If it flinches before the ordeal, if it clings to anything to which hitherto it has looked for help, if in that supreme hour it cries out for friend or helper, nay even for the Guru himself, the soul fails in that ordeal. Naked and alone it must go forth, with absolutely none to aid it save the divinity within itself. And it is that nakedness of the soul as it approaches the supreme goal, that is told of in that story of Shrî Kṛiṣhṇa, the child, and the Gopîs, the nakedness of life before the One who gave it. You find many another similar allegory. When the Lord comes in the Kalki, the tenth, Avatâra, He fights on the battlefield and is overcome. He uses all His weapons; every weapon fails Him; and it is not till He casts every weapon aside and fights with His naked hands, that He conquers. Exactly the same idea. Intellect, everything, fails the naked soul before God.[11] [Footnote 11: So in the _Imitation of Christ_, the work of an occultist, it is written that we must "naked follow the naked Jesus."] If I have taken up this story specially, out of hundreds of stories, to dwell upon, it is because it is one of the points of attack, and because you who are Hindus by birth ought to know enough of the inner truths of your own religion not to stand silent and ashamed when attacks are made, but should speak with knowledge and thus prevent such blasphemies. Then we learn more details of His play with the Gopîs as a child of seven: how He wandered into the forest and disappeared and all went after Him seeking Him; how they tried to imitate His own play, in order to fill up the void that was left by His absence. The child of seven, that He was at this time, disappeared for a while, but came back to those who loved Him, as God ever does with His bhaktas. And then takes place that wondrous dance, the Râsa[12] of Shrî Kṛiṣhṇa, part of His Lîlâ, when He multiplied Himself so that every pair of Gopîs found Him standing between them; amid the ring of women the child was there between each pair of them, giving a hand to each; and so the mystic dance was danced. This is another of these points of attack which are made by ignorant minds. What but an unclean mind can see aught that is impure in the child dancing there as lover and beloved? It is as though He looked forward down the ages, and saw what later would be said, and it is as though He kept the child form in the Lîlâ, in order that He might breathe harmlessly into men's blind unclean hearts the lesson that He would fain give. And what was the lesson? One other incident I remind you of, before I draw the lesson from the whole of this stage of His life. He sent for food, He who is the Feeder of the worlds, and some of His Brâhmaṇas refused to give it, and sent away the boys who came to ask for food for Him; and when the men refused, He sent them back to the women, to see if they too would refuse the food their husbands had declined to give. And the women--who have ever loved