THE HINDU FAITH. FROM A SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE WORLD'S PARLIAMENT OF RELIGIONS, SEPTEMBER 19, 1893, BY SWAMI VIVEKANANDA OF INDIA.

THE SACRED INDIAN BOOKS, THE VEDAS. THE Hindus have received their religion through the revelation of 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 with the laws that govern the spiritual world, the moral, ethical and spiritual relations between soul and soul and be

tween 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, and I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very best of them were

women.

DEFINES EXISTENCE.

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 matter and 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 will not die. Here am I in this body, and when it will fail, still I will go on living. Also I had a past. The soul was not created from nothing, for creation means a combination,

and that means a certain future dissolution. If, then, the soul was created, it must die. Therefore it was not created.

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. He believes every soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere, but whose centre is located in a body, and death means the change of this centre from body to body. Nor is the soul bound by the condition of matter. In its very essence it is free, unbound, holy, and pure and perfect. But somehow or other it has got itself bound down by matter and thinks of itself as matter.

Why should the free, perfect, and pure being be under the thraldom of matter? How can the perfect be deluded into the belief that he is imperfect? We have been told that the Hindus shirk the question and say that no such question can be there, and some thinkers want to answer it by the supposition of 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? 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 and conditioned by matter. But the fact is a fact, for all that. It is a fact in each man's consciousness that he thinks of himself as the body.

THE SOUL IS ETERNAL. Well, then, the human soul is eternal and immortal, perfect and infinite, and death means only a change of centre from one. body to another. The present is determined by our past actions, and the future will be by the present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting back from birth to birth and death to death-like a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the foaming crest of a billow, and dashed down into a yawning chasm the next, rolling to and fro at the mercy of good and bad actionsa powerless, helpless wreck in an everraging, 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 stops 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? The cry that went up from the bottom of the heart of despair 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 before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad tidings to the world:* "Hear, ye children of immortal bliss, even ye that resisted in higher spheres. I have found the Ancient One who is beyond all darkness, all delusion, and knowing him alone you shall be saved from death 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.

* In India, as elsewhere, there are many creeds. Some are materialistic, while others, like that of Swami Vivekananda, are spiritual and teach a future state of immortal bliss.

Thus it is 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 "through 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. Thou art He that bearest 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 worshipped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next life."

This is the doctrine of love preached in the Vedas; and let us see how it is fully developed and preached 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 this world-his heart for God and his hands for work.