also equally extended by these good men to the missions of any Church or nation which goes there, and whose labors are aiming to elevate the benighted natives, and prepare them by education and a public conscience for self-government.
The Hindoo Chronology and division of time are very singular,
and even whimsical. They hold to four great Ages of the
world, called Yugs. Each of these Yugs is inferior to its
immemediate predecessor in power, virtue, and happiness. These
divisions are denominated the Satya, the Treta, the Dwarper,
and the Kali Yugs, whose united length amounts to the
prodigious sum of 4,320,000 years; yet this sum of the Ages is
but a Kalpa, or one “Day of Brahma,” at the end of which this
sleepy deity wakes up to find the universe destroyed, and which
he has then to create anew for another “Day” ere he goes to
sleep again.
The Satya Yug, they tell us, lasted 1,728,000 years, and was the Age of Truth—the Golden Age—during which the whole race was virtuous, and lived each of them 100,000 years, and men attained the stature of “21 cubits” (37 feet) in height!
The Treta Yug lasted 1,296,000 years; this was the Silver Age, (using the same figures as the Greek and Roman poets,) during which one third of the race became corrupt, the human stature was lowered, and its life shortened to 10,000 years.
The Dwarper Yug extended to only 864,000 years—their Brazen Age—when fully one half of the race degenerated, and their height was again reduced, and their lives shortened to 1,000 years each.
The Kali Yug is the one in which we now live, and is regarded by them as the last—the Iron Age—in which mankind has become totally depraved, and their stature further reduced, and their life limited to 100 years. This Yug, according to them, began 4,950 years ago, and is to last exactly 427,050 years longer, which will close this Kalpa, or “Day of Brahma.”
They assert that one patriarch called Satyavrata, or Vaivaswata, had an existence running the whole period of the Satya Yug,
