APPENDICES ascend towards His formlessness. He is free, so His play is within bonds. We are bound, so we find our joy in freedom. All our sorrow is because we cannot understand this. He who sings, proceeds from his joy to the tune; he who hears, from the tune to joy. One comes from freedom into bond- age, the other goes from bondage into freedom; only thus can they have their communion. He sings and we hear. He ties the bonds as He sings to us, we untie them as we listen to Him.”
This idea also occurs in our devotees of the Middle Ages.
The ^'sahaj" folk endeavour to seek the bliss of divine union only for its own sake. Mundane de- sires are therefore accounted the chief obstacles in the way. But for getting rid of them, the wise Guru, according to the Baiils, does not advise renunciation of the good things of the world, but the opening of the door to the higher self. Thus guided, says Kabir, I close not my eyes, stop not my ears, nor torment my body% But every path I then traverse becomes a path of pilgrimage, whatever work I engage in becomes service.
This simple consummation is the best.
The simple way has led its votaries easily and nat- urally to their living conception of Humanity, Raj jab says: All the world is the Veda, all creations the Koran. Why read paper scriptures, O Rajjab.
Gather ever fresh wisdom from the Universe. The eternal wis- dom shines within the concourse of the millions of Humanity.
THE RELIGION OF MAN The Baiil sings: The simple has its thirty million strings whose mingled sym- phony ever sounds.
Take all the creatures of the World into yourself. Drown your- self in that eternal music.
I conclude with a few more examples of Baiil songs, esoteric and otherwise, from amongst many others of equal interest.
By Gangaram, the Namasudra Realize how finite and unbounded are One, As you breathe in and out.
Of all ages, then, you will count the moments, In every moment find the ages, The drop in the ocean, the ocean in the drop.
If your endeavour be but sahaj, beyond argument and cogita- tion, You will taste the precious quintessence.
Blinded are you by over-much journeying from bourne to bourne, O Gangaram, be simple I Then alone will vanish all your doubts.
By Bisha, the disciple of Bala: The Simple Man was in the Paradise of my heart, Alas, how and when did I lose Him, That now no peace I know, at home or abroad?
By meditation and telling of beads, in worship and travail, The quest goes on for ever; But unless the Simple Man comes of Himself, Fruitless is it all; For he yields not to forgetfulness of striving.
Bisha's heart has understood right well, That by His own simple way alone is its door unlocked.
“Listen, O brother man”, declares Chandidas, “the Truth of Man is the highest of truths; there is no other truth above it.”
APPENDIX II NOTE ON THE NATURE OF REALITY (A conversation between Rabindranath Tagore and Professor Albert Einstein, in the afternoon of July 14, 1930, at the Professor’s residence in Kaputh.)
E.: Do you believe in the Divine as isolated from the world?
T.: Not isolated. The infinite personality of Man comprehends the Universe. There cannot be anything that cannot be subsumed by the human personality, and this proves that the truth of the Universe is human truth. I have taken a scientific fact to illustrate this — Matter is composed of pro- tons and electrons, with gaps between them; but matter may seem to be solid. Similarly humanity is composed of individuals, yet they have their inter-connection of human relationship, which gives living solidarity to man’s world. The entire universe is linked up with us in a similar manner, it is a human universe. I have pursued this thought through art, literature and the religious consciousness of man.
E.: There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe: (i) The world as a unity dependent on humanity. (2) The world as a reality independent of the human factor.
T.: When our universe is in harmony with Man, the eternal, we know it as truth, we feel it as beauty.
THE RELIGION OF MAN E.: This is a purely human conception of the universe.
T.: There can be no other conception. This world is a human world — ^the scientific view of it is also that of the scientific man. There is some standard of reason and enjoyment which gives it truth, the standard of the Eternal Man whose ex- periences are through our experiences.
E.: This is a realization of the human entity.
T,: Yes, one eternal entity. We have to realize it through our emotions and activities. We realize the Supreme Man who has no individual limita- tions through our limitations. Science is concerned with that which is not confined to individuals; it is the impersonal human world of truths. Religion realizes these truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of truth gains universal significance. Religion ap- plies values to truth, and we know truth as good through our own harmony with it.
E.: Truth, then, or Beauty, is not independent of man?
T.:No.
E.: If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful.
T.'.No.
E.: I agree with regard to this conception of Beauty, but not with regard to Truth.
T.: Why not? Truth is realized through man.
E.: I cannot prove that my conception is right, but that is my religion.
