girls who are admittedly prostitutes,[403] an institution which takes us back to the cultus of Corinth and Babylon and is without parallel in any nation on approximately the same level of civilization.  Only British law prevents widows from being burned with their dead husbands, though even in the Vedic age the custom had been discontinued as barbarous.[404] But for the same legislation, human sacrifice would probably be common.  What the gods do and what their worshippers do in their service cannot according to Hindu opinion be judged by ordinary laws of right and wrong.  The god is supra-moral:  the worshipper when he enters the temple leaves conventionality outside.

Yet it is unfair to represent Hinduism as characterized by licence and cruelty.  Such tendencies are counterbalanced by the strength and prevalence of ideas based on renunciation and self-effacement.  All desire, all attachment to the world is an evil; all self-assertion is wrong.  Hinduism is constantly in extremes:  sometimes it exults in the dances of Krishna or the destructive fury of Kali:  more often it struggles for release from the transitory and for union with the permanent and real by self-denial or rather self-negation, which aims at the total suppression of both pleasure and pain.  This is on the whole its dominant note.

In the records accessible to us the transition from Brahmanism—­that is, the religion of the Vedas and Brahmanas—­to Hinduism does not appear as direct but as masked by Buddhism.  We see Buddhism grow at the expense of Brahmanism.  We are then conscious that it becomes profoundly modified under the influence of new ideas.  We see it decay and the religion of the Brahmans emerge victorious.  But that religion is not what it was when Buddhism first arose, and is henceforth generally known as Hinduism.  The materials for studying the period in which the change occurred—­say 400 B.C. to 400 A.D.—­are not scanty, but they do not facilitate chronological investigation.  Art and architecture are mainly Buddhist until the Gupta period (c. 320 A.D.) and literature, though plentiful, is undated.  The Mahabharata and Ramayana must have been edited in the course of these 800 years, but they consist of different strata and it is not easy to separate and arrange them without assuming what we want to prove.  From 400 B.C. (if not from an earlier date) onwards there grew up a great volume of epic poetry, founded on popular ballads, telling the stories of Rama and the Pandavas.[405] It was distinct from the canonical literatures of both Brahmans and Buddhists, but though it was not in its essential character religious, yet so general in India is the interest in religion that whole theological treatises were incorporated in these stories without loss, in Indian opinion, to the interest of the narrative.  If at the present day a congregation is seen in a Hindu temple listening to a recitation, the text which is being chanted will often prove to be part of the Mahabharata.