e
place of highest honour. Regarding the Great Peace as the ultimate
object of human attainment, he held that Spinoza alone had found a clear
path to the goal; since then European thought had been continually
decadent.

Though far advanced in life, Chandrapal had never seen Western
civilisation face to face until the year when we are about to meet him.
He travelled to America by way of Japan, and Vancouver was the first
Western city in which he set his foot. There he looked around him with
bewildered eyes, gaining no clear impression, save in the negative sense
that the city contained nothing to remind him of Spinoza or of the
Nazarene. It was not that he expected to find a visible embodiment of
their teaching in everything he saw; Chandrapal was too wise for that.
But he hoped that somewhere and in some form the Truth, which for him
these teachers symbolised in common, would show itself as a living
thing. It might be that he would see it on some human face; or he might
feel it in the atmosphere; or he might hear it in the voice of a man.
Chandrapal knew that he had much to see and to discover; but in all his
travels it was for this that he kept incessant watch.

From Vancouver he passed south to San Francisco; thence, city by city,
he threaded his way across the United States and found himself in New
York. All that he had seen so far gathered itself into one vast picture
of a world fast bound in the chains of error and groaning for
deliverance from its misery. In New York the misery seemed to deepen and
the groanings to redouble. But of this he said nothing. He let the
universities fete him; he let the millionaires entertain him in their
great houses; he delivered lectures on the wisdom of the East, and,
though a kindly criticism would now and then escape him, he gave no hint
of his great pity for Western men. He was the most courteous, the most
delightful of guests.

Arrived in England, he received the same impression and practised the
same reserve. Wherever he went a rumour spread before him, and men
waited for his coming as though the ancient mysteries were about to be
unsealed. The curious cross-examined him; the bewildered appealed to
him; the poor heard him gladly, and famished souls, eager for a morsel
of comfort from the groaning table of the East, hovered about his steps.
He preached in churches where the wandering prophet is welcomed; he
broke bread with the kings of knowledge and of song; he sat in the se