not drawn towards the gods of any other nation.
Our gods are shown by their works to be the
strongest, the most powerful. The Christians
have but few gods, and they are new—new,
and not strong; as it seems to us. They
will increase in number, it is true, for this
has happened with all gods, but that time is far away,
many ages and decades of ages away, for gods
multiply slowly, as is meet for beings to whom
a thousand years is but a single moment. Our
own gods have been born millions of years apart.
The process is slow, the gathering of strength
and power is similarly slow. In the slow lapse
of the ages the steadily accumulating power of our
gods has at last become prodigious. We
have a thousand proofs of this in the colossal
character of their personal acts and the acts of ordinary
men to whom they have given supernatural qualities.
To your Samson was given supernatural power,
and when he broke the withes, and slew the thousands
with the jawbone of an ass, and carried away the gate’s
of the city upon his shoulders, you were amazed—and
also awed, for you recognized the divine source
of his strength. But it could not profit
to place these things before your Hindoo congregation
and invite their wonder; for they would compare them
with the deed done by Hanuman, when our gods infused
their divine strength into his muscles; and they
would be indifferent to them—as you
saw. In the old, old times, ages and ages gone
by, when our god Rama was warring with the demon
god of Ceylon, Rama bethought him to bridge the
sea and connect Ceylon with India, so that his armies
might pass easily over; and he sent his general,
Hanuman, inspired like your own Samson with divine
strength, to bring the materials for the bridge.
In two days Hanuman strode fifteen hundred miles,
to the Himalayas, and took upon his shoulder a
range of those lofty mountains two hundred miles
long, and started with it toward Ceylon. It
was in the night; and, as he passed along the plain,
the people of Govardhun heard the thunder of
his tread and felt the earth rocking under it,
and they ran out, and there, with their snowy summits
piled to heaven, they saw the Himalayas passing by.
And as this huge continent swept along overshadowing
the earth, upon its slopes they discerned the
twinkling lights of a thousand sleeping villages,
and it was as if the constellations were filing in
procession through the sky. While they were
looking, Hanuman stumbled, and a small ridge
of red sandstone twenty miles long was jolted
loose and fell. Half of its length has wasted
away in the course of the ages, but the other
ten miles of it remain in the plain by Govardhun
to this day as proof of the might of the inspiration
of our gods. You must know, yourself, that Hanuman
could not have carried those mountains to Ceylon
except by the strength of the gods. You
know that it was not done by his own strength,
therefore, you know that it was done by the strength
of the gods, just as you know that Samson carried