Marie Alacoque, Saint Gertrude and the more distinguished Saint Theresa.  “To be loved by God and loved by him to distraction (jusqu’a la folie), Margaret melted away with love at the thought of such a thing....  She said to God, ’Hold back, my God, these torrents which overwhelm me or else enlarge my capacity for their reception’."[390] These are not the words of the Gita-govinda or the Prem Sagar, as might be supposed, but of a Catholic Bishop describing the transports of Sister Marguerite Marie, and they illustrate the temper of Krishna’s worshippers.  But the verses of the Marathi poet, Tukaram, who lived about 1600 A.D. and sang the praises of Krishna, rise above this sentimentality though he uses the language of love.  In a letter to Sivaji, who desired to see him, he wrote, “As a chaste wife longs only to see her lord, such am I to Vitthala.[391] All the world is to me Vitthala and nothing else:  thee also I behold in him.”  He also wrote elsewhere, “he that taketh the unprotected to his heart and doeth to a servant the same kindness as to his own children, is assuredly the image of God.”  More recently Ramakrishna, whose sayings breathe a wide intelligence as well as a wide charity, has given this religion of love an expression which, if somewhat too sexual to be perfectly in accordance with western taste, is nearly related to emotional Christianity.  “A true lover sees his god as his nearest and dearest relative” he writes, “just as the shepherd women of Vrindavana saw in Krishna not the Lord of the Universe but their own beloved....  The knowledge of God may be likened to a man, while the love of God is like a woman.  Knowledge has entry only up to the outer rooms of God, and no one can enter into the inner mysteries of God save a lover....  Knowledge and love of God are ultimately one and the same.  There is no difference between pure knowledge and pure love."[392]

These extracts show how Krishna as the object of the soul’s desire assumes the place of the Supreme Being or God.  But this surprising transformation[393] is not specially connected with the pastoral and erotic Krishna:  the best known and most thorough-going exposition of his divinity is found in the Bhagavad-gita, which represents him as being in his human aspect, a warrior and the charioteer of Arjuna.  Probably some seventy-five millions to-day worship Krishna, especially under the name of Hari, as God in the pantheistic sense and naturally the more his identity with the supreme spirit is emphasized, the dimmer grow the legendary features which mark the hero of Muttra and Dvaraka, and the human element in him is reduced to this very important point that the tie uniting him to his worshippers is one of sentiment and affection.