Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/74

 "So also it reads in another passage—

These were the very words, as thou must know, of the Highest God himself when, in the shape of a ram, he carried the boy Medhatithi to the heavenly world. For, indignant at his forcible abduction, the latter demanded to know who his abductor was: 'Tell me who thou art, else will I, a Brahman, smite thee with my wrath.' And he, in the semblance of a ram, revealed himself as that highest Brahman, as the All in All, in the words—

"It must by this time be plain to the dimmest eye that the likeness to the Brahman canot lie in being destroyed and eaten—as would be the case were gentleness and self-renunciation to be regarded as virtues—but, on the contrary, in destroying and eating all others. In other words, it lies in using others to the utmost and in crushing them—while in one's own person suffering no harm.

"There cannot therefore be the slightest doubt but that the doctrine—of the punishment of hell for him who commits deeds of violence—is an invention of the weak to protect themselves from the might of the strong, by intimidating them.