Siva--there are
said to be thirty million symbols of Siva scattered over India--yet
among gurus there is scarcely one in a hundred whose vocation is to
impart the mantra (the saving text) of Siva.[69] It has already been
explained how the creed of Hinduism is dissolving while its practices
remain; to restate the fact otherwise now--The hereditary purohits
continue to be employed many times a year in a Hindu household, as
worship, births, deaths, marriages, and social ceremonies recur, but the
hereditary gurus as religious teachers have become practically
defunct.[70] Literally, the _one_ duty of a guru has come to be to
communicate once in a lifetime to each Hindu his saving mantra or
Sanscrit text; periodically thereafter, the guru may visit his clients
to collect what dues they may be pleased to give. The place of religious
teacher in Hinduism is vacant, and Christianity and modern thought are
taking the vacant place. The modern middle-class Hindu is in need of a
guru. For mere purohits, as such, he has a small and a declining
reverence; but holy men, as such, his instinct is to honour--one of the
pleasing features of Hinduism. We can understand it all when we remember
how in the Christian Church, in a crisis like that from which the Church
is now emerging, many come to be married by the clergyman who have
practically lapsed from the faith.

CHAPTER XIV

THE NEW THEISM

"The idea of God is the productive and conservative principle
of civilisation; as is the religion of a community, so will be
in the main its morals, its laws, its general history."

_Vico_ and _Michelet_ (Prof. Flint's _Philosophy of History_).

[Sidenote: Polytheism receding before Monotheism.]

In some measure, then, we understand how Hindu polytheism, theism, and
pantheism are related to each other; we realise in some measure the
openness of the Indian mind, and we now ask ourselves how far the
Christian doctrine of God has impressed itself upon that open mind. Of
the polytheistic masses it has already been pointed out that intelligent
individuals will now readily acknowledge that there is truly one God
only. Further, that the polytheistic idolatry which is now associated
with the masses once extended far higher up the scale, is evident to
anyone reading the observations made early in the nineteenth century.
Early travellers in India, like the French traveller Tavernier of the
seventeenth century, speak of the Indians