to the highest the fighting god.  Then came into prominence the priestly caste, which gradually taught the warrior that mind was stronger than muscle.  But this caste was one of thinkers.  Their divinity was the product of reflection.  Indra remained, but yielded to a higher power, and the god thought out by the priests became God.  Yet it must not be supposed that the cogitative energy of the Brahman descended upon the people’s gods and suddenly produced a religious revolution.  In India no intellectual advance is made suddenly.  The older divinities show one by one the transformation that they suffered at the hands of theosophic thinkers.  Before the establishment of a general Father-god, and long before that of the pantheistic All-god, the philosophical leaven was actively at work.  It will be seen operative at once in the case of the sun-god, and, indeed, there were few of the older divinities that were untouched by it.  It worked silently and at first esoterically.  One reads of the gods’ ‘secret names,’ of secrets in theology, which ’are not to be revealed,’ till at last the disguise is withdrawn, and it is discovered that all the mystery of former generations has been leading up to the declaration now made public:  ’all these gods are but names of the One.’

THE SUN-GOD.

The hymn which was translated in the first chapter gives an epitome of the simpler conceptions voiced in the few whole hymns to the sun.  But there is a lower and a higher view of this god.  He is the shining god par excellence, the deva, s[=u]rya,[2] the red ball in the sky.  But he is also an active force, the power that wakens, rouses, enlivens, and as such it is he that gives all good things to mortals and to gods.  As the god that gives life he (with others)[3] is the author of birth, and is prayed to for children.  From above he looks down upon earth, and as with his one or many steeds he drives over the firmament he observes all that is passing below.  He has these, the physical side and the spiritual side, under two names, the glowing one, S[=u]rya, and the enlivener, Savitar;[4] but he is also the good god who bestows benefits, and as such he was known, probably locally, by the name of Bhaga.  Again, as a herdsman’s god, possibly at first also a local deity, he is P[=u]shan (the meaning is almost the same with that of Savitar).  As the ‘mighty one’ he is Vishnu, who measures heaven in three strides.  In general, the conception of the sun as a physical phenomenon will be found voiced chiefly in the family-books:  “The sightly form rises on the slope of the sky as the swift-going steed carries him ... seven sister steeds carry him."[5] This is the prevailing utterance.  Sometimes the sun is depicted under a medley of metaphors:  “A bull, a flood, a red bird, he has entered his father’s place; a variegated stone he is set in the midst of the sky; he has advanced and guards the two ends of space."[6] One after the other the