The theistic standpoint of the younger members of the educated class of to-day is easily discoverable.  The word God used in their English compositions or speeches, plainly implies a person.  The commonplace of the anxious student is that the pass desired, the failure feared, is dependent upon the will of God—­language manifestly not pantheistic.  Religious expressions, we may remark, are natural to a Hindu.

[Sidenote:  The conception of the Deity as female has gone from the minds of the educated.]

In the new theism of educated Indians we may note that the conception of the deity as female is practically gone.  Not so among the masses, particularly of the provinces of Bengal and Gujerat, the provinces distinctively of goddesses.  The sight of a man in Calcutta in the first hour of his sore bereavement calling upon Mother Kali has left a deep impression upon me.[83] Be it remembered, however, what his cry meant, and what the name Mother in such cases means.  It is a honorific form of address, not the symbol for devoted love.  The goddesses of India, not the gods, are the deities to be particularly feared and to be propitiated with blood.  It is energy, often destructive energy, not woman’s tenderness that they represent, even according to Hindu philosophy and modern rationalisers.  We may nevertheless well believe that contact with Christian ideas will yet soften and sweeten this title of the goddesses.

[Sidenote:  The new theism is largely Christian theism—­God is termed Father;]

[Sidenote:  Or Mother.]

The new theism of educated India is more and more emphatically Christian theism.  Anyone may observe that the name, other than “God,” by which the Deity is almost universally named by educated Hindus is “The Father,” or “Our Heavenly Father,” or some such name.  The new name is not a rendering of any of the vernacular names in use in modern India; it is due directly to its use in English literature and in Christian preaching and teaching.  The late Keshub Chunder Sen’s Lectures in India, addressed to Hindu audiences, abound in the use of the name.  The fatherhood of God is in fact one of the articles of the Br[=a]hma creed.  In his last years, the Brahma leader, Keshub Chunder Sen, frequently spoke of God as the divine Mother, but we are not to suppose that it expresses a radical change of thought about God.  Keshub Chunder Sen’s last recorded prayer begins:  “I have come, O Mother, into thy sanctuary”; his last, almost inarticulate, cries were:  “Father,” “Mother.”  Where modern Indian religious teachers address God as Mother, it is a modernism, an echo of the thought of the Fatherhood of God.  The name is altered because the name of Mother better suits the ecstasies of Indian devotion, where the ecstatic mood is cultivated.  A case in point is the Hindu devotee, Ramkrishna Paramhansa, who died near Calcutta in 1886.  “Why,” Ramkrishna Paramhansa asks, “does the God-lover find such