"Let me pay the penalty of my faults; but let me not suffer, O King, for the crime of others; there are so many days that have not dawned yet! Let them dawn for us also, O Varuna!" Such is the supreme God of the Vedic religion, an organizing God, almighty, omniscient, and moral. The following is a Vedic hymn which sums up with singular force the essential attributes of the God:-- "He who from on high rules this world sees every thing as if it were before him. That which two men, seated side by side are plotting, is heard by king Varuna, himself the third. "This earth belongs to the king Varuna, and this sky, these two sublime worlds with their remote limits; the two seas[45] are the belly of Varuna, and he rests also even in this small pool of water. "He who should leap over the sky and beyond it, would not escape the king Varuna: he has his spies, the spies of the heavens, who go through the world; he has his thousand eyes which look on the earth. "The king Varuna sees everything, all that which is between the two worlds and beyond them: he reckons the winking of the eye of all creatures: "The world is in his hand like the dice in the hand of the gamester. "Let thy sevenfold bands, O Varuna, let thy bands of wrath which are thrice linked together, let them enfold the man with a lying tongue, let them leave free the man with a truthful tongue!" _Ahura Mazda._[46]--Ancient Persia opposes to Zeus, to Jupiter, to Varuna, her Ormazd or Ahura Mazda.[47] "It is through me," he said to his prophet, Zoroaster, "that the firmament, with its distant boundaries, hewn from the sparkling ruby, subsists without pillars to rest upon; it is through me that the earth, through me that the sun, the moon, and the stars take their radiant course through the atmosphere; it was I who formed the seeds in such a manner that, when sown in the earth, they should grow, spring up, and appear on the surface; it was I who traced their veins in every species of plants, who in all beings put the fire of life which does not consume them; it is I who in the maternal womb produce the new-born child, who form the limbs, the skin, the nails, the blood, the feet, the ears; it was I who gave the water feet to run; it was I who made the clouds, which carry the water to the world," &c. This development, taken from a recent book of the Ghebers, the Bundahish, is to be found entire, in the very first words of their oldest and holiest book, the Avesta: "I proclaim and worship Ahura Mazda, the _Creator_." As far as history can be traced, he was already what he is now. Near the ruins of the ancient Ecbatana, the traveller may read, on the red granite of the mountain of Alvand, these words, which were engraved by the hand of Darius, the king of kings, nearly five centuries before the birth of Christ:--