in this or the next world, but it is better to love God for love's sake, and the prayer goes: THE HINDU PRAYER. It is good to love God for hope of reward | mercy comes to the pure. So purity is the condition of his mercy. How that mercy acts! God reveals himself to the pure heart, and the pure and stainless man sees God, yea, even in this life, and then, and then only, all the crookedness of the heart is made straight. Then all doubt ceases. Man is no more the freak of a terrible law of causation. So this is the very centre, the very vital conception, of Hinduism. The Hindu does not want to live upon words and theories. If there are existences beyond the ordinary sensual 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 go to 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." "Lord, I do not want wealth nor children nor learning. If it be thy will, I will go to a hundred hells, but grant me this, that I may love thee without the hope of reward -unselfishly love for love's sake." One of the disciples of Krishna, the then emperor of India, was driven from his throne by his enemies, and had to take shelter in a forest in the Himalayas with his queen; and there one day the queen was asking him how it was that he, the most virtuous of men, should suffer so much misery. Yuchistera answered: "Behold, my queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are. I love them. They do not give me anything, 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 be loved. My nature is to love him, and therefore I love. I do not pray for anything, 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 SOUL IS DIVINE. The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held under bondage of matter, and perfection will be reached when the bond shall burst: the word they use is therefore Mukto, freedom-freedom from the bonds of imperfection, freedom from death and misery. They teach that this bondage can fall off only through the mercy of God, and this 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. So the whole struggle in our system is a constant struggle to become perfect, to become divine, to reach God and see God. In this reaching God, seeing God, becoming perfect, even as the Father in heaven is perfect, consists the religion of the Hindus. And what becomes of man when he becomes perfect? 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-God—and enjoys the bliss with God. GOD IN ALL RELIGIONS. It is the same light coming through differ ent colors. And these little variations are necessary for that 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. And wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity, know ye that I am there." And what was the result? Through the whole order of Sanskrit philosophy I challenge any one to find any such expression as that the Hindu only would be saved and not others. Says Vyâsa, "We find perfect men even beyond the pale of our caste and creed.' How, then, can the Hindu, whose whole idea centres in God, believe in the Buddhism which is agnostic, or the Jainism which is atheist? The whole force of the Hindu religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. Men have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father. This, brethren, is a short sketch of the ideas of the Hindus. The Hindu might have failed to carry out all his plans. But if there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will hold no location in place or time-which will be infinite like the God it will preach, whose sun shines upon the followers of Krishna or Christ, saints or sinners, alike; which will not be the Brahmin or Buddhist, Christian or Mohammedan, but the sum-total of all these, and still have infinite space for development; which in its catholicity will embrace in its infinite arms and find a place for every human being, from the lowest grovelling man, from the brute, to the highest man towering almost above humanity and making society stand in awe 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 a divinity in every man or woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force, will be centred in aiding humanity to realize its divine nature. Aseka'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 Brahma 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 toward 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 Tasifu, a thousandfold more effulgent than it ever was before. Hail, Columbia, mother-land of liberty! It has been given to thee, who never dipped hand in neighbor's blood, who never found out that shortest way of becoming rich by robbing one's neighbors, it has been given to thee to march on in the vanguard of civilization with the flag of harmony! NOAH. HE sun had sunk behind the | He gazed around, and o'er his head was seen watery waste, When night's pale regent, beautiful and chaste, With silent footsteps stole upon the sight, elate; "For now the waters do indeed abate." As fearful to awake the Strange to relate, in these unthinking times, sals in her train; Cloud after cloud, in long fantastic chase, Till, by no intervening shade o'ercast, worn, And storms, as if by human passions torn, The ark, now gliding under easy sail, mars, Moves o'er a liquid firmament of stars. ing ray Shem oped the window to behold the day; Redeemed the burden that the Deluge bore, And earth until this very hour had run, When the fierce warfare of the heaven is o'er And thunders answering thunders cease to roar, How beautiful to see the sun's bright helm And flash a little sun on every eye: |