The explanation also is desired by these enquirers how it is that a red or brown cow can give white milk.[104] The rishis are rigorous logicians, and consider that the powerful divinities who made the world such as it is might have done better; and they do not scruple to communicate their opinion to whom it concerns. “If we were as rich as you we should not allow our worshippers to beg their bread.”
It has been asked whether humanity commenced by having a monotheistic or a polytheistic religion. This is not the first time that this question has been propounded; it has as an antecedent a very ancient opinion, developed in the schools of theology in the Middle Ages; the Fathers of the Church gave it as their opinion that a faith in one God, from the days of the greatest antiquity, had been the glorious heritage of the Semitic family, coming in a direct line from the first man. But these same theologians considered Hebrew to be the primitive language of the human race, an assertion now known to be erroneous.[105] We may therefore subject the first assertion to an examination.
The learned writers who dispute on the original form of religious thought forget that the ancient Aryans could not have been either monotheistic or polytheistic. The Vedic hymns show us that though there were many gods, and that they were equal, yet whilst the worshipper was addressing one, the rest were excluded from his mind, and were as though they did not exist; each god became in turn the Supreme Power, and received the highest praise; the rishis, who had represented the sun under the names of Vishnu, Varuna, Mitra, Savitar as the creator of the world, spoke of it immediately afterwards as the child of the waters, born of the dawn, a god among other gods, neither better nor worse; it is this characteristic of the Aryan religion, this worship offered alternately to different divinities to which Max Müller has given the name of Henotheism.
“Among you, O gods, there is none that is great, and none that is little—none old or young—you are all great indeed.”
The religion of humanity in its entirety at the beginning was this intuition of the divine, whose formula is that article of faith, at once the simplest and the most important—God is God—the want of definiteness in it making it the more applicable to the dawn of thought. This primitive intuition of God was in itself neither monotheistic nor polytheistic, though it might become either according to the expression which it took in the language of man; in no language does the plural exist before the singular; no human mind could have conceived the idea of gods without having previously conceived the idea of one God. “It would be, however, quite as great a mistake to imagine, because the idea of a god must exist previously to that of gods, that therefore a belief in one God preceded everywhere the belief in many gods. A belief in God, as exclusively One, involves a distinct negation of more than one God, and that negation is possible only after the conception, whether real or imaginary, of many gods.”[106] If therefore an expression had been given to this primitive intuition of the Deity, which is the mainspring of all later religion, it would have been, “There is a God,” but certainly not yet, “There is but one God.”
These fine distinctions require close attention to grasp them; the fact that in our modern tongues we have derived the singular Theos from the Greek plural Theoi has caused confusion; from a historical point of view, no doubt Theos has come from Theoi; but putting this aside, the meaning of the word has gone through as complete a transformation as that of the acorn to the oak; the evidence of this change has been so deeply impressed even on our outward senses that as soon as our intellect has attained some measure of development the sound of the word God used in the plural jars on our ears as if we heard of two universes or one twin.
The Hindoo mind, however, oscillated between the representation of many gods and of one only God; and the rishis appear to have attempted to establish a sort of priority amongst their numerous deities.
“That which is one, the seers call in many ways; they speak of Indra, Mitra, Agni, and Varuna—they call it by various names—that which is, and is one.”
“In the evening Agni becomes Varuna—he becomes Mitra when rising in the mornings; having become Savitri, he passes through the sky—having become Indra he warms the heaven in the centre.”[107]