the symbol for devoted love. The _goddesses_ of India,
not the gods, are the deities to be particularly feared and to be
propitiated with blood. It is energy, often destructive energy, not
woman's tenderness that they represent, even according to Hindu
philosophy and modern rationalisers. We may nevertheless well believe
that contact with Christian ideas will yet soften and sweeten this title
of the goddesses.

[Sidenote: The new theism is largely Christian theism--God is termed
Father;]

[Sidenote: Or Mother.]

The new theism of educated India is more and more emphatically Christian
theism. Anyone may observe that the name, other than "God," by which the
Deity is almost universally named by educated Hindus is "The Father," or
"Our Heavenly Father," or some such name. The new name is not a
rendering of any of the vernacular names in use in modern India; it is
due directly to its use in English literature and in Christian preaching
and teaching. The late Keshub Chunder Sen's _Lectures in India_,
addressed to Hindu audiences, abound in the use of the name. The
fatherhood of God is in fact one of the articles of the Br[=a]hma creed.
In his last years, the Brahma leader, Keshub Chunder Sen, frequently
spoke of God as the divine _Mother_, but we are not to suppose that it
expresses a radical change of thought about God. Keshub Chunder Sen's
last recorded prayer begins: "I have come, O Mother, into thy
sanctuary"; his last, almost inarticulate, cries were: "Father,"
"Mother." Where modern Indian religious teachers address God as
_Mother_, it is a modernism, an echo of the thought of the Fatherhood of
God. The name is altered because the name of Mother better suits the
ecstasies of Indian devotion, where the ecstatic mood is cultivated. A
case in point is the Hindu devotee, Ramkrishna Paramhansa, who died near
Calcutta in 1886. "Why," Ramkrishna Paramhansa asks, "does the God-lover
find such pleasure in addressing the Deity as Mother? Because," his
answer is, "the child is more free with its mother, and consequently she
is dearer to the child than anyone else.[84] Another instance we find in
the appeal issued by a committee of Hindu gentlemen for subscriptions
towards the rebuilding of the temple at Kangra, destroyed by the
earthquake of 1905. The president of the committee, signing the appeal,
was a Hindu judge of the High Court at Lahore, a graduate from a Mission
College. "There are Hindus," thus runs the appeal, "who by