a whole, is far removed, in its
grovelling thought, its idolatrous practices, and its thousand-headed
ritual, from the teaching of Higher Hinduism.

Above all, we must remember that the Hinduism of to-day is not the
Brahmanism of thirty centuries ago. It has been the passion of that
faith, from the beginning, to absorb all cults and faiths that have
come into contact with it. Hinduism is an amorphous thing; it has been
compared to a many-coloured and many-fibred cloth, in which are mixed
together Brahmanism, Buddhism, Demonolatry, and Christianity. And all
these, utterly regardless of the many contradictions which they bring
together, form modern Hinduism.

This is true also of the gods of India. The earliest of the Vedic gods
had elements of nobility in them. The most universally recognized of
their divinities in primitive times, Varuna, is free from the vain
passions and moral obliquities of more recent gods. Indeed, as one
follows the course of time and the consequent multiplication of
deities in India, one sees in their pantheon a steady deterioration of
character, until we come to the most popular of modern Hindu deities,
Krishna and Kali, the one well-called "the incarnation of lust," and
the other "the goddess of blood." One is the deification of human
passion, while the other is an apotheosis of brute force. And yet the
cults of those two deities have attained, at the present time, the
maximum of popularity throughout the land.

The same fact is manifest in connection with the customs of the
people. In early Vedic times, hardly one of those institutions which
now so disfigure this religion existed among the people. Idolatry, the
caste system, and the many forms of degradation of women are of later
growth. Never, in all the history of the country, did they exist and
flourish as they do at the present time.

Thus it will be seen that, while the religion of the Brahmans in its
earliest, primitive stage was merely an ethnic faith and largely the
echo of the spiritual yearning of the human soul, its development has
neither added to its power nor broadened its horizon. On the contrary,
it grows weaker and has, age after age, added superstition to
superstition, until it has reached its maximum of error and of evil at
the present time.

It is wise neither to ignore nor to underestimate the best that is in
a faith; nor is it fair to shut one's eyes to its achievement as
revealed in the life of the common people.