the Upanishads, just as high-minded Brahmans of all ages, were honest and liberal enough to permit all fit men to participate in higher religious activity, in wisdom and in piety. Nay, they express particular admiration in such participation, because, after all, there was to them something unexpected in all this. They were carried away by it to a certain ecstasy, the kind of ecstasy that goes with a paradox, as when the son of a peasant in Europe works his way to a professorship in a university. As regards the Rājas, or other nobles, we must not forget, too, that they were after all the source from which all blessings flowed. Even in theosophic occupation the Brahman remains, as I have said before, the poor cleric with the Rāja as his Mæcenas. I think that any one who reads these statements of royal proficiency in the highest wisdom attentively will acknowledge that they are dashed in the Upanishads, as they are in the Ritual, with a goodly measure of captatio benevolentiæ. In other words, the genuine admiration of high-minded nobles is not necessarily divorced from the subconsciousness that it is well to admire in high places. Even really good Brahmans might do that.

If King Janaka of Videha punctuates the Brahman