Can we tell which of them took the precedence and which followed? Historically we cannot do so, for the simple reason that India has no history; her past, present, and future are all represented on a single chart, and we are called to determine their sequence on other grounds than testimony. These grounds must be internal. In the absence of historical annals, we are driven within ourselves to contemplate the order of human thought. But when we enter into this region, it seems to me that we begin to get light even on the path of history. If we take a simple survey of the Indian chart, and consider only the natural and normal. movements of the universal human mind, I think we shall arrive at a tolerably fair and an approximately accurate reckoning of the sequence and arrangement of those steps by which the spirit of that great nation has climbed to its culminating worship.

I shall illustrate my meaning by comparison with a very early document, as old as many of the Vedas, and better known to the West than any of them the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. Of course no one will imagine that I think there is any connection between them except that connection of human nature which it is my aim to establish. But what I wish to remark is this. The objects of creation selected in the first chapter of Genesis are in a very peculiar sense identical with

those objects which are recognised in the Vedas as worthy of religious reverence. Now, in the Book of Genesis, these objects are presented to the view not collectively but seriatim. They are made to pass before us in a particular order. It has always seemed to me that it is not an order of creation, but an order of observation. I think the writer had in his view, not the sequence of God's working, but the sequence of man's perception. The six days of creation to my mind are meant to unfold those successive steps by which the eye of childhood rises to the appreciation of the visible universe. If this be the meaning, it would throw some light upon the sequence of the corresponding objects in the Vedas; for it would show that at a very early date such a mode of thought was native to the Eastern mind. But whether it be or be not a true exegesis, it is certainly a true delineation. It is a fact of experience that the child does arrive at the fullconception of nature by a process very similar to that which is indicated in the order observed by the six days' creation. Let us look for a moment at that sequence.

When the infant opens its eyes upon this wondrous world, the first object which awakens its wonder is light. Light is to every individual man the "offspring of heaven first-born." It is the earliest object of perception which meets his gaze. I do not say it is his earliest sense of conscious

ness; that probably begins with inward pain. But it is the first thing which takes the child out of himself, which tells him that there is another world besides his own soul. You will observe, this earliest outward sensation is light itself, pure and simple. It is not yet light involving the idea of space. Everything at first is touching the eye; there is no sense of distance; there is nothing but glitter, and the glitter is not recognised as anything separate from the sight. This higher recognition only comes with the second day. When the child puts forth its hand to catch the light and finds that it eludes its grasp, it awakens for the first time to the sense of distance. Light ceases to be a mere glitter; it becomes a firmament - a brilliant and boundless expanse — overarching all things. As yet, these things which it overarches are undiscerned; the perception of the diffused light precedes the perception either of its own individual forms or of any other forms. But with the third day there comes this vision of individual things. There opens for the child a season in which the dry land appears with its variegated colours of vegetation, its fruits and flowers and trees. Everything begins to be seen "after its kind"-in its distinction from every other thing; and the eye which has been at first delighted only with the heavens, begins to revel in the growing forms of earth. Then there breaks upon the mind a new perception. The child wakens

to the recognition that there is a connection between the earth and the heavens, that the sun rules the day and the moon rules the night. It is at this stage that it receives its impressions of the dread of physical darkness. That children dread the dark is proverbial; yet it is certainly not a primitive instinct it is the result of reflection. It can only be reached when darkness ceases to be a mere fact and becomes a symbol-the symbol of some guiding hand withdrawn. Then for the first time begins to dawn the interest in life as distinguished from the interest in form. And the earliest interest in life centres in the animal world. The child seeks the first mirror of itself not in the face of its brotherchild, but in the impulses and the movements of the lower creation; the horse and the dog excite its wonder ere ever it has learned to wonder at its own soul. The wonder at its own soul is the final stage of all; it is the sixth day. With the dawning of this day it begins to awaken into the sense of a human love, looks into a mother's face, and experiences that earliest impression of trust in another which is the portal into the Sabbath of rest.

Such is the order of man's childhood, and we have seen that it corresponds to the order of the Hebrew visions of creation. If we apply it to the Pantheon of India, we shall find that it will furnish at least a possible theory of the relative times of her different gods. Let us try to figure the process by which

the Indian filled up that Pantheon.

The Hindu

That

child, like the Hebrew child, opened his eyes on the world of nature, and the first object which he saw was Light; he called it Agni. It was as yet to him what it is at first to every child-only a thing which glitters. It was discerned simply as a part of the eye, and was unconnected with any sense of distance. The Indian child, like all other children, would first learn its distance by the abortive effort to touch it. When it found the light to be something which eluded its grasp, it would awaken into its second stage of worship. second stage was the adoration of Aditi the boundless firmament. Agni had been only the glittering light; Aditi was the light enthroned in the heavens, the light diffused through immensity. Then to the Indian, as to the Jew, there came a third stage; the dry land appeared. The eye began to rest upon solid masses, and to transfer its reverence from the things of heaven to the things of earth. Singularly enough, the first earthly thing which received its reverence was plant-life. It is at the stage subsequent to the worship of the heavens that we find the Indian adoring the juice of a vegetable product under the name of Soma.1 Then the fourth day breaks. The Indian has adored

1 This juice is offered up as a libation, and the offering indicates a glimmering sense of something in man which needs expiation. (Rig-Véda, Langlois' edition, i. 38.)