Text of Speech
Chicago Address - 1
Response to Welcome At The World's Parliament of Religions,
Chicago, 11th September 1893
Sisters and Brothers of America, It fills my heart with joy
unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome
which you have given us. l thank you in the name of the most
ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of the
mother of religions; and I thank you in the name of the millions
and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects. My thanks,
also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to
the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from
far-off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to different
lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion
which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance.
We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all
religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has
sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all
nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered
in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to the
southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which
their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am
proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still
fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote
to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have
repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by
millions of human beings:
"As the different streams having there sources in different
places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the
different paths which men take through different tendencies,
various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to
Thee."
The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies
ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world,
of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita:
"Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him;
all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to
Me."
Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism,
have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the
earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood,
destroyed civilization, and sent whole nations to despair. Had it
not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more
advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently
hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this
convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all
persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all
uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same
goal.
Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2004 7:31 pm Post subject:
________________________________________
Chicago Addresses -2
Why We Disagree
15th September 1893
I will tell you a little story. ou have heard the eloquent speaker
who has just finished say, "Let us cease from abusing each other,"
and he was very sorry that there should be always so much variance.
But I think I should tell you a story which would illustrate the
cause of this variance. A frog lived in a well. It had lived there
for a long time. It was born there and brought up there, and yet
was a little, small frog. Of course, the evolutionists were not
there then to tell us whether the frog lost its eyes or not, but,
for our story's sake, we must take it for granted that it had its
eyes, and that it every day cleansed the water of all the worms and
bacilli that lived in it with an energy that would do credit to our
modern bacteriologists. In this way it went on and became a little
sleek and fat. Well, one day another flog that lived in the sea
came and fell into the well.
'Where are you form?'
'I am from the sea.'
'The sea! How big is that?
Is it as big as my well?' and he took a leap how one side of the
well to the other.
'My friend,' said the frog of the sea,
'how do you compare the sea with your little well?'
Then the frog took another leap and asked, 'Is your sea so big?'
'What nonsense you speak, to compare the sea with your well!'
'Well, then,' said the frog of the well, 'nothing can be bigger
than my well; there can be nothing bigger than this; this fellow is
a liar, so turn him out.'
That has been the difficulty all the while.
I am a Hindu. I am sitting in my own little well and thinking
that the whole world is my little well. The Christian sits in his
little well and thinks the whole world is his well. The Mohammedan
sits in his little well and thinks that is the whole world. l have
to thank you of America for the great attempt you are making to
break down the barriers of this little world of ours, and hope
that, in the future, the Lord will help you to accomplish your
purpose.
______________
Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2004 7:31 pm Post subject:
________________________________________
Chicago Addresses -3
PAPER ON HINDUISM
Read at the Parliament on 19th September 1893
Three religions now stand in the world which have come down to us
from time prehistoric - Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism.
They have all received tremendous shocks, and all of them prove by
their survival their internal strength. But while Judaism failed
to absorb Christianity and was driven out of its place of birth by
its all-conquering daughter, and a handful of Parsees is all that
remains to tell the tale of their grand religion, sect after sect
arose in India and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its
very foundations, but like the waters of the sea-shore in a
tremendous earthquake it receded only for a while, only to return
in an all-absorbing Hood, a thousand times more vigorous, and when
the tumult of the rush was over, these sects were all sucked in,
absorbed and assimilated into the immense body of the mother faith.
From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which
the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low
ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism
of the Buddhists and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a
place in the Hindu's religion.
Where then, the question arises, where is the common center to
which all these widely diverging radii converge? Where is the
common basis upon which all these seemingly hopeless
contradictions rest? And this is the question I shall at- tempt to
answer.
The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the
Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without
end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be
without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant.
They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by
different persons in different times. Just as the law of
gravitation existed before its discovery, and would exist if all
humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the
spiritual relations between soul and soul and between individual
spirits and the Father of all spirits were there before their
discovery, and would remain even if we forgot them.
The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we honor them
as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of
the very greatest of them were women.
Here it may be said that these laws as laws may be without end, but
they must have had a beginning. The Vedas teach us that creation is
without beginning or end. Science is said to have proved that the
sum total of cosmic energy is always the same. Then, if there was
a time when nothing existed, where was all this manifested energy?
