Our missionaries who go from one end of the earth to the other, reciting the Lord’s Prayer in all the dialects of the world, do not doubt the historical fact that this prayer was said one day at Jerusalem for the first time; we also may feel as profoundly convinced that under the name of Heaven-Father, the Supreme Being has been worshipped on the Himalayan mountains, under the oaks of Dodona, on the Capitol, and in the forests of Germany. It has required millions of men to fashion this name alone, which is the most ancient prayer of the Aryan race. “Five thousand years have passed, perhaps more, since the Asiatic Aryans, speaking as yet neither Sanscrit, Greek, nor Latin, called upon the All-Father as Dyu-patar, Heaven-Father. Four thousand years ago, or it may be earlier, the Aryans who had travelled southwards to the rivers of the Punjaub called him Dyaush-pita, the Heaven-Father. Three thousand years ago, or it may be earlier, the Aryans on the shores of the Hellespont called him Zeus-pater, Heaven-Father. Two thousand years ago the Aryans of Italy looked up to that bright Heaven above and called it Ju-piter, the Heaven-Father. And a thousand years ago the same Heaven-Father was invoked in the dark forests of Germany, since the Teutonic Aryans sacrificed to the same Heaven-Father; and his old name of Tyr, Tiu, or Zio resounded then perhaps for the last time. “But no thought, no name, has ever been entirely lost.”[99] Some thousands of years have elapsed since these families have spread abroad on all sides; each branch has formed its own language, its own nationality, its mode of viewing life, and its philosophies; temples have been built and razed to the ground; since then all have aged, all are wiser, perhaps better, but the name which they gave to the Invisible Power who enfolds them is still the same, “Our Father which art in Heaven.” This name, whose unity has always been perfect, is a magical formula, which brings our ancestors, even the most remote, within touch, and enables us to see them as they were, as they spoke and felt, thousands of years before Homer and the Hindoo poets. Guided by the science of language and following the path in the Vedic hymns taken by the humanity preceding us, we see how the concept of God, in its germ in the name Deva, grew from the idea of light, to active light, the one who wakens, the giver of daily light, of warmth and new life. It is easy to understand the difference between these two assertions--first of this one--that the early Aryans called the phenomena of nature themselves by the name of God; and the other--that the Aryan mind distilled from the concept of these phenomena the general idea of God. “If I were asked,” said Max Müller, “which is the most wonderful discovery of the nineteenth century in the history of humanity, I should reply it is that of the etymological equation of the Sanscrit Dyaush-pitar, the Greek Zeus-pater, the Latin Ju-piter, and Tyr, Tiw, and Zio of the Germans.”