which modern research questions on all sides. Sectarianisra consists in the exclusive and not merely preferential worship of any divinity. The Poranas as a whole do not prohibit the worship of any god, but the sectarianism goes to the extent of recommending a particular deity in preference to all others. Passages are not rare in the Puranas, where all the deities are described as occupying an equal scale in the Hindu pantheon. .Again the Professor seems to have given greater weight to the riuternal testimony from those passages, which he thinks have a modern appearance, than to that which results from those parts which the Puranas must have contained from their first composition, in order to entitle them to a sacred character and to that reverence with which these works have been regarded by the Hindus. But the fixing of a possible date when tfefe Puranas received their present form is a question of little or ,no consequence, when it is admitted that there is abundant positive and circumstantial evidence of the prevalence of the doctrines which they teach, the currency of the legends which they narrate and the integrity of the institutions which they describe, at least three centuries before the Christian era. They cannot, therefore, be pious frauds in subservience to sectarian imposture. What more conclusive evidence of their antiquity can be required than their containing a correct description of the doctrines and institutions of the Hindu religion, which were prevalent in India three centuries before the Christian era ? For it is probable more that the present Pmranasare the same works as were than extant, than that eighteen persons should have each conceived 1300 years afterwards the design of writing a Purana and should have been able to compile or compose so accurately 18 different works *£
which correspond so exactly in most of their minute particulars. Of course it must be admitted that their present form. Quite the, ^