LOB vc REV. RICHARD COLLINS, M.A. 
16. Still more striking is the character of the revelation made 
by Krishna. He preaches a new faith, personal devotion to 
him, as the embodiment of the divine. He speaks of it, as I 
have before shown, as the chief among the sciences, the chief 
among the mysteries, the best means of sanctification. This 
mystery he sets above ‘“‘the Vedas, penance, gifts, and 
sacrifices.” It is to be a new creed, controlling all previous 
creeds. ‘The language in which this new creed is conveyed is 
in itself remarkable :—The devotees, who worship Krishna, 
‘dwell,’ he says, “in him, and he in them”: they are — 
“never ruined”: even ‘those who are of sinful birth, 
women, Vaisyas, and Siidras, resorting to him, attain to the 
supreme goal.” Other quotations I have given above. 
Whence did the writer of the Bhagavad-Gita derive these 
ideas of incarnation, sanctification, love, faith, the last over- 
topping and setting aside every previous Hindu rule of the 
religious life? Hvery one will allow, I think, that these are 
novel doctrines, of which there are no discernible germs in 
the Vedic literature. So remarkable an array of novelties of 
faith and practice could scarcely have been the production 
merely of the philosophical mind: in short, they bear 
evidence of having been derived from some foreign source ; 
and they have the strongest resemblance to some doctrines 
which are peculiar to the revelation of Jesus Christ. More- 
over, their connexion in the Giti is incongruous: in many 
parts of the poem the current Hindu methods for attaining 
perfection and emancipation are laboriously set forth; the 
doctrine of metempsychosis is stated ; and yet personal devo- 
tion to Krishna is made in one passage to render all these 
doctrines null and void. Still further, there is the most 
complete incongruity between some of the doctrines enun- 
ciated by Krishna, such as sanctification, forgiveness of sins, 
love, &c., in connexion with the worship of the incarnate 
deity, and his own character, as described in other portions 
of the Mahabharata. One scene is particularly repulsive, 
where, while he pronounces forgiveness of sins, he is de- 
scribed as standing to watch some dancing-girls, the skill of 
one of whom he rewards by telling her that if she will visit 
him, he will give her whatever she asks of him. Some of the 
accounts of these rewards to the forgiven. would not bear 
transcription. His conversation with Bhima on the same 
occasion is also most repulsive from a moral point of view ; 
while at the same time it is stated that Krishna had many 
thousands of wives. In the professed histories of Krishna’s 
life, which were, no doubt, all written after—some long 
after—the Bhagavad-Giti—as in the Harivamsa, which is 