T.: Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the Universal Being; Truth the perfect APPENDICES comprehension of the Universal Mind. We indi- viduals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experience, through our illumined consciousness— how, other- wise, can we know Truth?
E.: 1 cannot prove scientifically that truth must be conceived as a truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geom- etry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man. Anyway, if there is a reality independent of man there is also a truth relative to this reality; and in the same way the negation of the first engenders a negation of the existence of the latter.
T.: Truth, which is one with the Universal Being, must essentially be human, otherwise what- ever we individuals realize as true can never be called truth — at least the truth which is described as scientific and can only be reached through the process of logic, in other words, by an organ of thoughts which is human. According to Indian Philosophy there is Brahman the absolute Truth, which cannot be conceived by the isolation of the individual mind or described by words, but can only be realized by completely merging the indi- vidual in its infinity. But such a truth cannot be- long to Science. The nature of truth which we are discussing is an appearance — that is to say what appears to be true to the human mind and there- fore is human, and may be called maya, or illusion.
E.: So according to your conception, which may be the Indian conception, it is not the illusion of the individual, but of humanity as a whole.
THE RELIGION OF MAN T-: In science we go through the discipline of eliminating the personal limitations of our indi- vidual minds and thus reach that comprehension of truth which is in the mind of the Universal Man.
E.: The problem begins whether Truth is inde- pendent of our consciousness.
T.: What we call truth lies in the rational har- mony between the subjective and objective aspects of reality, both of which belong to the super- personal man.
E.: Even in our everyday life we feel compelled to ascribe a reality independent of man to the ob- jects we use. We do this to connect the experiences of our senses in a reasonable way. For instance, if nobody is in this house, yet that table remains where it is.
T.; Yes, it remains outside the individual mind, but not outside the universal mind. The table which I perceive is perceptible by the same kind of consciousness which I possess.
E.: Our natural point of view in regard to the existence of truth apart from humanity cannot be explained or proved, but it is a belief which no- body can lack — ^no primitive beings even. We attribute to Truth a. super-human objectivity; it is indispensable for us, this reality which is inde- pendent of our existence and our experience and our mind — though we cannot say what it means.
T.: Science has proved that the table as a solid object is an appearance, and therefore that which the human mind perceives as a table would not exist if that mind were naught. At the same time it must be admitted that the fact, that the ultimate APPENDICES physical reality of the table is nothing but a mul- titude of separate revolving centres of electric forces, also belongs to the human mind.
In the apprehension of truth there is an eternal conflict between the universal human mind and the same mind confined in the individual. The per- petual process of reconciliation is being carried on in our science and philosophy, and in our ethics. In any case, if there be any truth absolutely unre- lated to humanity then for us it is absolutely non- existing.
It is not difiicult to imagine a mind to which the sequence of things happens not in space, but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind its conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning. There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of lit- erature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth, which eats that paper, literature is abso- lutely non-existent, yet for Man’s mind literature has a greater value of truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner, if there be some truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.
E.: Then I am more religious than you are!
T.: My religion is in the reconciliation of the Super-personal Man, the Universal human spirit in my own individual being. This has been the subject of my Hibbert Lectures, which I have called “The Religion of Man”.
APPENDIX III DADU AND THE MYSTERY OF FORM (From an article in the Visvabharati Quarterly by Professor Kshiti Mohan Sen.)
The language of man has been mainly occupied with telling us about the elements into which the finite world has been analysed; nevertheless, now and again, it reveals glimpses of the world of the Infinite as well; for the spirit of man has discov- ered rifts in the wall of Matter. Our intellect can count the petals, classify the scent, and describe the colour of the rose, but its unity finds its expression when we rejoice in it.
The intellect at best can give us only a broken view of things. The marvellous vision of the Seer, in spite of the scoffing in which both Science and Metaphysics so often indulge, can alone make manifest to us the truth of a thing in its complete- ness. When we thus gain a vision of unity, we are no longer intellectually aware of detail, counting, classifying, or distinguishing — for them we have found admittance into the region of the spirit, and there we simply measure the truth of our realization by the intensity of our joy.
What is the meaning of this unutterable joy? That which we know by intellectual process is something outside ourselves. But the vision of any- thing in the fulness of its unity involves the reali- APPENDICES zation of the unity of the self within, as well as of the relation between the two. The knowledge of the many may make us proud, but it makes us glad when our kinship with the One is brought home to us. Beauty is the name that we give to this ac- knowledgment of unity and of its relationship with ourselves.