Some say it was in a potential form in God. In that case God is
sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which would make Him
mutable. Everything mutable is a compound and everything compound
must undergo that change which is called destruction. So God would
die, which is absurd-Therefore, there never was a time when there
was no creation.
If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator are two
lines, without beginning and without end, zoning parallel to each
other. God is the ever-active providence, by whose power systems
after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a
time, and again destroyed. This is what the Brahmin boy repeats
every day:
'The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and the moons
of previous cycles.'
And this agrees with modern science. Here I Stand and if I shut my
eyes, and try to conceive my existence, 'I,' 'I,' 'I', what is the
idea before me? The idea of a body. Am I, then, nothing but a
combination of material substances? The Vedas declare, 'No' I am
a spirit living in a body: I am not the body. The body will die,
but I shall not die. Here I am in this body; it will fall, bull
shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul was not created,
for creation means a combination, which means a certain future
dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must die. Some are
born happy, enjoy perfect health with beautiful body, mental vigor,
and all wants supplied. Others are born miserable; some are without
hands or feet; others again are idiots, and only drag on a wretched
existence. Why, if they are all created, why does a just and
merciful God create one happy and another unhappy, why is He so
partial? Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold that those
who are miserable in this life will be happy in a ôare one. Why
should a man be miserable even here in the reign of a just and
merciful God?
In the second place, the idea of a creator God does not explain the
anomaly, but simply expresses the cruel Rat of an all-powerful
being. There must have been causes, then, before his birth, to make
a man miserable or happy and those were his past actions.
Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for
by inherited aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of existence -
one of the mind, the other of matter. If matter and its
transformations answer for all that we have, there is no necessity
for supposing the existence of a soul. But it cannot be proved
that thought has been evolved out of matter; and if a philosophical
monism is inevitable, spiritual monism is certainly logical and no
less desirable than a materialistic monism; but neither of these is
necessary here.
We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from
heredity, but those tendencies only mean the physical configuration
through which a peculiar mind alone can act in a peculiar way.
There are other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by his past
actions. And a soul with a certain tendency would, by the laws of
affinity, take birth in a body which is the fittest instrument for
the display of that tendency. This is in accord with science, for
science wants to explain everything by habit, and habit is got
through repetitions. So repetitions are necessary to explain the
natural habits of a new born soul. And since they were not
obtained in this present life, they must have come down from past
lives.
There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted, how is
it that I do not remember anything of my past life? This can be
easily explained. I am now speaking English. It is not my mother
tongue; in fact, no words of my mother tongue are now present in my
consciousness; but let me try to bring them up, and they rush in.
That shows that consciousness is only the surface of mental ocean,
and within its depths are stored up all our experiences. Try and
struggle, they would come up. and you would be conscious even of
your past life.
This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the
perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the
world by the Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which the
very depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up - try it and
you would get a complete reminiscence of your past life.
So then the Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him the sword
cannot pierce - him the fire cannot burn - him the water cannot
melt - him the air cannot dry. The Hindu believes that every soul
is a circle whose circumference is nowhere but whose center is
located in the body, and that death means the change of the center
from holy to body. Nor is the soul bound by the conditions of
matter.
In its very essence, it is flee, unbounded, holy, pure, and
perfect. But somehow or other it finds itself tied down to matter
and thinks of itself as matter. Why should the free, perfect, and
pure be thus under the thraldom of matter, is the next question.
How can the perfect soul be deluded into the belief that it is
imperfect? We have been told that the Hindus shirk the question
and say that no such question can be there- Some thinkers want to
answer it by positing one or more quasi-perfect beings, and use big
scientific names to fill up the gap. But naming is not explaining.
The question remains the same. How can the perfect become the
quasi-perfect; how can the pure, the absolute change even a
microscopic particle of its nature? But the Hindu is sincere. He
does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He is brave enough
to face the question in a manly fashion; and his answer is: 'I do
not know.' I do not know how the perfect being, the soul, came to
think of itself as imperfect, as Joined to and conditioned by
matter.' But the fact is a fact for all that. It is a fact in
everybody's consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the body.
The Hindu does not attempt to explain why one thinks one is the
body. The answer that it is the will of God is no explanation. This
is nothing more than what the Hindu says, 'I do not know.'
