yet entered on their more dreadful phase only after they had fallen under malign influences, home or foreign.* The contrast might be pursued to their respective priesthoods, where, indeed, exceptions would be found, but only defining and confirming the rule. These characteristic and fundamental differences in feeling, thought, and worship can be traced to the primary difference in the conception of God. The one class of religions developed themselves from the idea of Divine Fatherhood, but the other class from the idea of Divine Sovereignty, severely exercised over a guilty race. The subjective Semite found his God in himself, and offered a worship such as would have been acceptable to him had he been Deity. The objective Indo-European found his God without and above him, and rejoiced in a religion as full of light and gladness as the resplendent heaven. We may now attempt to formulate the primitive IndoEuropean idea of God. We can at once exclude the fancy that it was a fetich or an idol-god, such as the savages of the South Sea Islands may now worship. The God of our fathers was no ghost of a deceased ancestor seen in feverish dreams. They stood in the primeval home in the highlands of North-western Asia, looked, as * Pfleiderer, "Die Religion," vol. ii. 128, ascribes the myth of Kronos devouring his own children to Oriental, i.e., Semitic influence. Gladstone, "Address on the Place of Ancient Greece in the Providential Order of the World," pp. 35, 36. among the first, to leave the common home, but the several Celtic dialects, Irish, Cymric, Armorican, Cornish, have the cognates of deva, but not of dyaus.* It seems an almost allowable inference that the Indo-Europeans had not begun to distinguish between the individual and the general, God and gods, when the earliest departures occurred. Then the Lithuanian has deva-s, old Prussian has deiwa-s, but neither has preserved the proper name. That deva had been undergoing a process of deterioration in very early times is also evident from its complete change of meaning in Zend, where daeva is no longer God, but demon. This is all the more significant as the Iranians are representatives of an Indo-European monotheistic tendency, and their repudiation of the deity of the daevas may be interpreted as their protest against the growing Polytheism. If, then, these facts may be held to indicate the extension of an individual name SO as to embrace a genus, the individual must have formed the starting-point. And if the inter-relations of dyaus and deva be studied, whatever the order of their application to the Divine Being, this aboriginal individualism becomes apparent. They spring from the same root-are branches of a common stem. The unity of root indicates unity * Pictet, "Les Origines Indo-Europ.," vol. ii. pp. 653, 663. The inter-relations of the words and their relation to the common root, dî, to shine, may be studied as exhibited in Fick, "Vergleich. Wörterbuch," pp. 93–96, and Max Müller, "Science of Language," of thought. If Dyaus was first, then a deva was a being who had the nature of Dyaus, Dyaus was deva, Ζεύς ὁ θεός. The qualities perceived in him were the qualities conceived as constitutive and distinctive of a god. If deva was first, then Dyaus was the deva par excellence, the being to whom the qualities held to be divine belonged. Inquiry as to the order in which the words were applied to God may be useless enough, but their common root seems to indicate that the primitive Indo-European mind had conceived Dyaus and deva as ultimately identical; just as the Hebrew-though here the verbal does not indicate the mental connection -identified in his ultimate thinking Jahveh and Elohim.* The radical connection thus existing between the words may be held as an evidence that a radical connection existed in the Indo-European mind between the idea of God and a specific God. However this connection is explained—whether Dyaus, or deva, or neither, but a thought anterior to both, is made the parent conception -the result is the same, a Theism which we may term individualistic. But now the question rises, What thought lay at the root of both words? The common ii. pp. 449 ff. Dyaus seems to have as a word a simpler and more rudimentary structure than deva, but simplicity of structure may not always be evidence of priority of use in a given sense. * Ewald, "Geschichte des Volks Israel,” vol. i. p. 138 (2nd ed.). Abraham once did, at the resplendent sun flooding the world with life and light, at the deep, broad, blue heaven, a bosom that enfolded earth, bringing the rain that fertilized their fields and fed their rivers, and the heat that ripened their corn, at the glory its sunlight threw upon the waking, its moonlight upon the sleeping, earth, and at the stars that "globed themselves" in the same boundless Heaven, and went and came and shone so sweetly on man and beast, and they called that far yet near, changing but unchangeable, still but ever-moving, bright yet unconsumed and unconsuming Heaven, deva— God. To Indo-European man, Heaven and God were one, not a thing but a person, whose Thou stood over against his I. His life was one, the life above him was one too. Then, that life was generative, productive, the source of every other life, and so to express his full conception, he called the living Heaven, Diespiter, Dyaushpitar-Heaven-Father. The primitive form of the Indo-European idea of God, so far as it is discoverable, now lies before us. We must now see what light the form can throw upon the genesis of the idea. It certainly shows the theories before examined to be historically untenable. Terror, distempered dreams, fear of the unknown causes of the accidents. and destructive phenomena of nature, the desire to propitiate the angry ghosts of ancestors deceased-none of these could have produced the simple, sublime faith of our Indo-European man-child. The religion whose earliest form embodies neither terror nor darkness, but a spirit glad and brilliant like the light of Heaven, cannot have risen out of the ignorance and fears of a soul hardly human. The object selected for worship was the sublimest man could perceive, and even the inquirer most inclined to deny spiritual and theistic elements to the first religion, must concede to its Indo-European form rare elevation of object and sunniness of aspect, and to the men who held it a force of thought and strength of imagination incompatible with what we know to be the mental and moral condition of savages. The idea formulated in HeavenFather was no product of the reasoning or reflective consciousness, because the conclusions of the one and the creations of the other are abstract, bodiless, not concrete, embodied, living. There were two real or objective, and two ideal or subjective, factors in the genesis of the idea. The two real were the bright, brooding Heaven and its action in relation to Earth. The two ideal were the conscience and the imagination. real factors stimulated the action of the ideal. The ideal borrowed the form in which to express themselves from the real. Conscience knew of relation, dependent and obligatory, to Some One. Imagination discovered the Some One on whom the individual and the whole alike depended in the Heaven. Neither faculty could be satisfied with the subjective, each was driven by the The |