: thee also I behold in
him." He also wrote elsewhere, "he that taketh the unprotected to his
heart and doeth to a servant the same kindness as to his own children,
is assuredly the image of God." More recently Ramakrishna, whose
sayings breathe a wide intelligence as well as a wide charity, has
given this religion of love an expression which, if somewhat too
sexual to be perfectly in accordance with western taste, is nearly
related to emotional Christianity. "A true lover sees his god as his
nearest and dearest relative" he writes, "just as the shepherd women
of Vrindavana saw in Krishna not the Lord of the Universe but their
own beloved.... The knowledge of God may be likened to a man, while
the love of God is like a woman. Knowledge has entry only up to the
outer rooms of God, and no one can enter into the inner mysteries of
God save a lover.... Knowledge and love of God are ultimately one and
the same. There is no difference between pure knowledge and pure
love."[392]

These extracts show how Krishna as the object of the soul's desire
assumes the place of the Supreme Being or God. But this surprising
transformation[393] is not specially connected with the pastoral and
erotic Krishna: the best known and most thorough-going exposition of
his divinity is found in the Bhagavad-gita, which represents him as
being in his human aspect, a warrior and the charioteer of Arjuna.
Probably some seventy-five millions to-day worship Krishna,
especially under the name of Hari, as God in the pantheistic sense and
naturally the more his identity with the supreme spirit is emphasized,
the dimmer grow the legendary features which mark the hero of Muttra
and Dvaraka, and the human element in him is reduced to this very
important point that the tie uniting him to his worshippers is one of
sentiment and affection.

In the following chapters I shall treat of this worship when
describing the various sects which practise it. A question of some
importance for the history of Krishna's deification is the meaning
of the name Vasudeva. One explanation makes it a patronymic, son of
Vasudeva, and supposes that when this prince Vasudeva was deified his
name, like Rama, was transferred to the deity. The other regards
Vasudeva as a name for the deity used by the Sattvata clan and
supposes that when Krishna was deified this already well-known
divine name was bestowed on him. There is much to be said for this
latter theory. As we have seen the Jains