Well, then, the human soul is eternal and immortal, perfect and
infinite, and death means only a change of center from one body to
another. The present is determined by our past actions, and the
future by the present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting
back from birth to birth and death to death. But here is another
question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the
foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the
next, rolling to and from at the mercy of good and bad actions - a
powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing,
uncompromising current of cause and effect - a little moth placed
under the wheel of causation, which rolls on crushing everything in
its way and waits not for the widow's tears or the orphan's cry?
The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of nature. Is
there no hope? Is there no escape? - was the cry that went up from
the bottom of the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy,
and words of hope and consolation came down and inspired a Vedic
sage, and he stood up before the world and in trumpet voice
proclaimed the glad tidings: 'Hear, ye children of immortal bliss!
even ye that reside in higher spheres! I have found the Ancient One
who is beyond all darkness, all delusion: knowing Him alone you
shall be saved from death over again. 'Children of immortal bliss'
-what a sweet, what a hopeful name! Allow me to call you, brethren,
by that sweet name -heirs of immortal bliss - yea, the Hindu
refuses to call you sinners. We are the Children of God, the
sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. e divinities
on earth - sinners! It is a sin to call a ma. so; it is standing
libel on human nature. Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion
that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and
eternal; ye are not matter, ye are not bodies; matter is your
servant, not you the servant of matter.
Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of
unforgiving laws, not an endless prison of cause and effect, but
that at the head of all these laws, in and through every particle
of matter and force, stands One, 'by whose command the wind blows,
the fire burns, the clouds rain and death stalks upon the earth.'
And what is His nature?
He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the
All-merciful. 'Thou art our father, Thou art our mother, Thou art
our beloved friend, Thou art the source of all strength; give us
strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the universe;
help me bear the little burden of this life.' Thus sang the Rishis
of the Veda. And how to worship Him? Through love. 'He is to be
worshiped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and
the next life.'
This is the doctrine of love declared in the Vedas, and let us see
how it is fully developed and taught by Krishna whom the Hindus
believe to have been God incarnate on earth.
He taught that a man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf,
which grows in water but is never moistened by water; so a man
ought to live in the world - his heart to God and his hands to
work.
It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the next
world, but it is better to love God for love's sake; and the prayer
goes: 'Lord, I do not want wealth nor children nor learning. If it
be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth; but grant me this,
that I may love Thee without the hope of reward - love unselfishly
for love's sake.'
One of the disciples of Krishna, the then Emperor of India, wag
driven from his kingdom by his enemies and had to take shelter with
his queen, in a forest in the Himalayas and there one day the queen
asked how it was that he, the most virtuous of men, should suffer
so much misery. udhishthira answered, 'Be hold, my queen, the
Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love them. They do
not give me any- thing but my nature is to love the grand, the
beautiful, therefore I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He
is the source of all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only
object to beloved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love.
I do not pray for any- thing; I do not ask for anything. Let Him
place me wherever He likes. I must love Him for love's sake. I
cannot trade in love.'
The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage
of matter; perfection will be reached when this bond will burst,
and the word they use for it is, therefore, Mukti - freedom,
freedom from the bonds of imperfection, freedom from death and
misery- And this bondage can only fall off through the mercy of
God, and this mercy comes on the pure. So purity is the condition
of His mercy. How does that mercy act? He reveals Himself to the
pure heart; the pure and the stainless see God, yea, even in this
life; then and then only all the crookedness of the heart is made
straight. Then all doubt ceases. He is no more the freak of a
terrible law of causation. This is the very center, the very vital
conception of Hinduism. The Hindu does not want to live upon words
and theories, If there are existences beyond the ordinary sensuous
existence, he wants to come face to face with them. If there is a
soul in him which is not matter, if there is an all-merciful
universal Soul, he will Rota Him direct. He must see Him, and that
alone can destroy all doubts. So the best proof a Hindu sage gives
about the soul, about God, is: 'I have seen the soul; I have seen
God.' And that is the only condition of perfection. The Hindu
religion does not consist in struggles and attempts to believe a
certain doctrine or dogma, but in realizing - not in believing, but
in being and becoming.
Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to
become perfect, to become divine, to reach God, and see God; and
this reaching God, seeing God, becoming perfect even as the Father
in Heaven is perfect, constitutes the religion of the Hindus.
