[KALKI]

Count Magnus Fredrik Ferdinand Bjornstjerna (1779-1847) Swedish minister in London, author of The Theogony of the Hindoos with their systems of Philosophy and Cosmogony after quoting from the Vedas says:

"These truly sublime ideas cannot fail to convince us that the Vedas recognize only one God, who is Almighty, Infinite, Eternal, Self-existent, the Light and the Lord of the Universe."

He says: “No nation on earth can vie with the Hindus in respect of the antiquity of their civilization and the antiquity of their religion.”

"In a metaphysical point of view we find among the Hindus all the fundamental ideas of those vast systems which, regarded merely as the offspring of fantasy, nevertheless inspire admiration on account of the boldness of flight and of the faculty of human mind to elevate itself to such remote ethereal regions. We find among them all the principles of Pantheism, Spinozism and Hegelianism, of God as being one with the universe; spiritual life of mankind; and of the return of the emanative sparks after death to their divine origin; of the uninterrupted alternation between life and death, which is nothing else but a transition between different modes of existence. All this we find among the philosophies of the Hindus exhibited as clearly as by our modern philosophers more than three thousand years since."

Referring to the practical character of Hindu philosophy, he said, In this respect the Hindus were far in advance of the philosophers of Greece and Rome, who considered the immortality of the soul as problematical."

"The literature of India makes us acquainted with a great nation of past ages, which grasped every branch of knowledge, and which will always occupy a distinguished place in the history of the civilization of mankind."

(source: Hindu Superiority - By Har Bilas Sarda p. 203-278).