g good can be expected now, the
conviction that even the powerful god Shiva himself can neither appear
nor help them are all deeply rooted in the minds of the old generation.
As for the younger men, they receive their education in high schools and
universities, learn by heart Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Darwin
and the German philosophers, and entirely lose all respect, not only for
their own religion, but for every other in the world.

The young "educated" Hindus are materialists almost without exception,
and often achieve the last limits of Atheism. They seldom hope to attain
to anything better than a situation as "chief mate of the junior clerk,"
as we say in Russia, and either become sycophants, disgusting flatterers
of their present lords, or, which is still worse, or at any rate
sillier, begin to edit a newspaper full of cheap liberalism, which
gradually develops into a revolutionary organ.

But all this is only en passant. Compared with the mysterious and
grandiose past of India, the ancient Aryavarta, her present is a
natural Indian ink background, the black shadow of a bright picture, the
inevitable evil in the cycle of every nation. India has become decrepit
and has fallen down, like a huge memorial of antiquity, prostrate and
broken to pieces. But the most insignificant of these fragments will for
ever remain a treasure for the archeologist and the artist, and, in
the course of time, may even afford a clue to the philosopher and the
psychologist. "Ancient Hindus built like giants and finished their work
like goldsmiths," says Archbishop Heber, describing his travel in India.
In his description of the Taj-Mahal of Agra, that veritable eighth
wonder of the world, he calls it "a poem in marble." He might have added
that it is difficult to find in India a ruin, in the least state of
preservation, that cannot speak, more eloquently than whole volumes, of
the past of India, her religious aspirations, her beliefs and hopes.

There is not a country of antiquity, not even excluding the Egypt of
the Pharaohs, where the development of the subjective ideal into
its demonstration by an objective symbol has been expressed more
graphically, more skillfully, and artistically, than in India. The whole
pantheism of the Vedanta is contained in the symbol of the bisexual
deity Ardhanari. It is surrounded by the double triangle, known in India
under the name of the sign of Vishnu. By his side lie a lion, a bull,
and an ea