And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He lives a
life of bliss infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect bliss,
having obtained the only thing in which man ought to have pleasure,
namely God, and enjoys the bliss with God.
So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common religion of
all the sects of India; but then perfection is absolute, and the
absolute cannot be two or three. It cannot have any qualities. It
cannot be an individual. And so when a soul becomes perfect and
absolute, it must become one with Brahman, and it would only
realize the Lord as the perfection, the reality, of its own nature
and existence, the existence absolute, knowledge absolute, and
bliss absolute. We have often and often read this called the losing
of individuality and becoming a stock or a stone.
'He jests at scars that never felt a wound.'
I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to enjoy
the consciousness of this small body, it must be greater happiness
to enjoy the consciousness of two bodies, the measure of happiness
increasing with the consciousness of an increasing number of
bodies, the Rim, the ultimate of happiness, being reached when it
would become a universal consciousness.
Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality, this
miserable little prison - individuality must go. Then alone can
death cease when I am one with life, then alone can misery cease
when I am one with happiness itself, then alone can all errors
cease when I am one with knowledge itself; and this is the
necessary scientific conclusion- Science has proved to me that
physical individuality is a delusion, that really my body is one
little continuously changing body in an unbroken ocean of matter,
and Advaita (unity) is the necessary conclusion with my other
counterpart, Soul.
Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science
would reach perfect unity, it would stop from further progress,
because it would reach the goal. Thus chemistry could not progress
farther when it would discover one element out of which all others
could be made. Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfill
its services in discovering one energy of which all the others are
hut manifestations, and the science of religion become perfect when
it would discover Him who is the one life in a universe of death,
Him who is the constant basis of an ever-changing world, One who is
the only Soul of which all souls are but delusive manifestations.
Thus is it, through multiplicity and duality, that the ultimate
unity is reached. Religion can go no farther. This is the goal of
all science.
All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run.
Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today; and
the Hindu is only glad that what he has been cherishing in his
bosom for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language and
with further light from the latest conclusions of science.
Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the religion
of the ignorant. At the very outset, I may tell you that there is
no polytheism in India. In every temple, if one stands by and
listens, one will find the worshipers applying all the attributes
of God, including omnipresence. to the images. It is not
polytheism, nor would the name henotheism explain the situation.
'The rose, called by any other name, would smell as sweet.' Names
are not explanations.
I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach to
crowd in India. Among other sweet things he was telling them was,
that if he gave a blow to their idol with his stick. what could it
do? One of his hearers sharply answered, 'If I abuse your God, what
can He do?' ' ou would be punished,' said the preacher, 'when you
die.' 'So my idol will punish you when you die,' retorted the
Hindu.
The tree is known by its fruits. When l have seen amongst them that
are called idolaters, men, the like of whom, in morality and
spirituality and love, I have never seen anywhere, l stop and ask
myself, 'Can sin beget holiness?'
Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse. Why
does a Christian go to church? Why is the cross holy? Why is the
face turned toward the sky in prayer? Why are there so many images
in the Catholic Church? Why are there so many images in the minds
of Protestants when they pray? My brethren, we can Do more think
about anything without a mental image than we can live without
breathing- By the law of association the material image calls up
the mental idea and vice versa. This is why the Hindu uses an
external symbol when he worships. He will tell you. it helps to
keep his mind fixed on the Being to whom he prays. He knows as well
as you do that the image is not God, is not omnipresent. finer all,
how much does omnipresence mean to almost the whole world? It
stands merely as a word, a symbol. Has God superficial area? If
not, when we repeat that word 'omnipresent', we think of the
extended sky. or of space - that is all.
As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental
constitution, we have to associate our ideas of infinity with the
image of the blue sky, or of the sea, so we naturally connect our
idea of holiness with the image of a church, a mosque, or a cross.
The Hindus have associated the ideas of holiness, purity, truth,
omnipresence, and such other ideas with different images and forms.
But with this difference that while some people devote their whole
lives to their idol of a church and never rise higher, because with
them religion means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and
doing good to their fellows, the whole religion of the Hindu is
centered in realization. Man is to become divine by realizing the
divine. Idols or temples or churches or books are only the
supports, the helps, of his spiritual childhood; but on and on he
must progress.
