eventually results both in philosophical pantheism, and in the recognition at the same time of a personal first cause.  To express the difference between Hellenic polytheism and the polytheism of the Rig Veda the latter should be called, if by any new term, rather by a name like pantheistic polytheism, than by the somewhat misleading word henotheism.  What is novel in it is that it represents the fading of pure polytheism and the engrafting, upon a polytheistic stock, of a speculative homoiousian tendency soon to bud out as philosophic pantheism.

The admission that other gods exist does not nullify the attitude of tentative monotheism.  “Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods?” asks Moses, and his father-in-law, when converted to the new belief, says:  “Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods."[27] But this is not the quasi-monotheism of the Hindu, to whom the other gods were real and potent factors, individually distinct from the one supreme god, who represents the All-god, but is at once abstract and concrete.

Pantheism in the Rig Veda comes out clearly only in one or two passages:  “The priests represent in many ways the (sun) bird that is one”; and (cited above) “They speak of him as Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni, ... that which is but one they call variously.”  So, too, in the Atharvan it is said that Varuna (here a pantheistic god) is “in the little drop of water,"[28] as in the Rik the spark of material fire is identified with the sun.

The new belief is voiced chiefly in that portion of the Rig Veda which appears to be latest and most Brahmanic in tone.

Here a supreme god is described under the name of “Lord of Beings,” the “All-maker,” “The Golden Germ,” the “God over gods, the spirit of their being” (x. 121).  The last, a famous hymn, Mueller entitles “To the Unknown God.”  It may have been intended, as has been suggested, for a theological puzzle,[29] but its language evinces that in whatever form it is couched—­each verse ends with the refrain, ’To what god shall we offer sacrifice?’ till the last verse answers the question, saying, ’the Lord of beings’—­it is meant to raise the question of a supreme deity and leave it unanswered in terms of a nature-religion, though the germ is at bottom fire:  “In the beginning arose the Golden Germ; as soon as born he became the Lord of All.  He established earth and heaven—­to what god shall we offer sacrifice?  He who gives breath, strength, whose command the shining gods obey; whose shadow is life and death....  When the great waters went everywhere holding the germ and generating light, then arose from them the one spirit (breath) of the gods....  May he not hurt us, he the begetter of earth, the holy one who begot heaven ...  Lord of beings, thou alone embracest all things ...”