Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/202

So, for instance, poets of the ancient family of bards, the Vasishthas, on a certain occasion brag that they made Indra prefer their own soma libations to those of Pāçadyumna Vāyata, though the latter had gone to the trouble of fetching Indra from a great distance. Frantically emphatic prayer; imprecation of the man who is praying at the same time; and naughty tricks of various sorts show us under this aspect the whole world of praying and sacrificing men engaged in a sort of universal game of tag: the hindmost is "it." The Vedic Hindus have made a sad botch of this matter. I am glad to say that this particular crudity passes out at the end of the Vedic period with the slow "twilight of the gods" which shifts the interest from polytheism, myth, and sacrifice to the theosophic speculations of the Upanishads. When the personal gods emerge again in later Hinduism, they are much clarified; at least the risky question about their presence in many places at one and the same time, and the equitable distribution of their favors is, as far as I know, never asked again.

There is scarcely any idea which has suffered so much from the utilitarian aspects of Vedic religion as the Vedic idea of faith. To begin with, the word itself is of interest; it is çraddhā, the sound for sound equivalent of Latin and our own credo. The etymological meaning of this word is absolutely