From the Catholic standpoint, Dr. E. L. Fischer has argued that "Varuna is in the ontological, physical, and ethical relation the highest, indeed the unique, God of ancient India"; and that the Nature-Gods of the Veda can belong only to a later period in the religious consciousness (Heidenthum und Offenbarung, 1878, pp. 36-37). Such a development, had it really occurred, might be said to represent a movement of primitive freethought from an unsatisfying monotheism to a polytheism that seemed better to explain natural facts. A more plausible view of the process, however, is that of von Bradke, to the effect that "the old Indo-Germanic polytheism, with its pronounced monarchic apex, which ... constituted the religion of the pre-Vedic [Aryan] Hindus, lost its monarchic apex shortly before and during the Rig-Veda period, and set up for itself the so-called Henotheism [worship of deities severally as if each were the only one], which thus represented in India a time of religious decline; a decline that, at the end of the period to which the Rig-Veda hymns belong, led to an almost complete dissolution of the old beliefs. The earlier collection of the hymns must have promoted the decline; and the final redaction must have completed it. The collected hymns show only too plainly how the very deity before whom in one song all the remaining Gods bow themselves, in the next sinks almost in the dust before another. Then there sounds from the Rig-Veda (x, 121) the wistful question: Who is the God whom we should worship?" (Dyâus Asura, Ahuramazda, und die Asuras, Halle, 1885, p. 115; cp. note, supra, p. 30). On this view the growth of monotheism went on alongside of a growth of critical unbelief, but, instead of expressing that, provoked it by way of reaction. Dr. Muir more specifically argues (Sanskrit Texts, v, 116) that in the Vedic hymns Varuna is a God in a state of decadence; and, despite the dissent of M. Barth (Religions of India, p. 18), this seems true. But the recession of Varuna is only in the normal way of the eclipse of the old Supreme God by a nearer deity, and does not suffice to prove a growth of agnosticism. M. Fontane (Inde Védique, 1881, p. 305) asserts on other grounds a popular movement of negation in the Vedic period, but offers rather slender evidence. There is better ground for his account of the system as one in which different cults had the upper hand at different times, the devotees of Indra rejecting Agni, and so on (pp. 310-11).