compared to what takes place in traveling, when to go to a distance we must first traverse the space that is near, and in ascending a height, when we must begin from the lower ground.

2. It is said in the Book of Poetry: "Happy union with wife and children is like the music of lutes and harps. When there is concord among brethren, the harmony is delightful and enduring. Thus may you regulate your family, and enjoy the pleasure of your wife and children."

3. The Master said, "In such a state of things, parents have entire complacence!"

Chapter XVI. 1. The Master said, "How abundantly do spiritual beings display the powers that belong to them!

2. "We look for them, but do not see them; we listen to, but do not hear them; yet they enter into all things, and there is nothing without them.

3. "They cause all the people in the empire to fast and purify themselves, and array themselves in their richest dresses, in order to attend at their sacrifices. Then, like overflowing water, they seem to be over the heads, and on the right and left of their worshipers.

4. "It is said in the Book of Poetry, 'The approaches of the spirits, you cannot surmise; and can you treat them with indifference?"

5. Such is the manifestness of what is minute! Such is the impossibility of repressing the outgoings of sincerity!"

Chapter XVII. 1. The Master said: "How greatly filial was Shun! His virtue was that of a sage; his dignity was the imperial throne; his riches were all within the four seas. He offered his sacrifices in his ancestral temple, and his descendants preserved the sacrifices to himself.

2. "Therefore having such great virtue, it could not but be that he should obtain the throne, that he should obtain those riches, that he should obtain his fame, that he should attain to his long life.

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3. Thus it is that Heaven, in the production of things, is surely bountiful to them, according to their qualities. Hence the tree that is flourishing, it nourishes; while that which is ready to fall, it overthrows.

4. "In the Book of Poetry, it is said, 'The admirable, amiable prince displayed conspicuously his excelling virtue, adjusting his people and adjusting his officers. Therefore, he received from Heaven the emoluments of dignity. It pro

tected him, assisted him, decreed him the throne; sending from heaven these favors, as it were repeatedly.'

5. "We may say, therefore, that he who is greatly virtuous will be sure to receive the appointment of Heaven."

VEDIC HYMNS.

BY SIR MONIER MONIER-WILLIAMS.

[SIR MONIER MONIER-WILLIAMS: A leading Anglo-Indian lexicographer and Orientalist; born at Bombay, India, November 12, 1819; died 1889. From 1860 on he was professor of Sanskrit in Oxford. He published several Sanskrit dictionaries, a Sanskrit and a Hindustani grammar; "Indian Epic Poetry (1863), "Indian Wisdom" (1875), "Hinduism" (1877), "Modern India and the Indians" (1878), "Buddhism," etc., 1889.]

To what deities were the prayers and hymns of the Vedas addressed? This is an interesting inquiry, for these were probably the very deities worshiped under similar names by our Aryan progenitors in their primeval home. The answer is: They worshiped those physical forces before which all nations, if guided solely by the light of nature, have in the early period of their life instinctively bowed down, and before which even the more civilized and enlightened have always been compelled to bend in awe and reverence if not in adoration.

To our Aryan forefathers God's power was exhibited in the forces of nature even more evidently than to ourselves. Lands, houses, flocks, herds, men, and animals were more frequently than in Western climates at the mercy of winds, fire, and water; and the sun's rays appeared to be endowed with a potency quite beyond the experience of any European country. We cannot be surprised, then, that these forces were regarded by our Eastern progenitors as actual manifestations, either of one deity in different moods or of separate rival deities contending for supremacy. Nor is it wonderful that these mighty agencies should have been at first poetically personified, and afterwards, when invested with forms, attributes, and individuality, worshiped as distinct gods. It was only natural, too, that a varying supremacy and varying honors should have been accorded to each deified force to the air, the rain, the storm, the sun, or fire-according to the special atmospheric influences to which particular localities were exposed, or according to the seasons of the year when the dominance of each was to be prayed for or deprecated.

This was the religion represented in the Vedas and the primitive creed of the Indo-Aryans about twelve or thirteen centuries before Christ. The first forces deified seem to have been those manifested in the sky and air. These were at first generalized under one rather vague personification, as was natural in the earliest attempts at giving shape to religious ideas. For it may be observed that all religious systems, even the most polytheistic, have generally grown out of some undefined original belief in a divine power or powers controlling and regulating the universe. And although innumerable gods and goddesses, gifted with a thousand shapes, now crowd the Hindu Pantheon, appealing to the instincts of the unthinking millions whose capacity for religious ideas is supposed to require the aid of external symbols, it is probable that there existed for the first Aryan worshipers a similar theistic creed; even as the thoughtful Hindu of the present day looks through the maze of his mythology to the philosophical background of one eternal self-existent Being, one universal Spirit, into whose unity all visible symbols are gathered, and in whose essence all entities are comprehended.

In the Veda this unity 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.

