वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

456 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS. theological views mentioned above. We may not be able to fix definitely when each hymn of the Ṛig-Veda was sung; but we may safely say that those who survived the catastrophe, or their immediate descendants, must have incorporated into hymns the religious knowledge they had inherited as a sacred trust from their forefathers at the first opportunity, that is, soon after they were able to make at least temporary settlements. The hymns cannot, therefore, be supposed to promulgate a new religion consciously or unconsciously evolved on the plains of Central Asia in post-Glacial times; and the Polar character of the Vedic deities removes every doubt on the point. How far the language of the hymns, as we have them at present, resem- bled the ante-diluvian forms of speech is a different question; and according to Patanjali and Vyâsa, we are not here concerned with the words or the syllables of the hymns, which, it is admit- ted, have not remained permanent. We have to look to the subject matter of the hymns; and there is no reason to doubt either the competency or the trustworthiness of the Vedic bards to execute what they considered to be their sacred task or duty, viz., that of preserving and transmitting, for the benefit of future generations, the religious knowledge they had inherited 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 tradi- tions 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 an- cient religious rites and worship, must have keenly watched the utterances of these Ṛiṣhis. We may, therefore, safely assert that the religion of the primeval Arctic home was correctly