The children sit in rows facing each other, along the walls of the veranda. My Wisest of the Wise explains to me that the God who dwells within us is to be invited to inhabit that lump of mud (the clay on the potters’ wheel), for His better worshipping by the children of men. So, the opening ceremony is a movement of the hands--the invocation! Each little worshipper sits wrapt before the God in the clay.... Now the Priest takes up the Sanskrit word, and the Babies chaunt it after him. “Oh! Great God, bless us, forgive us, remain with us.” “Oh, Great God, I offer thee this incense, these flowers, this holy water,” etc. And the fingers are busy with the offering while every now and again “_Dhyan karo_” (meditate) will be the order: and five hundred pairs of Baby eyes are puckered into concentration and five hundred pairs of arms are tightly folded. The earnest tension of the attitude moves one to tears.... Of what are they thinking? Oh! but of what? “The worship of the Possible?” _That_ is the Wise Woman’s thought, not theirs. I put it to her. “Of what should they think,” said she, “but of the whole duty of womanhood--to be a good wife: to omit no act of ceremonial Hinduism.” The sequence showed her wisdom. And being a good Hindu wife means fulfilling the duty of a Life-Bringer, thinking no evil of the lord who bears to you God’s message of creation, counting his most temporal want as superior to your own most spiritual craving, making a religion of his smallest wish; and when the Gods, for your sins, take him from you, holding to his memory with prayer and fasting and self-suppression.... So we end, whence we set out _Devi--Goddess!_ V THE SETTER-FAR OF IGNORANCE