is the great enemy of the soul’s salvation, and they must beat it down by ascetic mortifications.  But asceticism, here as everywhere else, tends to self-indulgence, since one extreme produces another.  In one part of India, therefore, devotees are swinging on hooks in honor of Siva, hanging themselves by the feet, head downwards, over a fire, rolling on a bed of prickly thorns, jumping on a couch filled with sharp knives, boring holes in their tongues, and sticking their bodies full of pins and needles, or perhaps holding the arms over the head till they stiffen in that position.  Meantime in other places whole regions are given over to sensual indulgences, and companies of abandoned women are connected with different temples and consecrate their gains to the support of their worship.

As one-sided spiritualism will manifest itself in morals in the two forms of austerity and sensuality, so in religion it shows itself in the opposite direction of an ideal pantheism and a gross idolatry.  Spiritualism first fills the world full of God, and this is a true and Christian view of things.  But it takes another step, which is to deny all real existence to the world, and so runs into a false pantheism.  It first says, truly, “There is nothing without God.”  It next says, falsely, “There is nothing but God.”  This second step was taken in India by means of the doctrine of Maya, or Illusion.  Maya means the delusive shows which spirit assumes.  For there is nothing but spirit; which neither creates nor is created, neither acts nor suffers, which cannot change, and into which all souls are absorbed when they free themselves by meditation from the belief that they suffer or are happy, that they can experience either pleasure or pain.  The next step is to polytheism.  For if God neither creates nor destroys, but only seems to create and destroy, these appearances are not united together as being the acts of one Being, but are separate, independent phenomena.  When you remove personality from the conception of God, as you do in removing will, you remove unity.  Now if creation be an illusion, and there be no creation, still the appearance of creation is a fact.  But as there is no substance but spirit, this appearance must have its cause in spirit, that is, is a divine appearance, is God.  So destruction, in the same way, is an appearance of God, and reproduction is an appearance of God, and every other appearance in nature is a manifestation of God.  But the unity of will and person being taken away, we have not one God, but a multitude of gods,—­or polytheism.

Having begun this career of thought, no course was possible for the human mind to pursue but this.  An ultra spiritualism must become pantheism, and pantheism must go on to polytheism.  In India this is not a theory, but a history.  We find, side by side, a spiritualism which denies the existence of anything but motionless spirit or Brahm, and a polytheism which believes and worships Brahma the Creator, Siva the Destroyer, Vischnu the Preserver, Indra the God of the Heavens, the Sactis or energies of the gods, Krishna the Hindoo Apollo, Doorga, and a host of others, innumerable as the changes and appearances of things.