He must not stop anywhere. 'External worship, material worship' ?,'
say the scriptures, 'is the lowest stage,' struggling to rise high,
mental prayer is the next stage, but the highest stage is when the
Lord has been realized., Mark, the same earnest man who is kneeling
before the idol tells you, 'Him the sun cannot express, nor the
moon, nor the stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what we
speak of as fire; through Him they shine.' But he does not abuse
anyone's idol or call its worship sin. He recognizes in it a
necessary stage of life. 'The child is father of the man.' Would
it be right for an old man to say that childhood is a sin or youth
a sin?
If a man can realize his divine nature with the help of an image,
would it be right to call that a sin? Nor, even when he has passed
that stage, should he call it an error. To the Hindu, man is not
travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower
to higher truth. To him all the religions from the lowest
fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the
human soul to grasp and realize the Infinite, each determined by
the conditions of its birth and association, and each of these
marks a stage of progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring
higher and higher, gathering more and more strength till it reaches
the Glorious Sun.
Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has
recognized it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas
and tries to force society to adopt them. It places before society
only one coat which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If
it does not fit John or Henry he must go without a coat to cover
his body. The Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be
realized, or thought of, or stated through the relative, and the
images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols - so many
pegs to hang spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is
necessary for everyone, but those that do not need it have no right
to say that it is wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism.
One thing I must tell you. Idolatry in India does not mean anything
horrible. It is not the mother of harlots. On the other hand, it
is the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths.
The Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their exceptions;
but mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and
never for cutting the throats of their neighbors. If the Hindu
fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of
Inquisition. And even this cannot be laid at the door of his
religion any more than the burning of witches can be laid at the
door of Christianity.
To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only a
travelling, a coming up, of different men and women, through
various conditions and circumstances, to the same goal. Every
religion is only evolving a God out of the material man, and the
same God is the inspirer of all of them. Why, then, are there so
many contradictions? They are only apparent, says the Hindu. The
contradictions come from the same truth adapting itself to the
varying circumstances of different natures.
It is the same light coming through glasses of different colors-
And these little variations are necessary for purposes of
adaptation. But in the heart of everything the same truth reigns.
The Lord has declared to the Hindu in His incarnation as Krishna:
'I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls.
Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power
raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there. ' And
what has been the result? I challenge the world to find, throughout
the whole system of Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as
that the Hindu alone will be saved and not others. Says Vyasa, 'we
find perfect men even beyond the pale of our caste and creed.' One
thing more. How, then, can the Hindu, whose whole fabric of
thought centers in God, believe in Buddhism which is agnostic, or
in Jainism which is atheistic?
The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole
force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in
every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the
Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son
bath seen the Father also.
This, brethren, is a short sketch of the religious ideas of the
Hindus. The Hindu may have failed to carry out all his plans, but
if there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which
will have no location in place or time; which will be infinite like
the God it will preach, and whose sun will shine upon the followers
of Krishna and of Christ, on saints and sinners alike; which will
not be Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammedan, but the
sum total of all these. and still have infinite space for
development; which in its catholicity will embrace in infinite
arms, and find a place for, every human being from the lowest
grovelling savage, not far removed from the brute, to the highest
man towering by the virtues of his head and heart almost above
humanity, making society stand in awe of him and doubt his human
nature. It will be a religion which will have no place for
persecution or intolerance in its polity, which will recognize
divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole
force, will be centered in aiding humanity to realize its own true,
divine nature.
Offer such a religion and all the nations will follow you. Asoka's
council was a council of the Buddhist faith. Akbar's. though more
to the purpose. was only a parlor meeting. It was reserved for
America to proclaim to all quarters of the globe that the Lord is
in every religion.
May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura-Mazda of the
Zoroastrians, the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews,
the Father in Heaven of the Christians, give strength to you to
carry out your noble idea! The star arose in the East; it travelled
steadily towards the West, sometimes dimmed and sometimes
effulgent, till it made a circuit of the world, and now it is again
rising on the very horizon of the East, the borders of the
Sanpo(1), a thousand fold more effulgent than it ever was before.
Hail Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been given to thee,
who never dipped her hand in her neighbor's blood, who never found
out that the shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing one's
neighbors, it has been given to thee to march at the vanguard of
civilization with the flag of harmony.
_________
No comments:
Post a Comment