aven and
earth, must at all events be greater than heaven and earth, and thus
the child became greater than the father, ay, became the father of his
father. Indra was not the only god that created heaven and earth. In
one hymn[190] that creation is ascribed to Soma and Pushan, by no
means very prominent characters; in another[191] to Hira_n_yagarbha
(the golden germ); in another again to a god who is simply called
Dhat_ri_, the Creator,[192] or Vi_s_vakarman,[193] the maker of all
things. Other gods, such as Mitra and Savit_ri_, names of the sun, are
praised for upholding Heaven and Earth, and the same task is sometimes
performed by the old god Varu_n_a[194] also.

What I wish you to observe in all this is the perfect freedom with
which these so-called gods or Devas are handled, and particularly the
ease and naturalness with which now the one, now the other emerges as
supreme out of this chaotic theogony. This is the peculiar character
of the ancient Vedic religion, totally different both from the
Polytheism and from the Monotheism as we see it in the Greek and the
Jewish religions; and if the Veda had taught us nothing else but this
_henotheistic_ phase, which must everywhere have preceded the more
highly-organized phase of Polytheism which we see in Greece, in Rome,
and elsewhere, the study of the Veda would not have been in vain.

It may be quite true that the poetry of the Veda is neither beautiful,
in our sense of the word, nor very profound; but it is instructive.
When we see those two giant spectres of Heaven and Earth on the
background of the Vedic religion, exerting their influence for a time,
and then vanishing before the light of younger and more active gods,
we learn a lesson which it is well to learn, and which we can hardly
learn anywhere else--the lesson _how gods were made and unmade_--how
the Beyond or the Infinite was named by different names in order to
bring it near to the mind of man, to make it for a time
comprehensible, until, when name after name had proved of no avail, a
nameless God was felt to answer best the restless cravings of the
human heart.

I shall next translate to you the hymn to which I referred before as
addressed to the Rivers. If the Rivers are to be called deities at
all, they belong to the class of terrestrial deities. But the reason
why I single out this hymn is not so much because it throws new light
on the theogonic process, but because it may help to impart some
reality