AND DARKNESS.

WHEN Maitland blasphemously asserted that God was but "a Bogie of
the nursery," he unwittingly made a remark as suggestive in point of
philology as it was crude and repulsive in its atheism. When examined
with the lenses of linguistic science, the "Bogie" or "Bug-a-boo" or
"Bugbear" of nursery lore turns out to be identical, not only with
the fairy "Puck," whom Shakespeare has immortalized, but also with the
Slavonic "Bog" and the "Baga" of the Cuneiform Inscriptions, both
of which are names for the Supreme Being. If we proceed further, and
inquire after the ancestral form of these epithets,--so strangely
incongruous in their significations,--we shall find it in the Old Aryan
"Bhaga," which reappears unchanged in the Sanskrit of the Vedas, and has
left a memento of itself in the surname of the Phrygian Zeus "Bagaios."
It seems originally to have denoted either the unclouded sun or the sky
of noonday illumined by the solar rays. In Sayana's commentary on the
Rig-Veda, Bhaga is enumerated among the seven (or eight) sons of Aditi,
the boundless Orient; and he is elsewhere described as the lord of life,
the giver of bread, and the bringer of happiness. [94]

Thus the same name which, to the Vedic poet, to the Persian of the time
of Xerxes, and to the modern Russian, suggests the supreme majesty
of deity, is in English associated with an ugly and ludicrous fiend,
closely akin to that grotesque Northern Devil of whom Southey was unable
to think without laughing. Such is the irony of fate toward a deposed
deity. The German name for idol--Abgott, that is, "ex-god," or
"dethroned god"--sums up in a single etymology the history of the
havoc wrought by monotheism among the ancient symbols of deity. In
the hospitable Pantheon of the Greeks and Romans a niche was always
in readiness for every new divinity who could produce respectable
credentials; but the triumph of monotheism converted the stately mansion
into a Pandemonium peopled with fiends. To the monotheist an "ex-god"
was simply a devilish deceiver of mankind whom the true God had
succeeded in vanquishing; and thus the word demon, which to the ancient
meant a divine or semi-divine being, came to be applied to fiends
exclusively. Thus the Teutonic races, who preserved the name of their
highest divinity, Odin,--originally, Guodan,--by which to designate
the God of the Christian, [95] were unable to regard the Bog of ancient
tradition as anything but an "ex-god,"