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"Why," Ramkrishna Paramhansa asks, "does the God-lover find such pleasure in addressing the Deity as Mother? Because," his answer is, "the child is more free with its mother, and consequently she is dearer to the child than anyone else.

The Imitation of Buddha, likewise we may observe, has been published. About "The Imitation of Christ" itself, we quote from a Hindu's advertisement appended to the life of a new Hindu saint, Ramkrishna Paramhansa.

Where modern Indian religious teachers address God as Mother, it is a modernism, an echo of the thought of the Fatherhood of God. The name is altered because the name of Mother better suits the ecstasies of Indian devotion, where the ecstatic mood is cultivated. A case in point is the Hindu devotee, Ramkrishna Paramhansa, who died near Calcutta in 1886.

Their chief doctrine, the infallibility of the Vedas or earliest Hindu scriptures, is reactionary, although a number of reforms are inculcated in the name of a return to the Vedas. The late Ramkrishna Paramhansa, a famous Bengali ascetic of high spiritual tone, but of the old type.

In the view of the pantheist, when we see aught else divine or human than this all-embracing Deity or Godhead, it is only a self-created mist of the dim human eye, in which there play the flickering phantasms of deities and human individuals and things. "In the Absolute, there is no thou, nor I, nor God," said Ramkrishna, a great Hindu saint who died in 1886.

At the same time he was in the habit of visiting the famous Bengali ascetic, Ramkrishna Paramhansa, already mentioned, and of communing with him.

In 1895, having gone to Dakhineswar, the old residence of his Hindu master, Ramkrishna, Swami Vivekananda was actually expelled from the temple where his master had been wont to worship. The Chicago representative of Hinduism had been guilty of the sins of crossing the sea and of living like a European, and so he must be disowned and the temple purged of his presence.

Listen also to the words of Swami Vivekananda, in the Parliament of Religions, Chicago, about his master, Ramkrishna Paramhansa's growing into self-conscious Deity: "Every now and then strange fits of God-consciousness came upon him.... He then spoke of himself as being able to do and know everything.... He would speak of himself as the same soul that had been born before as Rama, as Krishna, as Jesus, or as Buddha, born again as Ramkrishna.... He would say he was ... an incarnation of God Himself."

The explanation of a recent Hindu devotee, Ramkrishna Paramhansa, is: "A true devotee, who has drunk deep of divine Love, is like a veritable drunkard, and as such cannot always observe the rules of propriety."