is no canonical book, nowhere any stated body of doctrine that might be called the Hindu creed.  The only common measure of Hindus is that they employ brahmans in their religious ceremonies, and even that does not hold universally.  A saying of their own is, “On two main points all sects agree—­the sanctity of the cow and the depravity of women.”  In contrast to Hindus in this respect of the absence of a standard creed, Mahomedans call themselves kitabi or possessing a book, since in the Koran they do possess such a canon.  In the words of Mahomed, Christians and Jews likewise are “the peoples of the book,” and have a defined theological position.  But regarding Hindus, again, we note there is no doctrinal pale, no orthodoxy or heterodoxy.  “We Europeans,” writes Sir Alfred Lyall regarding Hinduism, “can scarcely comprehend an ancient religion, still alive and powerful, which is a mere troubled sea without shore or visible horizon."[62] In these days of opportunist denunciation of creeds, the amorphous state of creedless Hinduism may be noted.

The experience of the late Dr. John Henry Barrows, President of the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, may be quoted in confirmation of the absence of a Hindu creed.  After he had won the confidence of India’s representatives as their host at Chicago, and had secured for them a unique audience there, being himself desirous to write on Hinduism, he wrote to over a hundred prominent Hindus requesting each to indicate what in his view were some of the leading tenets of Hinduism.  He received only one reply.

[Sidenote:  Pantheism, Maya, and Transmigration may be called Hindu doctrines.]

No one doctrine is distinctive of Hinduism.  It is an extreme misleading statement, nevertheless, to say as some Western writers have done, and at least one Hindu writer,[63] that Hinduism is not a religion at all, but only a social system.  There are several doctrines to which a great many Hindus would at once conventionally subscribe, and these I venture to call Hindu doctrines.  In theological conversations with Hindus, three doctrines very frequently show themselves as a theological background.  These are, first, Pantheism; secondly, Transmigration and Final Absorption into Deity; and, thirdly, Maya, i.e.  Delusion, or the Unreality of the phenomena of Sense and Consciousness.  I find a recent pro-Hindu writer making virtually the same selection.  In the ninth century, she writes, Sankarachargya, the great upholder of Pantheism, “took up and defined the [now] current catch-words—­maya, karma [the doctrine of works, or of re-birth according to desert], reincarnation, and left the terminology of Hinduism what it is to-day."...  “But,” she also adds, “they are nowhere and in no sense regarded as essential."[64] Naturally, then, the inquiry that we have set ourselves to will at the same time be an inquiry how far Christian thought has affected these three main Hindu doctrines of Pantheism, Transmigration, and Maya.