“What great crime have I committed, O Varuna, that thou shouldst want to kill thy friend, thy bard. Tell me, O Lord, O infallible one, and I will then lay my homage at thy feet.
“Free me from the bonds of my crime, do not sever the thread of the prayer that I am weaving, do not deliver me over to the deaths that, at thy dictate, O Asura, strike him who has committed a crime: send me not into the gloomy regions far from the light.
“Let me pay the penalty of my faults; but let me not suffer, O King, for the crime of others; there are so many days that have not dawned yet! Let them dawn for us also, O Varuna!”
Such is the supreme God of the Vedic religion, an organizing God, almighty, omniscient, and moral. The following is a Vedic hymn which sums up with singular force the essential attributes of the God:—
“He who from on high rules this world sees every thing as if it were before him. That which two men, seated side by side are plotting, is heard by king Varuna, himself the third.
“This earth belongs to the king Varuna, and this sky, these two sublime worlds with their remote limits; the two seas[45] are the belly of Varuna, and he rests also even in this small pool of water.
“He who should leap over the sky and beyond it, would not escape the king Varuna: he has his spies, the spies of the heavens, who go through the world; he has his thousand eyes which look on the earth.
“The king Varuna sees everything, all that which is between the two worlds and beyond them: he reckons the winking of the eye of all creatures:
“The world is in his hand like the dice in the hand of the gamester.
“Let thy sevenfold bands, O Varuna, let thy bands of wrath which are thrice linked together, let them enfold the man with a lying tongue, let them leave free the man with a truthful tongue!”