itical more than to their
religious character. Like the wind, the spirit bloweth where it listeth:
it is governed by no laws but those which its own reverence imposes: it
lives in changing speculation. But in Europe it has been in double
bondage to the logic of Greece and the law of Rome. India deals in
images and metaphor: Greece in dialectic. The original thought of
Christianity had something of this Indian quality, though more sober and
less fantastic, with more limitation and less imagination. On this
substratum the Greeks reared their edifices of dialectic and when the
quarrels of theologians began to disturb politics, the state treated the
whole question from a legal point of view. It was assumed that there
must be a right doctrine which the state should protect or even enforce,
and a wrong doctrine which it should discourage or even forbid. Hence
councils, creeds and persecutions. The whole position is logical and
legal. The truth has been defined: those who do not accept it harm not
only themselves but others: therefore they should be restrained and
punished.

But in religious matters Hindus have not proceeded in this way as a
rule. They have adopted the attitude not of a judge who decides, but of
the humane observer who sees that neither side is completely right or
completely wrong and avoids expressing his opinion in a legal form.
Hindu teachers have never hesitated to proclaim their views as the whole
and perfect truth. In that indeed they do not yield to Christian
theologians but their pronouncements are professorial rather than
judicial and so diverse and yet all so influential that the state,
though bound to protect sound doctrine, dare not champion one more than
the other. Religious persecution is rare. It is not absent but the
student has to search for instances, whereas in Christian Europe they
are among the most conspicuous facts of history.

Restless, subtle and argumentative as Hindu thought is, it is less prone
than European theology to the vice of distorting transcendental ideas by
too stringent definition. It adumbrates the indescribable by metaphors
and figures. It is not afraid of inconsistencies which may illustrate
different aspects of the infinite, but it rarely tries to cramp the
divine within the limits of a logical phrase. Attempts to explain how
the divine and human nature were combined in Christ convulsed the
Byzantine Empire and have fettered succeeding generations with their
stiff fo