e Epics,
which are so largely drawn upon, are later still. And it is upon the
basis of the Epics, and the still later Puranas, that the common people
of India still worship him as the god of good-fellowship and of lust.
The masses longed for a god of human sympathies, even though he were a
Bacchus.

In the Bhagavad Gita as we now have it, with its many changes, Krishna
has become the supreme God, though according to Lassen his actual
worship as such was not rendered earlier than the sixth century; and
Professor Banergea claims that it "was not at its zenith till the
eighth century, and that it then borrowed much from Christian, or at
least Hebrew, sources." Webber and Lorinser have maintained a similar
view. Krishna as the Supreme and Adorable One has never found favor
except with the pantheists, and to this day the worship of the real
Krishna as a Bacchus is the most popular of all Hindu festivals, and
naturally it is the most demoralizing.

We are now prepared to assume that the pantheistic groundwork of the
poem on the one hand, and its borrowed Christian conceptions and
Christian nomenclature on the other, will explain its principal alleged
parallels with the New Testament. With his great familiarity with our
Bible, and his rare ability in adjusting shades of thought and
expression, Mr. Chatterji has presented no less than two hundred and
fourteen passages which he matches with texts from the Bible. Many of
these are so adroitly worded that one not familiar with the
peculiarities of Hindu philosophy might be stumbled by the comparisons.
Mr. R.C. Bose tells us that this poem has wrought much evil among the
foreign population of India; and in this country there are thousands of
even cultivated people with whom this new translation will have great
influence. Men with unsettled minds who have turned away with contempt
from the crudities of spiritualism, who are disgusted with the rough
assailments of Ingersoll, and who find only homesickness and desolation
on the bleak and wintry moor of agnostic science, may yet be attracted
by a book which is so elevated and often sublime in its philosophy, and
so chaste in its ethical precepts, and which, like Christianity, has
bridged the awful chasm between unapproachable deity and our human
conditions and wants by giving to the world a God-man.

If the original author and the various expositors of the Bhagavad Gita
have not borrowed from the Christian revelation, they have rend