It is through the beauty of Nature, or of Human Character, or Service, that we get our glimpses of the Supreme Soul whose essence is bliss. Or rather, it is when we become conscious of Him in Nature, or Art, or Service, that Beauty flashes out. And whenever we thus light upon the Dweller-within, all discord disappears and Love and Beauty are seen inseparable from Truth. It is really the com- ing of Truth to us as kinsman which floods our being with Joy.
This realization in Joy is immediate, self-suffi- cient, ultimate. When the self experiences Joy within, it is completely satisfied and has nothing more to ask from the outside world. Joy, as we know it, is a direct, synthetic measure of Beauty and neither awaits nor depends upon any analyti- cal process. In our Joy, further, we behold not only the unity, but also the origin, for the Beauty which tells us of Him can be nothing but radiance re- flected, melody re-echoed, from Him; else would all this have been unmeaning indeed — Society, Civilization, Humanity. The progress of Man would otherwise have ended in an orgy of the gratification of his animal passions.
The power of realization, for each particular individual, is limited. All do not attain the privi- lege of directly apprehending the universal Unity.
THE RELIGION OF MAN Nevertheless, a partial vision of it, say in a flower, or in a friend, is a common experience; moreover, the potentiality is inherent in every individual soul, by dint of disciplined striving, to effect its own expansion and thereupon eventually to achieve the realization of the Supreme Soul.
By whom, meanwhile, are these ineffable tidings from the realm of the Spirit, the world of the In- finite, brought to us? Not by potentates or phi- losophers, but by the poor, the untutored, the despised. And with what superb assurance do they lead us out of the desert of the intellect into the paradise of the Spirit!
When our metaphysicians, dividing themselves into rival schools of Monism, Dualism or Monis- tic-Dualism, had joined together in dismissing the world as Maya, then, up from the depths of their social obscurity, rose these cobblers, weavers, and sewers of bags, proclaiming such theorems of the intellect to be all nonsense; for the metaphysicians had not seen with their own inner vision how the world overflowed with Truth and Love, Beauty and Joy.
Dadu, Ravidas, Kabir and Nanafc were not ascetics; they bore no message of poverty, or re- nunciation, for their own sake; they were poets who had pierced the curtain of appearances and had glimpses of the world of Unity, where God himself is a poet. Their words cannot stand the glare of logical criticism; they babble, like babes, of the joy of their vision of Him, of the ecstasy into which His music has thrown them.
Nevertheless, it is they, not the scientists or phi- losophers, who have taught us of reality. On the APPENDICES one side the Supreme Soul is alone, on the other my individual soul is alone. If the two do not come together, then indeed there befalls the greatest of all calamities, the utter emptiness of chaos. For all the abundance of His inherent joy, God is in want of my joy of Him; and Reality in its perfec- tion only blossoms where we meet.
“When I look upon the beauty of this Universe”, says Dadu, “I cannot help asking: ‘How, O Lord, did you come to create it? What sudden wave of joy coursing through your being compelled its own manifestation? Was it really due to desire for self- expression, or simply on the impulse of emotion? Or was it perhaps just your fancy to revel in the play of form? Is this play then so delightful to you; or is it that you would see your own inborn delight thus take shape?’ Oh, how can these ques- tions be answered in words?” cries Dadu. “Only those who know will understand.”
“Why not go to him who has wrought this mar- vel”, says Dadu elsewhere, “and ask: ‘Cannot your own message make clear this wondrous making of the One into the many?’ When I look on creation as beauty of form, I sec only Form and Beauty. When I look on it as life, everywhere I sec Life. When I look on it as Brahma, then indeed is Dadu at a loss for words. When I sec it in relation, it is of bewildering variety. When I see it in my own soul, all its variousness is merged in the beauty of the Supreme Soul. This eye of mine then becomes also the eye of Brahma, and in this exchange of mutual vision does Dadu behold Truth.”
The eye cannot see the face — for that purpose a mirror is necessary. That is to say, cither the face THE RELIGION OF MAN has to be put at a distance from the eye, or the eye moved away from the face — in any case w'hat w^as one has to be made into two. The image is not the face itself, but how else is that to be seen? _ So does God mirror Himself in Creation; and since He cannot place Himself outside His own Infinity, He can only gain a vision of Himself — and get a taste of His own joy — through my joy in Him and in His Universe. Hence the anxious striving of the devotee to keep himself thoroughly pure — not through any pride of puritanism, but because his soul is the playground where God would revel in Himself. Had not God’s radiance. His beauty, thus found its form in the Universe, its joy in the devotee, He would have remained mere formless, colourless Being in the nothingness of infinity.
