But the two often blend together, as in the religions
of the Aryan race, in which we see deified heroes and
ancestors crowding the courts of Olympus, with a
multitude of anthropomorphic gods, who are often
merely obvious personifications of natural phenomena
or astronomical myths. Thus Varuna, Ouranos, or
Uranus, are personifications of the vault of heaven ;
Phoebus, the shining one, of the sun ; Aurora, of
the dawn ; while Hercules is half deified hero and
half solar myth. Sometimes, however, of the two
stems of religion one only has flourished, and the other
has either never existed, or been overshadowed by the
first and relegated to a lower sphere. Thus the great
Chinese civilisation, comprising such a large portion of
the human race, has apparently developed its religion
entirely from the idea of spirits and spirit -worship.
The worship of ancestors is its main feature, and its
sacred books are, in efi"ect, treatises on ethics and political
economy, with rules for rites and ceremonies to enforce
decent and decorous behaviour, rather than what we
should call works of religion. There is no trace of a con-
ception of anthropomorphic gods in the genuine national
Chinese religion from Confucius downwards ; and even
the introduction of Buddhism has done little but add
the deified hero, Buddha, to the list of divine ancestors
and give more definite shape to various vague super-
stitions. In like manner the whole Buddhist world can
hardly be said to recognise anything beyond their
incarnate hero, except a Nirvana or metaphysical
abstraction, rather than a personal deity.
With other races again, and specially the Hebrew,
the idea of a tribal anthropomorphic God has gradually



198 MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT.
