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LECTURE III.
107
we witnessed ourselves but yesterday, the ancestors of the whole Aryan race, thousands of years it may be before Homer and the Veda, worshipping an unseen Being, under the selfsame name, the best, the most exalted name which they could find in their vocabulary-under the name of Light and Sky.
And let us not turn away, and say that this was, after all, but nature-worship and idolatry. No, it was not meant for that, though it may have been degraded into that in later times. Dyaus did not mean the blue sky, nor was it simply the sky personified: it was meant for something else. We have in the Veda the invocations Dyaūs pítar, the Greek Zell nátep, the Latin Jupiter; and that means in all the three languages what it meant before these three languages were torn asunder-it means Heaven-Father! These two words are not mere words; they are to my mind the oldest poem, the oldest prayer of mankind, or at least of that pure branch of it to which we belong-and I am as firmly convinced that this prayer was uttered, that this name was given to the unknown God before Sanskrit was Sanskrit and Greek was Greek, as, when I see the Lord's Prayer in the languages of Polynesia and Melanesia, I feel certain that it was first uttered in the language of Jerusalem. We little thought when we heard for the first time the name of Jupiter, degraded it may be My Homer or Ovid into a scolding husband or a faithless lover, what sacred records lay enshrined in that unholy name. We shall have to learn the same lesson again and again in the Science of Religion, viz. that the place whereon we stand is holy ground. Thousands of years have passed since the Aryan nations separated to travel to the North
