MY INDIAN FRIENDS. II. (continued 2)

“A man after fourteen years of hard asceticism in a lonely forest, obtained at last the power of walking on the waters. Overjoyed at this acquisition, he went to his teacher and told him of his great feat. At this the master replied: ‘My poor boy, what thou hast accomplished after fourteen years of arduous labour, ordinary men do the same by paying a penny to the boatman.’”

110“Where is God? How can we get at Him? There are pearls in the sea. One must dive again and again till one gets at them. So there is God in the world, but you should persevere in diving.”

“The vanities of all others may gradually die out, but the vanity of a saint is hard, indeed, to wear away.”

There are hundreds of such sayings, all breathing the same spirituality, the same familiarity with the unseen world. Some of them sound to us trivial and common, but in publishing them I did not like to leave out any, for fear of being suspected of falsifying the record and representing the bright side of the movement only. To our taste there may be too much of that familiarity. Silence in the presence of God seems to us more reverential than words, but to a man of the character of Râmakrishna, and I might say, to Hindus in general, the distance between the human and the Divine, between God and man, has always been very small, till at last it seems to vanish altogether. To their eyes the unseen world and the unseen God are not unseen. The veil formed by what we call the flesh is to them so transparent that it often vanishes altogether. The idea of a distance from God or of a gradual approach to Him after death exists indeed in their exoteric philosophy, but to the true Vedântist such an approach is really unthinkable. To the Vedântist the highest goal has always been to have his humanity taken back into the Godhead, not to put on a new nature, 111but to recover his old and true nature, in fact to become what, in spite of the dreams and fancies of life, he has always been. Those who cannot soar so high, may indeed be allowed to worship a distant God, nay, to approach His throne reverentially in another life, and they are taught that even in that state of mind, they are moving forward on the right road, the road that may at last bring them to themselves and make them enjoy the Divine and the Eternal within them. Hence with all their strong sense of the imperfections of this life, with the acknowledgment of their guilt and their consequent separation from God, they never use the disparaging language of other religions which seems to make man the most contemptible worm on earth. No doubt, they also have imagined a number of beings intermediate between God and man, but when these creatures of their own fancy have been dissolved again, they seem to feel that in reality there is no class of real beings that can claim to fill the self-made gap between God and man. Râmakrishna himself was still in the bonds of the popular faith of India. He worshipped the gods created by man, such as Vishnu, Siva, and others, he did not shrink even from offering sacrifices to idols, but he felt and saw that behind them there is the inexpressible Essence which is more than any or all of them. The purely human devotion and love which he expresses for his Divine Mother, for instance, is sometimes most startling, but one feels all the time that, if he could only express it, he is 112groping for that Godhead which he must find in himself or in his Self before he can find it in the Self of the whole world, in the Self even of the old idols. A distant God like the Jewish Jehovah would be no God at all to the Vedântist, he cannot be too near to his God; nay, to be without Him but for one moment would be death and annihilation to him.

Such ideas are no doubt strange to most of us, but if we cannot as yet make them our own, we should at all events give Râmakrishna and his followers credit for holding them honestly.

113