tly declares.
The making was surely slow. In tracing the genealogy of the divine, it
has been found that its root was fear. The root, dispersed by light,
ultimately dissolved. But, meanwhile, it founded religion, which,
revealed in storm and panic, for prophets had ignorance and dread. The
gods were not then. There were demons only, more exactly there were
diabolized expressions invented to denominate natural phenomena and
whatever else perturbed. It was in the evolution of the demoniac that
the divine appeared. Through one of time's unmeasurable gaps there
floated the idea that perhaps the phenomena that alarmed were but the
unconscious agents of superior minds. At the suggestion, irresistibly
a dramatization of nature began in which the gods were born, swarms of
them, nebulous, wayward, uncertain, that, through further gaps, became
concrete, became occasionally reducible to two great divinities, earth
and sky, whose union was imagined--a hymen which the rain
suggested--and from which broader conceptions proceeded and grander
gods emerged.

The most poetic of these are perhaps the Hindu. At the heraldings of
newer gods, the lords of other ghostlands have, after battling
violently, swooned utterly away. But though many a fresher faith has
been brandished at them, apathetically, in serene indifference, the
princes of the Aryan sky endure.

It is their poetry that has preserved them. To their creators poetry
was abundantly dispensed. To no other people have myths been as
frankly transparent. To none other, save only their cousins the
Persians, have fancies more luminous occurred. The Persians so
polished their dreams that they entranced the world that was. Poets
can do no more. The Hindus too were poets. They were children as well.
Their first lisp, the first recorded stammer of Indo-European speech,
is audible still in the _Rig-Veda_, a bundle of hymns tied together,
four thousand years ago, for the greater glory of Fire. The worship of
the latter led to that of the Sun and ignited the antique altars. It
flamed in Persia, lit perhaps the shrine of Vesta, afterward dazzled
the Incas, igniting, meanwhile, not altars merely, but purgatory
itself.

In Persia, where it illuminated the face of Ormuzd, its beneficence is
told in the _Avesta_, a work of such holiness that it was polluted if
seen. In the _Rig-Veda_, there are verses which were subsequently
accounted so sacred that if a soudra overheard them the ignominy of
h