There are in fact three religions in the Veda, or, if I may say so, three naves in one great temple, reared, as it were, before our eyes by poets, prophets, and philosophers. Here too we can watch the work and the workmen. We have not to deal with hard formulas only, with unintelligible ceremonies, or petrified fetiches. We can see how the human mind arrives by a perfectly rational process at all its later irrationalities. This is what distinguishes the Veda from all other Sacred Books. Much, no doubt, in the Veda also, and in the Vedic ceremonial, is already old and unintelligible, hard, and petrified. But in many cases the development of names and concepts, their transition from the natural to the supernatural, from the individual to the general, is still going on, and it is for that very reason that we find it so difficult, nay almost impossible, to translate the growing thoughts of the Veda into the full-grown and more than full-grown language of our time. Let us take one of the oldest words for god in the Veda, such as d e v a, the Latin _deus_. The dictionaries tell you that d e v a means god and gods, and so, no doubt, it does. But if we always translated d e v a in the Vedic hymns by god, we should not be translating, but completely transforming the thoughts of the Vedic poets. I do not mean only that _our_ idea of God is totally different from the idea that was intended to be expressed by d e v a; but even the Greek and Roman concept of gods would be totally inadequate to convey the thoughts imbedded in the Vedic d e v a. D e v a meant originally bright, and nothing else. Meaning bright, it was constantly used of the sky, the stars, the sun, the dawn, the day, the spring, the rivers, the earth; and when a poet wished to speak of all of these by one and the same word--by what we should call a general term--he called them D e v a s. When that had been done, D e v a did no longer mean "the Bright ones," but the name comprehended all the qualities which the sky and the sun and the dawn shared in common, excluding only those that were peculiar to each. Here you see how, by the simplest process, the D e v a s, the bright ones, might become and did become the D e v a s, the heavenly, the kind, the powerful, the invisible, the immortal--and, in the end, something very like the θεοἱ (or _dii_) of Greeks and Romans. In this way one Beyond, the Beyond of Nature, was built up in the ancient religion of the Veda, and peopled with Devas, and Asuras, and Vasus, and Âdityas, all names for the bright solar, celestial, diurnal, and vernal powers of nature, without altogether excluding, however, even the dark and unfriendly powers, those of the night, of the dark clouds, or of winter, capable of mischief, but always destined in the end to succumb to the valor and strength of their bright antagonists. * * * * *