2) | 
— 
Indeed, as Professor Max Miiller points out,* Zeus was 
originally the supreme God, even to the Greeks; the ancient 
song of the Peleiades, at Dodona, was, “ Zeus was, Zeus is, 
Zeus will be,’—a sentiment that expresses an idea utterly 
beyond anthropomorphism, and traceable to an earlier existence 
in the human mind tkan the anthropomorphic idea. As far 
back as we can go in the records of human thought, Dyaus 
is called; in the Rig-Veda’ (iv. 1, 10), ‘‘the Father, the 
Creator.” Zeus, then, was originally “ Light” ; a religious 
idea which is not advanced upon by even St. John’s ‘God 
is Light,” nor by the Christian creed of to-day, that Christ 
is © Light of Light.” 
The Hindus are said to have some millions of gods. Their 
pantheon is so expansive as to be ready to accept a fresh 
candidate every day. Even the ghost of a dreaded English- 
man has claimed a niche in the temple of the gods. Anthr opo- 
morphism to-day in India everywhere rules supreme. — But 
that it was not so originally among the remote ancestors of 
the Hindu race we have very suggestive evidence. The early 
religious notions were not of © shosts ” and “doubles ”’ of 
heroes. ‘There is every evidence that the anthropomorphic 
idea grew out of the imperfections of human language, and 
the decay of religious integrity. The further back we go, the 
more evident becomes the fact, as just illustrated in the case 
of Zeus, that attributes, which modern thought has not im- 
proved upon, are predicated of the Deity. 
Already in the time of the Vedic poets the religion of the 
Hindu was in one sense polytheistic ; but the polytheism of 
the Hindu was very different from the later polytheism of the 
Greeks and Romans. The Vedic gods are not first ghosts 
and heroes, and then gods ; but they are personifications of 
abstract ideas and powers of Nature; and are, perhaps, often 
wrongly interpreted by us on account of our previous educa- 
tion in Greek and Roman polytheistic thought. In many 
passages, where it might appear to us that different gods are 
named, it may be originally only that the appellation is dif- 
ferent, as we ourselves call God the Infinite, the Almighty, 
the Creator, the Father, and even the ‘‘ Heaven.” +. The 
heroic period of Hindu religious cult was long subsequent to 
the Vedic era. The materialist might, no doubt, say that 
the personification of Nature’s powers and phenomena is 
a later development of ghost-worship; but against this we 
* Lectures on the Science of Language, vol. ii. p. 481. 
t St. Luke xv. 21, 
