It is not only that you find the same teaching in both religions; but in every other religion of the world the terms of physical love are used to describe the relation between the soul and God. Take the "Song of Solomon." If you take the Christian _Bible_ and read the margin you will see "The Love of Christ for His Church"; and if from the margin you look down the column, you will find the most passionate of love songs, a description of the exquisite female form in all the details of its attractive beauty; the cry of the lover to the beloved to come to him that they might take their fill of love. "Christ and His Church" is supposed to make it all right, and I am content that it should be so. I have no word to say against the "Song of Solomon," nor any complaint against its gorgeous and luxuriant imagery; but I refuse to take from the Hebrew as pure, what I am to refuse from the Hindu as impure. I ask that all may be judged by the same standard, and that if one be condemned the same condemnation may be levelled against the other. So also in the songs of the Sûfîs, the mystics of the faith of Islâm, woman's love is ever used as the best symbol of love between the soul and God. In all ages the love between husband and wife has been the symbol of union between the Supreme and His devotees; the closest of all earthly ties, the most intimate of all earthly unions, the merging of heart and body of twain into one--where will you find a better image of the merging of the soul in its God? Ever has the object of devotion been symbolised as the lover or husband, ever the devotee as wife or mistress. This symbology is universal, because it is fundamentally true. The absolute surrender of the wife to the husband is the type upon earth of the absolute surrender of the soul to God. That is the justification of the Râsa of Shrî Kṛiṣhṇa; that is the explanation of the story of His life in Vraja. I have dwelt specially on this, my brothers, you all know why. Let us pass from it, remembering that till the nineteenth century this story provoked only devotion not ribaldry, and it is only with the coming in of the grosser type of western thought that you have these ideas put into the _Bhâgavad-Purâṇa_. I would to God that the Ṛishis had taken away the _Shrîmad Bhâgavata_ from a race that is unworthy to have it; that as They have already withdrawn the greater part of the Vedas, the greater part of the ancient books, they would take away also this story of the love of Shrî Kṛiṣhṇa, until men are pure enough to read it without blasphemy and clean enough to read it without ideas of sexuality.