powers of nature, Surya, the sun:  Agni, fire:  Indra, rain, etc.  It is maintained by many authors, in India as well as in Europe, that these designations were only applied as names of one and the same potential deity.  This is the ground held by the various branches of the modern Somaj of India.  Yet we must not suppose that the monotheism of the early Aryans was all that we understand by that term; it is enough that the power addressed was one and personal.  Even henotheism, the last name which Professor Max Mueller applies to the early Aryan faith, denotes oneness in this sense.  The process of differentiation and corruption advanced more rapidly among the Indo-Aryans than in the Iranian branch of the same race, and in all lands changes were wrought to some extent by differences of climate and by environment.[34] The Norsemen, for example, struggling with the wilder and sterner forces of storm and wintry tempest, would naturally differ in custom, and finally in faith, from the gentle Hindu under his Indian sky; yet there were common elements traceable in the earliest traditions of these races, and the fact that religions are not wholly dependent upon local conditions is shown by both Christianity and Buddhism, which have flourished most conspicuously and permanently in lands where they were not indigenous.

“In the Vedas,” says Sir Monier Williams, “unity in the conception of deity 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.”  One of the earliest deifications that we can trace was that of Varuna, who represented the overhanging sky.  The hymns addressed to Varuna are not only the earliest, but they are the loftiest and most spiritual in their aspirations.  They find in him an element of holiness before which sin is an offence; and in some vague sense he is the father of all things, like the Zeus whom Paul recognized in the poetry of Greece.

But, as already stated, this vague conception of God as one, was already in a transition toward separate impressions of the different powers of nature.  If the idea of God was without any very clear personality and more or less obscure, it is not strange that it should come to be thus specialized as men thought of objects having a manifestly benign influence—­as the life-quickening sun or the reviving rain.  It is not strange that, without a knowledge of the true God, they should have been filled with awe when gazing upon the dark vault of night, and should have rendered adoration to the moon and her countless retinue of stars.  If there must be idolatry, let it be that sublime nature worship of the early Aryans, though even that was sure to degenerate into baser forms.  One might suppose that the worship of the heavenly bodies would remain the purest and noblest; and yet the sun-worship of the Assyrians and the Phoenicians became unspeakably vile in its sensuousness, and finally the most wicked and abominable of all heathen systems.  India in her darkest days never sank so low, and when her degradation came it was through other conceptions than those of nature worship.