he Hindus made gods
of departed men. They did this long after the Vedic period. But there
is no proof that all the Vedic gods, as claims Spencer, were the
worshipped souls of the dead. No _argumentum a fero_ can show in a
Vedic dawn-hymn anything other than a hymn to personified Dawn, or
make it probable that this dawn was ever a mortal's name.

In respect of that which precedes all tradition we, whose task is not
to speculate in regard to primitive religious conceptions, but to give
the history of one people's religious progress, may be pardoned for
expressing no opinion. But without abandoning history (i.e.,
tradition) we would revert for a moment to the pre-Indian period and
point out that Zarathustra's rejection of the _daevas_ which must be
the same _devas_ that are worshipped in India, proves that
_deva_-worship is the immediate predecessor of the Hindu religion. As
far back as one can scrutinize the Aryan past he finds, as the
earliest known objects of reverence, 'sun' and 'sky,' besides and
beside the blessed Manes. A word here regarding the priority of
monotheism or of polytheism. The tradition is in favor of the latter,
while on _a priori_ grounds whoever thinks that the more primitive the
race the more apt it is for monotheism will postulate, with some of
the older scholars, an assumed monotheism as the pre-historic religion
of the Hindus; while whosoever opines that man has gradually risen
from a less intellectual stage will see in the early gods of the
Hindus only another illustration of one universal fact, and posit even
Aryan polytheism as an advance on the religion which it is probable
that the remoter ancestors of the Aryans once acknowledged.

A word perhaps should be said, also, in order to a better
understanding between the ethnologists as represented by Andrew Lang,
and the unfortunate philologists whom it delights him to pommel.
Lang's clever attacks on the myth-makers, whom he persistently
describes as the philologists--and they do indeed form part of that
camp--have had the effect of bringing 'philological theories' into sad
disrepute with sciolists and 'common-sense' people. But the sun-myths
and dawn-myths that the myth-makers discover in Cinderella and Red
Riding Hood, ought not to be fathered upon all philologists. On the
other hand, who will deny that in India certain mythological figures
are eoian or solar in origin? Can any one question that Vivasvant the
'wide gleaming' is sun or bright