The Vedanta-Sara

Excerpt from The Vedanta-Sara

Carlyle says: "Of a man or of a nation we inquire first of all: What religion they had? Answering this question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or of the nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were the parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and the actual; their religion, as I say, was the great fact about them."

Man is a religious being: he will worship. In whatever part of the world he may be found, however degraded in many respects, he has a religion of some kind or another.

India is now the scene of a momentous revolution. Railways, education, the press, and contact with the West are producing vast changes. Of all, the most important are those connected with religion. It is true that comparatively few are yet thus affected; the masses are largely untouched. But the new ideas will filter down, and gradually influence the whole. Lyall thus indicates the probable course of events:

"It seems possible that the old gods of Hinduism will die in these new elements of intellectual light and air as quickly as a net full of fish lifted up out of the water; that the alteration in the religions needs of such an intellectual people as the Hindus, which will have been caused by a change in their circumstances, will make it impossible for them to find in their new world a place for their ancient deities. Their primitive forms will fade and disappear silently, as witchcraft vanished from Europe, and as all such delusions become gradually extinguished."

An effort is now being made to prevent the "old gods of Hinduism" from dying in the "new elements of intellectual light and air." This has been tried even in the case of Krishna. All such attempts will be as fruitless as those made to arrest the decline of polytheism in Europe.

Educated Hindus generally profess to be adherents only of the "Higher Hinduism." By this is understood the Vedanta or the eclectic system of the Bhagavad Gita.

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