The earliest Christians with their apparitions, their apostles who received the gift of tongues, their thaumaturgists, and their exorcists, only continued a tradition which has existed from the earliest times without interruption. There is no difference between the disciples of Peter and Paul and the initiates of India, between the saints of the Christianity of the Catacombs and the Pitris of the Brahmins. Subsequently, the chiefs, in the interest of their temporal and religious domination, discouraged both the belief and practice, and, by slow degrees, the old system of ancient worship assumed the more modern form with which we are familiar. It was not until they had passed through the first three of the contemplative states to which we have alluded that the Nirvanys and Yoguys were admitted to a of the higher philosophical studies, and they were thus made acquainted with the secrets of human destiny, both present and future. When he who had been initiated into the third degree had passed the age of eighty, and was not a member of the Supreme Council, who all remained in active life until their death, he was supposed to have abandoned his pagoda, or the hermitage that he occupied, to have renounced all pious practices, ceremonies, sacrifices, and evocations, and to have retired to some lonely and uninhabited spot, there to await the coming of death. Be no longer received [p. 95] food or nourishment, except by chance, and passed away in the contemplation of the infinite.
"Having abandoned all his duties," says Manu, "and 'relinquished the direction of the sacrifices and the performance of the five ablutions, having wiped away all his faults by the prescribed purifications, having curbed all his organs and mastered the vedas to their fullest extent, he should refer all ceremonies and the offering of the funeral repast to his son for performance."
Having thus abandoned every religious observance, every act of austere devotion, applying his mind solely to the contemplation of the