The prevailing aspect of the religion presented in the Vedic hymns may
be broadly designated as Nature-worship.

[Sidenote: Physical phenomena in India.
Their effect on the religion.]
All physical phenomena in India are invested with a grandeur which they
do not possess in northern or even southern Europe. Sunlight, moonlight,
starlight, the clouds purpled with the beam of morning or flaming in the
west like fiery chariots of heaven; to behold these things in their full
magnificence one ought to see them in the East. Even so the sterner
phenomena of nature--whirlwind and tempest, lightning and thunder, flood
and storm-wave, plague, pestilence, and famine; all of these oftentimes
assume in the East a character of awful majesty before which man cowers
in helplessness and despair. The conceptions and feelings hence arising
have from the beginning powerfully affected the religion of the Hindus.
Every-where we can trace the impress of the grander manifestations of
nature--the impress of their beneficence, their beauty, their might,
their mystery, or their terribleness.

[Sidenote: The deities are "the bright ones," according to the language
of the sacred books of India.]
The Sanskrit word for god is _deva_, which means _bright, shining_. Of
physical phenomena it was especially those connected with light that
enkindled feelings of reverence. The black thunder-cloud that enshrouded
nature, in which the demon had bound the life-giving waters, passed
away; for the glittering thunder-bolt was launched, and the streams
rushed down, exulting in their freedom; and then the heaven shone out
again, pure and peaceful as before. But such a wonder as the dawn--with
far-streaming radiance, returning from the land of mystery, fresh in
eternal youth, and scattering the terrors of the night before her--who