ns
is shown by both Christianity and Buddhism, which have flourished most
conspicuously and permanently in lands where they were not indigenous.

"In the Vedas," says Sir Monier Williams, "unity in the conception of
deity soon diverged into various ramifications. Only a few of the hymns
appear to contain the simple conception of one divine, self-existent,
omnipresent Being, and even in these, the idea of one God, present in
all nature, is somewhat nebulous and undefined." One of the earliest
deifications that we can trace was that of _Varuna_, who represented the
overhanging sky. The hymns addressed to Varuna are not only the
earliest, but they are the loftiest and most spiritual in their
aspirations. They find in him an element of holiness before which sin is
an offence; and in some vague sense he is the father of all things, like
the Zeus whom Paul recognized in the poetry of Greece.

But, as already stated, this vague conception of God as one, was already
in a transition toward separate impressions of the different powers of
nature. If the idea of God was without any very clear personality and
more or less obscure, it is not strange that it should come to be thus
specialized as men thought of objects having a manifestly benign
influence--as the life-quickening sun or the reviving rain. It is not
strange that, without a knowledge of the true God, they should have been
filled with awe when gazing upon the dark vault of night, and should
have rendered adoration to the moon and her countless retinue of stars.
If there must be idolatry, let it be that sublime nature worship of the
early Aryans, though even that was sure to degenerate into baser forms.
One might suppose that the worship of the heavenly bodies would remain
the purest and noblest; and yet the sun-worship of the Assyrians and the
Phoenicians became unspeakably vile in its sensuousness, and finally the
most wicked and abominable of all heathen systems. India in her darkest
days never sank so low, and when her degradation came it was through
other conceptions than those of nature worship.

In the early Vedic hymns are to be found many sublime passages which
seem to suggest traces of those common traditions concerning the
creation--the Fall of man and the Deluge, which we believe to have been
the earliest religious heritage of mankind. They contrast strongly with
the later and degrading cosmogonies of degenerate heathen systems, and
especially with the grotesq