My faith is to be taught. I learn my Bible higher within the gentle of your Bible and the darkish prophecies of my faith change into brighter compared with these of your prophets. Fact has all the time been common. If I alone have been to have six fingers on my hand whereas all of you had solely 5, you wouldn’t suppose that my hand was the true intent of nature, however slightly that it was irregular and diseased. Simply so with faith. If one creed alone have been to be true and all of the others unfaithful, you’d have a proper to say that that faith was diseased; if one faith is true, all of the others should be true. Thus the Hindu faith is your property in addition to mine. Of the 2 hundred and ninety hundreds of thousands of individuals inhabiting India, solely two hundreds of thousands are Christians, sixty hundreds of thousands Mohammedans and all the remainder are Hindus.
The Hindus discovered their creed upon the traditional Vedas, a phrase derived from Vid, “to know”. These are a sequence of books which, to our minds, include the essence of all faith; however we don’t suppose they alone include the truths. They train us the immortality of the soul. In each nation and each human breast there’s a pure want to discover a secure equilibrium — one thing that doesn’t change. We can’t discover it in nature, for all of the universe is nothing however an infinite mass of adjustments. However to deduce from that that nothing unchanging exists is to fall into the error of the Southern college of Buddhists and the Chârvâkas, which latter consider that every one is matter and nothing thoughts, that every one faith is a cheat, and morality and goodness, ineffective superstitions. The Vedanta philosophy teaches that man just isn’t sure by his 5 senses. They solely know the current, and neither the long run nor the previous; however as the current signifies each previous and future, and all three are solely demarcations of time, the current additionally could be unknown if it weren’t for one thing above the senses, one thing impartial of time, which unifies the previous and the long run within the current.
However what’s impartial? Not our physique, for it relies upon upon outward situations; nor our thoughts, as a result of the ideas of which it’s composed are precipitated. It’s our soul. The Vedas say the entire world is a mix of independence and dependence, of freedom and slavery, however by all of it shines the soul impartial, immortal, pure, excellent, holy. For whether it is impartial, it can’t perish, as dying is however a change, and relies upon upon situations; if impartial, it should be excellent, for imperfection is once more however a situation, and subsequently dependent. And this immortal and excellent soul should be the identical within the highest God in addition to within the humblest man, the distinction between them being solely within the diploma by which this soul manifests itself.
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