From “Linguistic and Oriental Essays.”

THE BHAGAVATA PURANA has been curiously analyzed, and numerous passages selected as manifest loans from the Evangelists. It is forgotten by such critics that mere coincidences of language go for nothing; and coincidences of thought may be explained by reflecting on the common fount of Oriental maxims and ideas and conceptions which can be traced back to a period long anterior to the Christian era.

  Others have traced in the legend the struggle of the Brahmanical system against the Buddhists, or of the Vaishnavists against the Saivites. Others have found in the strange license a reaction against the severity of Buddhist manners. The lascivious and carnal fancy of the poet dwelt on the love of the shepherdesses to their lord, while the more cautious theologians asserted that these shepherdesses were but incarnations of the Vedic hymns. The song of Jayadeva is strangely parallel to the song of Solomon; and the instructed reader is expected to understand by Krishna the human body, by the shepherdesses the allurements of sense, and by Rádhá, the favorite, the knowledge of divine things; or the whole is said to be an allegory of God and prayer, the human soul and the Divine Being typified in the lover and the beloved. Amidst the mysticism of the Sufis, and such approximation of good and evil, it requires to advance with a very firm step; and with such doctrines in the sanctuary, disguised under the semblance of heavenly love, we may expect to find the greatest licentiousness among the ignorant multitude, every Anomian abomination, and a justification of admitted crimes committed by a divinity under the convenient theory of illusion or máyaá. The downfall of morals, religion, and conscience is not then far off.

  Perhaps something of the same character has wandered through all religious history, and crops out in the allegories of the bridegroom, and the espousal, and the dreams of young women like St. Catherine and St. Agnes, that they are espoused to their Lord, and the same feeling underlies the idea of nunneries. The Premsagar of Krishna is but the Ocean of Love of Keble; love in heaven and heaven in love: there is a bitter and dangerous contrast of word and sense, and more dangerous among an Oriental people. We read the lines of Sadi, the Persian poet, with startled amazement, when we are told that the wine cup and the sweetheart represent something so totally different from their usual meaning; the Hebrew prophets are not free from these dangerous ambiguities and figures of speech. The incongruous mingling of things human and divine is far less felt in Greek mythology; for the Indian theologians had worked out such sublime ideas of the Divinity, that the conscience is shocked, when a justification is put in for the gross immorality of God incarnate in the flesh, by the assertion that the actions of Vishnu must be believed, and his mode of procedure not questioned, as it was a mystery, and the Supreme Being could not be liable to sin. Blasphemy can go no greater lengths than this, and we shall see the consequences in the vagaries of the Vallabha.

  But the conception of faith was marvelous, as illustrated by the story in the Vishnu Purana of the sage, who, having gone through certain stages of transmigration, could recollect the events of a preceding birth, and remembered also immediately after his last death, as he lay half unconscious, overhearing the King of Death charging his servants not to lay their hands on any who had died with faith in Vishnu.