When the priestly families on the Ganges passed beyond the borders of their several states in their contact with each other, they perceived the extent of the whole treasure of sacrificial song and forms of prayer, which the races had brought over in separate portions from the Indus. The confusing multitude of deities and their attributes, which now forced themselves upon the priests, led to the attempt to discover some unity in the mass. The astonishing abundance of conceptions and the number of the supreme deities in the old prayers were essentially due, as has already been pointed out, to the fact that the Indians desired to render to every god whom they invoked the proper and the highest honour. With this object the number of attributes was increased, and the god in question endowed to a greater or less degree with the power and peculiarities of other deities; and in order to win the favour of the deity to whom the sacrifice was offered, men were inclined to praise him as the highest and mightiest of all gods. This inclination was supported by the circumstance that the quick and lively fancy of the Indians never fixed the outlines of their deities or separated them as individuals, and further, by the blind impulse already noticed, to concentrate the power of the gods in one highest god, and seize the unity of the divine nature. Thus we saw that Indra and Agni, Mitra and Varuna, were in turns extolled as the highest deity. The task now before the priests was to understand the meaning of these old prayers, to grasp the point of agreement in these various invocations, the unity in these wide attributes, ascribed sometimes to one god and sometimes to another. This gave a strong impulse to the reflective mind of the Brahmans, and no sooner did the Indians begin to meditate than their fancy became powerful. The form of Indra, and the conception lying at the base of his divinity--the struggle against the black spirits of darkness--faded away in the land of the Ganges. In that region tempests do not come on with the same violence as in the Panjab; the hot season is followed by the rainy season and the inundation without any convulsions of the atmosphere. Again, as the life of war fell into the background, the position of Indra as a god of war and victory became less prominent. Least of all could the priests in a time of peace recognise the god of their order in the god of war, and in any case the national, warlike, heroic character of Indra could offer few points of contact with priestly meditation. If in consequence of the new circumstances and relations of life, Indra passed into the background--the old gods of light, the common possession of the Aryas in Iran and India, Mitra, Aryaman, Varuna, beside and above whom Indra had risen, were again allowed to come into prominence. The effort to grasp the unity of the divine power seemed to find a satisfactory basis in the form of Varuna, who from his lofty watch-tower beholds all things, is present