If I claim the demigod then,
why not the prophet?
Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise
the whole roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named;
for like royal kings of old times, we find the head-waters
of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves.
That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster,
which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons
in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo
himself for our Lord;--Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten
earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.
When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to
recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions,
he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas,
or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable
to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore
must have contained something in the shape of practical hints
to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of
the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding
down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes.
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