SCIENCE. 



349 



Max Muller is disposed to deprecate the supposition that 

 the " Heaven-Father " of the earliest Vedic hymns is 

 rightly to be understood as having meant what we mean 

 by God. Very probably indeed it may have meant some- 

 thing much more simple. But not the less on that ac- 

 count it may have meant something quite as true. I do 

 not know, indeed, why we should set any very high esti- 

 mate on the success which has attended the most learned 

 theologians in giving anything like form or substance to 

 our conceptions of the Godhead. Christianity solves the 

 difficulty by presenting, as the type of all true concep- 

 tions on the subject, the image of a Divine Humanity, and 

 the history of a perfect Life. In like manner, those 

 methods of representing the character and attributes of 

 the Almighty, which were employed to teach the Jewish 

 people, were methods all founded on the same principle 

 of a sublime Anthropomorphism. But when we come 

 to the abstract definitions of Theology they invariably 

 end either in self contradictions, or in words in which 

 beauty of rhythm takes the place of intelligible mean- 

 ing. Probably no body of men ever came to draw up 

 such definitions with greater advantages than the Re- 

 formers of the English Church. They had before them 

 the sublime imagery of the Hebrew Prophets — all the 

 traditions of the Christian world — all the language of 

 philosophy — all the subtleties of the Schools. Yet of 

 the Godhead, they can only say, as a negative definition, 

 that God is " without body, parts, or passions." But, if 

 by "passions" we are to understand all mental 

 affections, this definition is not only in defiance 

 of the whole language of the Jewish Scriptures, but 

 in defiance also of all that is conceivable of the Being 

 who is the author of all good, the fountain of all love, 

 who hates evil, and is angry with the wicked every day. 

 A great master of the English tongue has given another 

 definition in which, among other things it is affirmed 

 that the attributes of God are "incommunicable." 4 Yet, 

 at least, all the good attributes of all creatures must be 

 conceived as communicated to them by their Creator, 

 in whom all fullness dwells. I do not know, therefore, 

 by what title we are to assume that " what we mean by 

 God " is certainly so much nearer the truth than the 

 simplest conceptions of a primeval age. It is at least 

 possible that in that age there may have been intima- 

 tions of the Divine Personality, and of the Divine Presence 

 which we have not now. Moreover, there may have 

 been developments of error in this high matter, wh : ch 

 may well shake our confidence in the unquestionable su- 

 periority of " what we mean by God " over what may 

 have been meant and understood by our earliest fathers 

 in respec to the Being whom they adored. Some con- 

 ceptions of the Divine Being which have been prevalent 

 in the Christian Church, have been formed upon theolo- 

 gical traditions so questionable that the developments of 

 them have been among the heaviest burdens of the 

 Faith. It is not too much to say that some of the doc- 

 trines derived from scholastic theology, and once mpst 

 widely accepted in the Christian Church — such, for ex- 

 ample, as the fate of unbaptized infants — are doctrines 

 which present the nature and character of the Godhead 

 in aspects as irrational as they are repulsive. One of the 

 most remarkable schools of Christian thought which has 

 arisen in recent times is that which has made the idea of 

 the "Fatherhood of God" the basis of its distinctive 

 teaching. Yet it is nothing but a reversion to the sim- 

 plest of all ideas, the most rudimentary of all experiences 

 — that which takes the functions and the authority of a 

 father as the most natural image of the Invisible and 

 Infinite Being to whom we owe " life and breath and all 

 things." In the facts of Vedic literature, when we care- 

 fully separate these facts from theories about them, there 

 is really no symptom of any time when the idea of some 

 Living Being in the nature of God had not yet been at- 



tained. On the contrary, the earliest indications of this 

 conception are indications of the sublimest character, and 

 the process of evolution seems distinctly to have been a 

 process not of an ascending but of a descending order. 

 Thus it appears that the great appellative " Dyaus," 

 which in the earliest Vedic literature is masculine, and 

 stood for " The Bright or Shining One," or the Living 

 Being whose dwelling is the Light, and in later times be- 

 come a feminine, and stood for nothing but the sky. 5 It 

 is quite evident that in the oldest times of the Aryan 

 race, in so far as those times have left us any record, not 

 only had the idea of a Personal God been fully conceived, 

 but such a Being had been described, and addressed in 

 language and under symbols which are comparable with 

 the sublimest imagery in the Visions of Patmos. How 

 firmly, too, and how naturally these conceptions of a God 

 were rooted in the analogies of our own human person- 

 ality, is attested by the additional fact that Paternity was 

 the earliest Vedic idea of Creation, and Dyaus was in- 

 voked not only as the Heaven-Father, but specially as the 

 " Dyaush pita ganita," which is the Sanskrit equivalent 

 of the Greek Zei)c irarrip yevETt/p. 



When, again, we are told by Sanskrit scholars that 

 the earliest religious conceptions of the Aryan race, as 

 exhibited in the Veda, were Pantheistic, and that the 

 Gods they worshiped were "Deifications" of the Forces 

 or Powers of Nature, we are to remember that this is an 

 interpretation and not a fact. It is an interpretation, 

 too, which assumes the familiarity of the human mind in 

 the ages of its infancy with one of the most doubtful and 

 difficult conceptions of modern science — namely, the ab- 

 stract conception of Energy or Force as an inseparable 

 attribute of Matter. The only fact, divested of all pre- 

 conceptions, which these scholars have really ascertained 

 is, that in compositions which are confessedly poetical the 

 energies of Nature were habitually addressed as the en- 

 ergies of Personal or Living Beings. But this fact does 

 not in the least involve the supposition that the energies 

 of Nature which are thus addressed had, at some still 

 earlier epoch, been regarded under the aspect of Material 

 Forces, and had afterwards come to be personified, nor 

 does it in the least involve the other supposition that, 

 when so personified, they were really regarded as so many 

 different beings absolutely separate and distinct from each 

 other. Both of these suppositions may indeed be matter 

 of argument; but neither of them can be legitimately 

 assumed. They are, on the contrary, both ot them open 

 to the most serious, if not to insuperable objections. As 

 regards the first of them — that the earliest human con- 

 ceptions of Nature were of that most abstruse and diffi- 

 cult kind which consists in the idea of Material Force 

 without any living embodiment or abode, I have already 

 indicated the grounds on which it seems in the highest 

 degree improbable. As regards the second supposition 

 ■ — viz,, that when Natural Forces came to be personified 

 each one of them was regarded as the embodiment of a 

 separate and distinct Divinity — this is a most unsafe in- 

 terpretation of the language of poetry. The purest Mono- 

 theism has a Pantheistic side. To see all things in God 

 is very closely related to seeing God in all things. The 

 giving of separate names to divers manifestations of one 

 Divine Power may pass into Polytheism by insensible 

 degrees. But it would be a most erroneous conclusion 

 from the use of such names at a very early stage in the 

 history of religious development, that those who so em- 

 ployed them had no conception of One Supreme Being. 

 In the Philosophy of Brahminism even, in the midst of 

 its most extravagant Polytheistic developments, not only 

 has this idea been preserved, but it has been taught and 

 held as the central idea of the whole system. " There is 

 but one Being — no second." Nothing really exists but 

 the one Universal Spirit, called Brahmin ; and whatever 

 appears to exists independently is identical with that 



J. H. Newman, " Idea of a University," p. 60, 



5 Hibbert Lectures, pp. 276, 277, 



