But this world and time are to them wholly uninteresting; God and eternity are all in all.

They torture themselves with self-inflicted torments; for the body is the great enemy of the soul's salvation, and they must beat it down by ascetic mortifications.
But asceticism, here as everywhere else, tends to self-indulgence, since one extreme produces another.

In one part of India, therefore, devotees are swinging on hooks in honor of Siva, hanging themselves by the feet, head downwards, over a fire, rolling on a bed of prickly thorns, jumping on a couch filled with sharp knives, boring holes in their tongues, and sticking their bodies full of pins and needles, or perhaps holding the arms over the head till they stiffen in that position.

Meantime in other places whole regions are given over to sensual indulgences, and companies of abandoned women are connected with different temples and consecrate their gains to the support of their worship.
As one-sided spiritualism will manifest itself in morals in the two forms of austerity and sensuality, so in religion it shows itself in the opposite direction of an ideal pantheism and a gross idolatry.
Spiritualism first fills the world full of God, and this is a true and Christian view of things.

But it takes another step, which is to deny all real existence to the world, and so runs into a false pantheism.