102 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
like men and among men, with similar passions to men. The Greek 
artists fashioned their statues in the form of men and women, supreme 
only in their grace and beauty. Poets narrated their conversations and 
sang of their quarrels. Gradually, alongside the formal national rites in 
their honour, the impish popular wit began to fasten uponthem, Jupiter’s 
infidelities, Juno’s jealousies, Mercury’s petty larcenies, Vulcan’s 
stupidity, Cupid’s mischief, finally scattered the idea of awe, and the 
Greek mind was liberated to reason out for itself the problem of existence 
and the canons of right living. In all this geography undoubtedly had 
a hand. Her peculiar mountain system had divided Greece into a 
number of separate little communities, allies at times, enemies at others, 
but always vigilant for their physical fitness in the defence of their home 
cities. Her extensive and sheltered seaboard brought to her doors all 
the busy intellectual life of the Mediterranean world. With athletic 
bodies, sane and alert intellects, her children had no room for super- 
stitous fears of the unknown, and they laid the foundations of modern 
scientific thought. 
Into India virtually the same theogony had been imported by the Indo- 
Aryan invaders of two or three millennia before Christ. But into how 
different a world they came. Isolated by gigantic mountain ranges and 
stormy oceans from her neighbours, India had very little living contact 
with the thoughts or interests of other lands. Within her borders the 
workings of nature were hard and often cruel. Drought and famine at 
periodic intervals swept off their thousands and their hundreds of 
thousands. Diseases attacked the land in mass formation ; so did flood, 
earthquake, tempest, everything against which man is powerless. Beasts 
of prey swarmed, and no humble home was safe from snakes whose sting 
was inevitable death. ‘The landscape, too, had its times of grimness, as 
those of us know who have lived in the plains through Indian hot weathers. 
The hills were awe-inspiring rather than friendly, and the forests held 
particular dread for those early simple people. In this environment the 
gods soon lost all human touch. The first Veda had addressed them in 
stately and reverent hymns ; but its strains were foreign to the soil and 
were never renewed. The Hindu pantheon became a huge gallery of 
godlings and goblins, in which the heavenly beings of the primitive 
Aryan stock got for the most part changed into objects of terror to be 
propitiated and, whenever possible, avoided. The cult of Krishna, it is 
true, shows how the human heart yearns for a divinity which is consoling 
and kindly ; but Sri Krishna’s observances are only a brief interlude in 
the gloom of India’s religious life. The representations of the gods in 
statuary and painting are deliberately monstrous, as if to mark their 
distance from man, and to our western taste almost always repulsive. In 
tracing this connexion between the rigours of nature and the severity of 
men’s creeds, I would not be taken as ignoring that side of India’s mind 
which strives daringly to plumb the unknowable. In pure metaphysic it 
is possible that India has something to teach to lands where geography 
is kinder; but here again the vague mysticism of her speculation has 
some analogy to the vastness of her plains and the inaccessible sanctuaries 
of her hills. 
