hey might simply
be classed as visible and finite beings. But the ancient poets were
more honest to themselves. They could see Heaven and Earth, but they
never saw them in their entirety. They felt that there was something
beyond the purely finite aspect of these beings, and therefore they
thought of them, not as they would think of a stone, or a tree, or a
dog, but as something not-finite, not altogether visible or knowable,
yet as something important to themselves, powerful, strong to bless,
but also strong to hurt. Whatever was between Heaven and Earth seemed
to be theirs, their property, their realm, their dominion. They held
and embraced all; they seemed to have produced all. The Devas or
bright beings, the sun, the dawn, the fire, the wind, the rain, were
all theirs, and were called therefore the offspring of Heaven and
Earth. Thus Heaven and Earth became the Universal Father and Mother.

Then we ask at once: "Were then these Heaven and Earth gods?" But gods
in what sense? In our sense of God? Why, in our sense, God is
altogether incapable of a plural. Then in the Greek sense of the word?
No, certainly not; for what the Greeks called gods was the result of
an intellectual growth totally independent of the Veda or of India. We
must never forget that what we call gods in ancient mythologies are
not substantial, living, individual beings, of whom we can predicate
this or that. D e v a, which we translate by god, is nothing but an
adjective, expressive of a quality shared by heaven and earth, by the
sun and the stars and the dawn and the sea, namely _brightness_; and
the idea of god, at that early time, contains neither more nor less
than what is shared in common by all these bright beings. That is to
say, the idea of god is not an idea ready-made, which could be applied
in its abstract purity to heaven and earth and other such like beings;
but it is an idea, growing out of the concepts of heaven and earth and
of the other bright beings, slowly separating itself from them, but
never containing more than what was contained, though confusedly, in
the objects to which it was successively applied.

Nor must it be supposed that heaven and earth, having once been raised
to the rank of undecaying or immortal beings, of divine parents, of
guardians of the laws, were thus permanently settled in the religious
consciousness of the people. Far from it. When the ideas of other
gods, and of more active and more distinctly personal