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.”