It is interesting to note how this idea, vaguely stated as it was in the Veda, gradually developed and became more clearly defined in the time of Manu. In the last verses of the twelfth book (123-125) we have the following: "Him some adore as transcendently present in fire; others in Manu, lord of creatures; some as more distinctly present in Indra, others in pure air, others as the most high eternal Spirit. Thus the man who perceives in his own soul, the supreme soul, present in all creatures, acquires equanimity towards them all, and shall be absorbed at last in the highest essence."

In the Purusha-sukta of the Rig-veda, which is one of the later hymns, probably not much earlier than the earliest Brahmana, the one Spirit is called Purusha. The more common name is Atman or Paratman, and in the later system Brahman, neut. (nom. Brahmă), derived from root brih, to expand, and denoting the universally expanding essence or universally diffused substance of the universe. It was thus

that the later creed became not so much monotheistic (by which I mean the belief in one God regarded as a personal Being external to the universe, though creating and governing it) as pantheistic: Brahman is the neuter being, "simple infinite being," the only real eternal essence, which, when it passes into universal manifested existence, is called Brahma; when it manifests itself on the earth, is called Vishnu; and when it again dissolves itself into simple being, is called Siva ; all the other innumerable gods and demigods being also mere manifestations of the neuter Brahman, who alone is eternal. This, at any rate, appears to be the genuine pantheistic creed of India at the present day.

To return to the Vedic hymns—perhaps the most ancient and beautiful Vedic deification was that of Dyaus, the sky, as Dyaush-pitar, "Heavenly Father" (the Zeus or Jupiter of the Greeks and Romans). Then closely connected with Dyaus was a goddess, Aditi, "the Infinite Expanse," conceived of subsequently as the mother of all the gods. Next came a development of the same conception called Varuna, "the Investing Sky," said to answer to Ahura Mazda, the Ormazd of the ancient Persian mythology, and to the Greek Ouranos — but a more spiritual conception, leading to a worship which rose to the nature of a belief in the great Our-Father-who-art-inHeaven. This Varuna, again, was soon thought of in connection with another vague personification called Mitra (= the Persian Mithra), god of day. After a time these impersonations of the celestial sphere were felt to be too vague to suit the growth of religious ideas in ordinary minds. Soon, therefore, the great investing firmament resolved itself into separate cosmical entities with separate powers and attributes. First, the watery atmosphere, personified under the name of Indra, ever seeking to dispense his dewy treasures (indu), though ever restrained by an opposing force or spirit of evil called Vritra; and, secondly, the wind, thought of either as a single personality named Vagu, or as a whole assemblage of moving powers coming from every quarter of the compass, and impersonated as Maruts or "Storm-gods." At the same time in this process of decentralization - if I may use the term -the once purely celestial Varuna became relegated to a position among seven secondary deities of the heavenly sphere called Adityas (afterwards increased to twelve, and regarded as diversified forms of the sun in the several months of the year), and sub

sequently to a dominion over the waters when they had left the air and rested on the earth.

Of these separately deified physical forces, by far the most favorite object of adoration was the deity supposed to yield the dew and rain, longed for by Eastern cultivators of the soil with even greater cravings than by Northern agriculturists. Indra, therefore, the Jupiter Pluvius of early Indian mythology, —is undoubtedly the principal divinity of Vedic worshipers, in so far at least as the greater number of their prayers and hymns are addressed to him.

What, however, could rain effect without the aid of heat? a force, the intensity of which must have impressed an Indian mind with awe, and led him to invest the possessor of it with divine attributes. Hence the other great god of Vedic worshipers, and in some respects the most important in his connection with sacrificial rites, is Agni (Latin Ignis), the god of fire. Even Surya, the sun (Greek Helios), who was probably at first adored as the original source of heat, came to be regarded as only another form of fire. He was merely a manifestation of the same divine energy removed to the heavens and consequently less accessible. Another deity, Ushas, goddess of the dawn, the Eōs of the Greeks, was naturally connected with the sun, and regarded as daughter of the sky. Two other deities, the Açvins, were fabled as connected with Ushas, as ever young and handsome, traveling in a golden car, and precursors of the dawn. They are sometimes called Dasras, as divine physicians, destroyers of diseases; sometimes Uasatyas, as "never untrue." They appear to have been personifications of two luminous rays imagined to precede the break of day. These, with Yama, "the God of departed spirits," are the principal deities of the Mantra portion of the Veda.

We find, therefore, no trace in the Mantras of the Trimurti or Triad of deities (Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva), afterwards so popular. Nor does the doctrine of transmigration, afterwards an essential element of the Hindu religion, appear in the Mantra portion of the Veda, though there is a clear declaration of it in the Aranyaka of the Aitareya Brahmana. Nor is caste clearly alluded to, except in the later Purusha-sūkta.

But here it may be asked, if sky, air, water, fire, and the sun were thus worshiped as manifestations of the supreme universal God of the universe, was not the earth also an object of adoration with the early Hindus? And unquestionably in the earlier