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RELIGIOUS PRACTICES AND OPINIONS
peaceably and decently at home. But although the practice is discontinued the doctrine* remains, and influences opinion; and devotional ceremonies, pilgrimage, penance, and abstract contemplation, have an undue preponderance in the estimation of the people, even the best informed amongst them, over active duties and the precepts of morality. As to the common people, they have, as I indicated in my last, a still lower scale, and they find a ready substitute for the inconveniences of all moral restraint in the fervour of that faith which they place in Vishnu, and the unwearied perseverance with which they train a parrot or a starling to repeat his names, to articulate Krishna-Rádhá, or Sítá-Rám.
What then are the consequences which the Hindus propose to themselves from the fulfilment of any description of prescribed duties or acts of merit? Those who profess devoted attachment to a popular deity expect to be rewarded by elevation to the heaven in which he is supposed to dwell, and to reside there for ever in ecstatic communication or union with him. These notions, however, are innovations; and even the independent establishments, the several heavens of these divinities, are modern contrivances. The heaven of Krishna, Go-loka, the sphere or heaven of cows, has grown out of the legends of his boyhood, whilst straying amongst the pastures of Vraj. There is no such place in the celestial topography
* [Man. 6, 1. 33.]
