Page 594 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

PRIMITIVE ARYAN CULTURE AND RELIGION 375
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bards to execute what they considered to be their sacred task
or duty viz., that of preserving and transmitting, for the bene-
fit of future generations, the religious knowledge they had in-
herited from their ante-diluvian forefathers. It was by an
agency similar to this that the hymns have been preserved
accent for accent, according to the lowest estimate, for the
last 3000 or 4000 years; and what is achieved in more recent
times can certainly be held to have been done by the older
bards in times when the traditions about the Arctic home and
religion were still fresh in their mind. We may also observe
that the hymns were publicly sung and recited and the whole
community, which must be supposed to have been interested
in preserving its ancient religious rites and worship, must have
keenly watched the utterances of these ~i~his. We may, there-
fore, safely assert that the religion of the primeval Arctic home
was correctly preserved in the form oftraditions by the discip-
lined memory of the ~.i~his until it was incorporated first into
crude as contrasted with the polished hymns ( su-uktas ) of the
~g-Veda in the Orion period, to be collected later on in
Ma~~alas and finally into Sarilhitas; and that the subject-matter
of these hymns is inter-Glacial, though its ultimate origin is
still lost in geological antiquity. Without mixing up the theolo-
gical and historical views we may, therefore, now state the two
in parallel columns as follows :-

Theological view Historical view

1 The Vedas are eternal 1 The Vedic or the Aryan
( nitya ), beginning-less ( and- religion can be proved to be
di ) and not made by man inter-Glacial; but its ultimate
( a-paur~heya ) origin is still lost in geological
antiquity.
2 The Vedas were destroyed 2 Aryan religion and culture
in the deluge, at the end of were destroyed during the
the last Kalpa. last Glacial period that
invaded the Arctic Aryan
home.
3 At the beginning of the 3 The . Vedic hymns were
present Kalpa, the ~i~his, sung in post-Glacial times by