ch He
became Dyaus, and Dyaus became He. Henceforth Dyaus remained as an
appellative of that unseen though ever present Power, which had
revealed its existence to man from the beginning, but which remained
without a name long after every beast of the field and every fowl of
the air had been named by Adam.

Now, what happened in this instance with the name of Dyaus, happened
again and again with other names. When men felt the presence of God in
the great and strong wind, in the earthquake, or the fire, they said
at first, He storms, He shakes, He burns. But they likewise said, the
storm (Marut) blows, the fire (Agni) burns, the subterraneous fire
(Vulcanus) upheaves the earth. And after a time the result was the
same as before, and the words meaning originally wind or fire were
used, under certain restrictions, as names of the unknown God. As long
as all these names were remembered as mere names or attributes of one
and the same Divine Power, there was as yet no polytheism, though, no
doubt, every new name threatened to obscure more and more the
primitive intuition of God. At first, the names of God, like fetishes
or statues, were honest attempts at expressing or representing an idea
which could never find an adequate expression or representation. But
the eidolon, or likeness, became an idol; the nomen, or name, lapsed
into a numen, or demon, as soon as they were drawn away from their
original intention. If the Greeks had remembered that Zeus was but a
name or symbol of the Deity, there would have been no more harm in
calling God by that name than by any other. If they had remembered
that Kronos, and Uranos, and Apollon were all but so many attempts at
naming the various sides, or manifestations, or aspects, or persons of
the Deity, they might have used these names in the hours of their
various needs, just as the Jews called on Jehovah, Elohim, and
Sabaoth, or as Roman Catholics implore the help of Nunziata, Dolores,
and Notre-Dame-de-Grace.

What, then, is the difference between the Aryan and Semitic
nomenclature for the Deity? Why are we told that the pious invocations
of the Aryan world turned into a blasphemous mocking of the Deity,
whereas the Semitic nations are supposed to have found from the first
the true name of God? Before we look anywhere else for an answer to
the question, we must look to language itself, and here we see that
the Semitic dialects could never, by any possibility, have produced
such names a