If it is right to regard with veneration the great forces of nature, fire, sun and water, a similar feeling towards the reproductive force cannot be unphilosophic or immoral.  Nor does the idea that the supreme deity is a mother rather than a father, though startling, contain anything unseemly.  Yet it is an undoubted fact that all the great religions except Hinduism, though they may admit a Goddess of Mercy—­Kuan-yin or the Madonna—­agree in rejecting essentially sexual deities.  Modern Europe is probably prudish to excess, but the general practice of mankind testifies that words and acts too nearly connected with sexual things cannot be safely permitted in the temple.  This remark would indeed be superfluous were it not that many millions of our Hindu fellow-citizens are of a contrary opinion.

Such practices prevail chiefly among the Saktas in Bengal and Assam but similar licence is permitted (though the theoretical justification and theological setting are different) in some Vishnuite sects.  Both are reprobated by the majority of respectable Hindus, but both find educated and able apologists.  And though it may be admitted that worship of the linga may exist without bad effects, moral or intellectual, yet I think that these effects make themselves felt so soon as a sect becomes distinctly erotic.  Anyone who visits two such different localities as Kamakhya in Assam and Gokul near Muttra must be struck with the total absence in the shrines of anything that can be called beautiful, solemn or even terrible.  The general impression is of something diseased, unclean and undignified.  The figure of the Great Goddess of life and death might have fired[82] the invention of artists but as a matter of fact her worship has paralyzed their hands and brains.

Nor can I give much praise to the Tantras as literature[83].  It is true that, as some authors point out, they contain fine sayings about God and the soul.  But in India such things form part of the common literary stock and do not entitle the author to the praise which he would win elsewhere, unless his language or thoughts show originality.  Such originality I have not found in those Tantras which are accessible.  The magical and erotic parts may have the melancholy distinction of being unlike other works but the philosophical and theological sections could have been produced by any Hindu who had studied these branches of Indian literature.

23. Hinduism in Practice

After reviewing the characteristics of a religion it is natural to ask what is its effect on those who profess it.  Buddhism, Christianity and Islam offer materials for answering such a question, since they are not racial religions.  In historical times they have been accepted by peoples who did not profess them previously and we can estimate the consequences of such changes.  But Hinduism has racial or geographical limits.  It proselytizes, but hardly outside the Indian area:  it is difficult to distinguish it