nd conduct of the deity, in Hinduism this is not completely
admitted in practice, though a library might be filled with the
beautiful things that have been said about man and God. The outward
forms of Indian religion are pagan after the fashion of the ancient
world, a fashion which has in most lands passed away. But whereas in
the fourth century A.D. European paganism, despite the efforts of
anti-Christian eclectics, proved inelastic and incapable of satisfying
new religious cravings, this did not happen in India. The bottles of
Hinduism have always proved capable of holding all the wine poured
into them. When a new sentiment takes possession of men's souls, such
as love, repentance, or the sense of sin, some deity of many shapes
and sympathies straightway adapts himself to the needs of his
worshippers. And yet in so doing the deity, though he enlarges
himself, does not change, and the result is that we often meet with
strange anachronisms, as if Jephthah should listen appreciatively to
the Sermon on the Mount and then sacrifice his daughter to Christ.
Many Hindu temples are served by dancing girls who are admittedly
prostitutes,[403] an institution which takes us back to the cultus of
Corinth and Babylon and is without parallel in any nation on
approximately the same level of civilization. Only British law
prevents widows from being burned with their dead husbands, though
even in the Vedic age the custom had been discontinued as
barbarous.[404] But for the same legislation, human sacrifice would
probably be common. What the gods do and what their worshippers do in
their service cannot according to Hindu opinion be judged by ordinary
laws of right and wrong. The god is supra-moral: the worshipper when
he enters the temple leaves conventionality outside.

Yet it is unfair to represent Hinduism as characterized by licence and
cruelty. Such tendencies are counterbalanced by the strength and
prevalence of ideas based on renunciation and self-effacement. All
desire, all attachment to the world is an evil; all self-assertion is
wrong. Hinduism is constantly in extremes: sometimes it exults in the
dances of Krishna or the destructive fury of Kali: more often it
struggles for release from the transitory and for union with the
permanent and real by self-denial or rather self-negation, which aims
at the total suppression of both pleasure and pain. This is on the
whole its dominant note.

In the records accessible to us the tran