This is what makes the Mystery so profound, so inscrutable. Whether we say that only Brahma is true, or only the universe is true, we are equally far from the Truth, which can only be c-xpressed as both this and that, or neither this nor that.
AndDadu can only hint at it by saying: “Neither death nor life is He; He neither goes out, nor docs He come in; nor sleeps, nor wakes; nor wants, nor is satisfied. He is neither I nor you, neither One nor Two. For no sooner do I say that all is One, than I find us both; and when I say there are two, I see we’re One. So, O Dadu, rest content to look on Him just as He is, in the dcep_ of your heart, and give up wrestling with vain imaginings and empty words.”
“Words shower”, Dadu goes on, “when spouts the fount of the intellect; but where realization APPENDICES grows, there music has its seat.” When the intellect confesses defeat, and words fail, then, indeed, from the depth of the heart wells up the song of the joy of realization. What words cannot make clear, melody can; to its strains one can revel in the vision of God in His revels.
“That is why”, cries Dadu, “your universe, this creation of yours, has charmed me so — ^your waters and your breezes, and this earth which holds them, with its ranges of mountains, its great oceans, its snow-capped poles, its blazing sun, because, through all the three regions of earth, sky and heaven, amidst all their multifarious life, it is your ministration, your beauty, that keeps me en- thralled. Who can know you, O Invisible, Unap- proachable, Unfathomable! Dadu has no desire to know; he is satisfied to remain enraptured with all this beauty of yours, and to rejoice in it with you.”
To look upon Form as the play of His love is not to belittle it. In creating the senses God did not intend them to be starved. “And so”, says Dadu, “the eye is feasted with colour, the car with music, the palate with flowers, wondrously provided.” And we find that the body longs for the spirit, the spirit for the body; the flower for the scent the scent for the flower; our words for truth, the Truth for words; form for its ideal, the ideal for form; all thus mutual worship is but the worship of the incfifable Reality behind, by whose Presence every one of them is glorified. And Dadu struggles not, but simply keeps his heart open to this shower of love and thus rejoices in perpetual Springtime.
Every vessel of form the Formless fills with THE RELIGION OF MAN Himself, and in their beauty He gains them in re- turn. With His love the Passionless fulfils every devoted heart and sets it a-dance, and their love streams back to the Colourless, variegated with the tints of each. Beauteous Creation yields up her charms, in all their purity, to her Lord. Need she make further protestation, in words of their mutual love? So Dadu surrenders his heart, mind and soul at the feet of his Beloved. His one care is that they be not sullied.
If any one should object that evanescent Form is not worthy to represent the Eternal, Dadu would answer that it is just because Form is fleeting that it is a help, not a hindrance, to His worship. While returning back to its Origin, it captures our mind and takes it along with itself. The call of Beauty tells us of the Unthinkable, towards whom it lies. In passing over us. Death assures us of the truth of Life, APPENDIX IV NIGHT AND MORNING (An address in the Chapel of Manchester College, Oxford, on Sunday, May 25, 1930, by Rabindranath Tagore.)
In his early youth, stricken with a great sorrow at the death of his grandmother, my father painfully groped for truth when his world had darkened, and his life lost its meaning. At this moment of despair a torn page of a manuscript carried by a casual wind was brought to his notice. The text it contained was the first verse of the Ishopanishad: Isavasyam idam survam Yat Kincha jagatyam jagat, tena tyaktena bhunjitha Ma grdhah Kasyasvitdhanam. - It may be thus translated; “Thou must know that whatever moves in this moving world in enveloped by God. And therefore find thy enjoyment in renunciation, never coveting what belongs to others.”
In this we are enjoined to realize that all facts that move and change have their significance in their relation to one everlasting truth. For then we can be rid of the greed of acquisition, gladly dedicat- ing everything we have to that Supreme Truth. The change in our mind is immense in its generos- ity of expression when an utter sense of vanity and vacancy is relieved at the consciousness of a per- vading reality.
THE RELIGION OF MAN I remember once while on a boat trip in a strange neighbourhood I found myself unexpectedly at the confluence of three great rivers as the daylight faded and the night darkened over a desolation dumb and inhospitable. A sense of dread pos- sessed the crew and an oppressive anxiety bur- dened my thoughts, with its unreasonable exag- geration all through the dark hours. The morning came and at once the brooding obsession vanished. Everything remained the same only the sky was filled with light.
