f
spring and winter, of birth and death. But, although the Divine
presence was felt everywhere, it was impossible in that early period
of thought, and with a language incapable as yet of expressing
anything but material objects, to conceive the idea of God in its
purity and fullness, or to assign to it an adequate and worthy
expression. Children cannot think the thoughts of men, and the poets
of the Veda could not speak the language of Aristotle. It was by a
slow process that the human mind elaborated the idea of one absolute
and supreme Godhead; and by a still slower process that the human
language matured a word to express that idea. A period of growth was
inevitable, and those who, from a mere guess of their own, do not
hesitate to speak authoritatively of a primeval revelation, which
imparted to the Pagan world the idea of the Godhead in all its purity,
forget that, however pure and sublime and spiritual that revelation
might have been, there was no language capable as yet of expressing
the high and immaterial conceptions of that Heaven-sent message. The
real history of religion, during the earliest mythological period,
represents to us a slow process of fermentation in thought and
language, with its various interruptions, its overflowings, its
coolings, its deposits, and its gradual clearing from all extraneous
and foreign admixture. This is not only the case among the
Indo-European or Aryan races in India, in Greece, and in Germany. In
Peru, and wherever the primitive formations of the intellectual world
crop out, the process is exactly the same. "The religion of the sun,"
as it has been boldly said by the author of the "Spanish Conquest in
America," "was inevitable." It was like a deep furrow which that
heavenly luminary drew, in its silent procession from east to west,
over the virgin mind of the gazing multitude; and in the impression
left there by the first rising and setting of the sun, there lay the
dark seed of a faith in a more than human being, the first intimation
of a life without beginning, of a world without end. Manifold seed
fell afterwards into the soil once broken. Something divine was
discovered in everything that moved and lived. Names were stammered
forth in anxious haste, and no single name could fully express what
lay hidden in the human mind and wanted expression--the idea of an
absolute, and perfect, and supreme, and immortal Essence. Thus a
countless host of nominal gods was called into be