These facts go far to explain some peculiar features of Hinduism.  Compared with Islam or Christianity its doctrines are extraordinarily fluid, multiform and even inconsistent:  its practice, though rarely lax, is also very various in different castes and districts.  The strangeness of the phenomenon is diminished if one considers that the uniformity and rigidity of western creeds are due to their political more than to their religious character.  Like the wind, the spirit bloweth where it listeth:  it is governed by no laws but those which its own reverence imposes:  it lives in changing speculation.  But in Europe it has been in double bondage to the logic of Greece and the law of Rome.  India deals in images and metaphor:  Greece in dialectic.  The original thought of Christianity had something of this Indian quality, though more sober and less fantastic, with more limitation and less imagination.  On this substratum the Greeks reared their edifices of dialectic and when the quarrels of theologians began to disturb politics, the state treated the whole question from a legal point of view.  It was assumed that there must be a right doctrine which the state should protect or even enforce, and a wrong doctrine which it should discourage or even forbid.  Hence councils, creeds and persecutions.  The whole position is logical and legal.  The truth has been defined:  those who do not accept it harm not only themselves but others:  therefore they should be restrained and punished.

But in religious matters Hindus have not proceeded in this way as a rule.  They have adopted the attitude not of a judge who decides, but of the humane observer who sees that neither side is completely right or completely wrong and avoids expressing his opinion in a legal form.  Hindu teachers have never hesitated to proclaim their views as the whole and perfect truth.  In that indeed they do not yield to Christian theologians but their pronouncements are professorial rather than judicial and so diverse and yet all so influential that the state, though bound to protect sound doctrine, dare not champion one more than the other.  Religious persecution is rare.  It is not absent but the student has to search for instances, whereas in Christian Europe they are among the most conspicuous facts of history.

Restless, subtle and argumentative as Hindu thought is, it is less prone than European theology to the vice of distorting transcendental ideas by too stringent definition.  It adumbrates the indescribable by metaphors and figures.  It is not afraid of inconsistencies which may illustrate different aspects of the infinite, but it rarely tries to cramp the divine within the limits of a logical phrase.  Attempts to explain how the divine and human nature were combined in Christ convulsed the Byzantine Empire and have fettered succeeding generations with their stiff formulae.  It would be rash to say that the ocean of Hindu theological literature contains no speculations about the incarnations