The night had brought her peace, the peace of a black ultimatum in which all hope ceased in an abyss of nothingness, but the peace of the morning appeared like that of a mother’s smile, which in its serene silence utters, “I am here”. I realized why birds break out singing in the morning, and felt that their songs are their own glad answers to the emphatic assurance of a Yes in the morning light in which they find a luminous harmony of their own existence. Darkness drives our being into an isolation of insignificance and we are frightened because in the dark the sense of our own truth dwindles into a minimum. Within us we carry a positive truth, the consciousness of our personality, which naturally seeks from our surroundings its response in a truth which is positive, and then in this harmony we find our wealth of reality and are gladly ready to sacrifice. That which distinguishes man from the animal is the fact that he expresses himself not in his claims, in his needs, but in his sacrifice, which has the creative energy that builds his home, his society, his civilization. It proves that his instinct acknowledges the inexhaustible APPENDICES APPENDICES wealth of a positive truth which gives highest value to existence. In whatever we are mean, greedy and unscrupulous, there are the dark bands in the spectrum of our consciousness; they prove chasms of bankruptcy in our realization of the truth that the world moves, not in a blank sky of negation, but in the bosom of an ideal spirit of fulfil- ment.
Most often crimes are committed when it is night. It must not be thought that the only reason for this is that in the dark they are likely to remain undetected. But the deeper reason is that in the dark the negative aspect of time weakens the posi- tive sense of our own humanity. Our victims, as well as we ourselves, are less real to us in the night, and that which we miss within we desper- ately seek outside us. Wherever in the human world the individual self forgets its isolation, the light that unifies is revealed the light of the Ever- lasting Yes, whose sound-symbol in India is OM. Then it becomes easy for man to be good not be- cause his badness is restrained, but because of his joy in the positive background of his own reality, because his mind no longer dwells in a fathomless night of an anarchical world of denial.
Man finds an instance of this in the idea of his own country, which reveals to him a positive truth, the idea that has not the darkness of negation which is sinister, which generates suspicion, exaggerates fear, encourages uncontrolled greed; for his own country is an indubitable reality to him which delights his soul. In such intense consciousness of reality we discover our own greater self that spreads beyond our physical life and immediate THE RELIGION OF MAN present, and offers ns generous opportunities of enjoyment in renunciation.
In the introductory chapter of our civilization individuals by some chance found themselves to- gether within a geographic enclosure. But a mere crowd without an inner meaning of inter-relation is negative, and therefore it can easily be hurtful. The individual who is a mere component part of an unneighbourly crowd, who in his exclusiveness represents only himself, is apt to be suspicious of others, with no inner control in hating and hitting his fellow-beings at the very first sight. This sav- age mentality is the product of the barren spirit of negation that dwells in the spiritual night. But when the morning of mutual recognition broke out, the morning of co-operative life, that divine mys- tery which is the creative spirit of unity, imparted meaning to individuals in a larger truth named “people”. These individuals gladly surrendered themselves to the realization of their true human- ity, the humanity of a great wholeness composed of generations of men consciously and unconsciously building up a perfect future. They realized peace according to the degree of unity which they at- tained in their mutual relationship, and within that limit they found the one sublime truth which pervades time that moves, the things that change, the life that grows, the thoughts that flow onwards. They united with themselves the surrounding physical nature in her hills and rivers, in the dance of rhythm in all her forms and colours, in the blue of her sky, the tender green of her corn shoots.
In gradual degrees men became aware that the subtle intricacies of human existence find their per- APPENDICES fection in the harmony of interdependence, never in the vigorous exercise of elbows by a mutually pushing multitude, in the arrogant assertion of independence which fitly belongs to the barren rocks and deserts grey with the pallor of death.
For rampant individualism is against what is truly human — that is to say spiritual — it belongs to the primitive poverty of the animal life, it is t& confinement of a cramped spirit, of restricted con- sciousness.
The limited boundaries of a race or a country within which the supreme truth of humanity has been more or less realized in the past are crossed to-day from the outside. The countries are physi- cally brought closer to each other by science. But science has not brought with it the light that helps understanding. On the contrary science on its prac- tical side has raised obstacles among them against the development of a sympathetic knowledge.
