On the other hand, from the point of view of morality, Brahmanic religion is not in any way individual.  The race, whether Aryan or Hinduistic, had as fragile virtue as have other folks, and shows the same tentative efforts to become purer as those which characterize every national advance.  There is, perhaps, a little too much formal insistence on veraciousness, and one is rather inclined to suspect, despite Muellers brave defence of the Hindu in this regard, that lying came very naturally to a people whose law-givers were so continuously harping on the beauty of truth.  The vicious caste-system necessarily scheduled immorality in accordance with the caste order, as certain crimes in other countries are estimated according to the race of the sinner rather than according to any abstract standard.  In the matter of precept we know no better moral laws than those promulgated by the Brahmans, but they are the laws that every people evolves for itself.  Religious immorality, the excess of Cakti worship, is also not peculiar to the Hindu.  If one ask how the morality of India as a whole compares with that of other countries, we reply that, including religious excesses, it stands level with the personal morality of Greece in her best days,[17] and that without the religiously sensual (Hindu) element, it is nominally on a par with that of London or New York.  There are good and bad men, and these make good and bad coteries, which stand inside the pale of a religious profession.  There is not much theoretical difference.  Few of the older gods are virtuous, and Right, even in the Rig Veda, is the moral power, that is, Right as Order, correct behavior, the prototype both of ritual and of [=a]c[=a]ra, custom, which rules the gods.  In the law-court the gods are a moral group, and two of them, Varuna and Agni, hate respectively the sins of adultery and untruth.  In the law it is, however, Dharma and the Father-god or his diadochos, who, handing down heavenly precepts, gives all moral laws, though it must be confessed that the Father-god is almost the last to care for morality.  And pure Brahmanism stops with Brahm[=a].  In modern Hinduism, to kill, lust, steal, drink, so far from offending, may please a god that is amorous, or bloodthirsty, or, like Civa, is ‘the lord of thieves.’  Morality here has God himself against it.  In the Rig Veda, to sin is merely to displease a god.  But even in Brahmanism, as in Buddhism, there is not that intimate connection between goodness and godness that obtains in Christianity.  The Brahman, like the Buddhist, was self-controlled, in order to exert control upon the gods and the course of his own future life.  He not only, as is perhaps the case elsewhere, was moral with an ulterior motive, but his moral code lacked the divine hand.  It was felt as a system which he applied to himself for his own good.  He did not assume that he offended a god by not following it, except in two special cases, as in sins against Agni and Varuna.  Ulterior motives are deprecated, but because he that seeks absorption into God must quit desires.[18]