eloved to come to him
that they might take their fill of love. "Christ and His Church" is
supposed to make it all right, and I am content that it should be so. I
have no word to say against the "Song of Solomon," nor any complaint
against its gorgeous and luxuriant imagery; but I refuse to take from
the Hebrew as pure, what I am to refuse from the Hindu as impure. I ask
that all may be judged by the same standard, and that if one be
condemned the same condemnation may be levelled against the other. So
also in the songs of the Sufis, the mystics of the faith of Islam,
woman's love is ever used as the best symbol of love between the soul
and God. In all ages the love between husband and wife has been the
symbol of union between the Supreme and His devotees; the closest of all
earthly ties, the most intimate of all earthly unions, the merging of
heart and body of twain into one--where will you find a better image of
the merging of the soul in its God? Ever has the object of devotion
been symbolised as the lover or husband, ever the devotee as wife or
mistress. This symbology is universal, because it is fundamentally true.
The absolute surrender of the wife to the husband is the type upon earth
of the absolute surrender of the soul to God. That is the justification
of the Rasa of Shri Krishna; that is the explanation of the
story of His life in Vraja.

I have dwelt specially on this, my brothers, you all know why. Let us
pass from it, remembering that till the nineteenth century this story
provoked only devotion not ribaldry, and it is only with the coming in
of the grosser type of western thought that you have these ideas put
into the _Bhagavad-Purana_. I would to God that the Rishis had
taken away the _Shrimad Bhagavata_ from a race that is unworthy to have
it; that as They have already withdrawn the greater part of the Vedas,
the greater part of the ancient books, they would take away also this
story of the love of Shri Krishna, until men are pure enough to
read it without blasphemy and clean enough to read it without ideas of
sexuality.

Pass from this to the next great stage, that of the Destroyer of evil,
shortly, very shortly. From the time when as a babe but a few weeks old
He sucked to death the Rakshasi, Putana; from the time He entered the
great cave made by the demon, and expanding Himself shivered the whole
into fragments; from the time He trampled on the head of the serpent
Kalia so that it might not poison