Some of the Upanishads hide behind a veil of mystery; yet many of them, as Windisch has said, are, in a way, popular; that is, they are intended for a general public, not for priests alone.

This is especially the case with the pantheistic Upanishads in their more pronounced form.
But still it is only the very wise that can accept the teaching.

It is not the faith of the people.
Epic literature, which is the next living literature of the Brahmans, after the Upanishads, takes one, in a trice, from the beginnings of a formal pantheism, to a pantheism already disintegrated by the newer worship of sectaries.

Here the impersonal _[=a]tm[=a]_, or nameless Lord, is not only an anthropomorphic Civa, as in the late Upanishads, where the philosophic _brahma_ is equated with a long recognized type of divinity, but _[=a]tm[=a]_ is identified with the figure of a theomorphic man.
Is there, then, nothing with which to bridge this gulf?
In our opinion the religion of the law-books, as a legitimate phase of Hindu religion, has been too much ignored.

The religion of Upanishad and Ved[=a]nta, with its attractive analogies with modern speculation, has been taken as illustrative of the religion of a vast period, to the discrediting of the belief represented in the manuals of law.