But I am not foolish enough to condemn science as materialistic. No truth can be that. Science means intellectual probity in our knowledge and dealings with the physical world and such con- scientiousness has a spiritual quality that encour- ages sacrifice and martyrdom. But in science the oft-used half-truth that honesty is the best policy is completely made true and our mind’s honesty in this field never fails to bring us the best profit for our living. Mischief finds its entry through this back-door of utility, tempting the primitive in man, arousing his evil passions. And through this the great meeting of races has been obscured of its great meaning. When I view it in my mind I am reminded of the fearful immensity of the THE RELIGION OF MAN meeting of the three mighty rivers where I found myself unprepared in a blackness of universal menace. Over the vast gathering of peoples the insensitive night darkly broods, the night of un- reality. The primitive barbarity of limitless suspi- cion and mutual jealousy fills the world’s atmos- phere to-day — the barbarity of the aggressive indi- vidualism of nations, pitiless in its greed, un- ashamed of its boastful brutality.
Those that have come out for depredation in this universal night have the indecent audacity to say that such conditions are eternal in man, that the moral ideals are only for individuals but that the race belongs to the primitive nature of the animal.
But when we see that in the range of physical power man acknowledges no limits in his dreams, and is not even laughed at when he hopes to visit the neighbouring planet; must he insult his hu- manity by proclaiming that human nature has reached its limit of moral possibility? We must work with all our strength for the seemingly im- possible; we must be sure that faith in the perfect builds the path for the perfect — that the external fact of unity which has surprised us must be sub- limated in an internal truth of unity which would light up the Truth of Man the Eternal.
Nations are kept apart not merely by interna- tional jealousy, but also by their Karma, their own past, handicapped by the burden of the dead. They find it hard to think that the mentality which they fondly cultivated within the limits of a narrow past has no continuance in a wider future, they are never tired of uttering the blasphemy that warfare is eternal, that physical might has its inevitable THE RELIGION OF MAN THE RELIGION OF MAN right of moral cannibalism where the flesh is weak. The wrong that has been done in the past seeks to justify itself by its very perpetuation, like a disease by its chronic malignity, and it sneers and growls at the least proposal of its termi- nation. Such an evil ghost of a persistent past, the dead that would cling to life, haunts the night to- day over mutually alienated countries, and men that are gathered together in the dark cannot see each other’s faces and features.
We in India are unfortunate in not having the chance to give expression to the best in us in creat- ing intimate relations with the powerful nations, whose preparations are all leading to an enormous waste of resources in a competition of brow-beating and bluff. Some great voice is waiting to be heard which will usher in the sacred light of truth in the dark hours of the nightmare of politics, the voice which will proclaim that “God is over all”, and exhort us never to covet, to be great in renunciation that gives us the wealth of spirit, strength of truth, leads us from the illusion of power to the fullness of perfection, to the Sdntam, who is peace eternal, to the Advaitam who is the infinite One in the heart of the manifold. But we in India have not yet had the chance. Yet we have our own human voice which truth demands. The messengers of truth have ever joined hands across centuries, across the seas, across historical barriers, and they help to raise up the great continent of human brotherhood from avidya, from the slimy bottom of spiritual apathy. We individuals, however small may be our power and whatever corner of the world we may belong to, have a claim upon THE RELIGION OF MAN THE RELIGION OF MAN US to add to the light of the consciousness that com- prehends all humanity. And for this cause I ask your co-operation, not only because co-operation gives us strength in our work, but because co- operation itself is the best aspect of the truth we represent; it is an end and not merely the means.
Let us keep our faith firm in the objectivity of the source of our spiritual ideal of unity, though it cannot be proved by any mathematical logic. Let us proclaim in our conduct that it has already been given to us to be realized, like a song which has only to be mastered and sung, like the morning which has only to be welcomed by raising the screens, opening the doors.
The idea of a millennium is treasured in our ancient legends. The instinct cradled and nour- ished in them has profound meaning. It is like the instinct of a chick which dimly feels that an infinite world of freedom is already given to it, truer than the narrow fact of its immediate life within the egg. An agnostic chick has the rational right to doubt it, but at the same time it cannot help pecking at its shell. The human soul, confined in its limitation, has also dreamt of millennium, and striven for a spiritual emancipation which seems impossible of attainment, and yet it feels its reverence for some ever-present source of inspira- tion in which all its experience of the true, the good and beautiful finds its reality.
And therefore it has been said by the Upani- shad: “Thou must know that God pervades all things that move and change in this moving world; find thy enjoyment in renunciation, covet not what belongs to others.”
APPENDICES Ya ek5 varno bahudha saktiyogat Varnan a^ekan nihitartho dadhati.
Vichaiti chante visvamadau sa devah Sa no buddhya subhaya samjmnaktu.
He who is one, and who dispenses the inherent needs of all peoples and all times, who is in the beginning and the end of all things, may he unite us with the bond of truth, of common fellowship, of righteousness.