d in religious teachers, the personality of the Christ of the
Gospels, of the first three Gospels in particular, appeals strongly. To
the pessimistic mood of India He appeals as one whose companionship
makes this life more worth living; for Christ was not a jogi in the
Indian sense of a renouncer of the world. His call to fraternal service
has taken firm hold of the best Indians of to-day. Of the future we know
not, but we feel that the narrative of the first three Gospels naturally
precedes the deeper insight of the fourth.

CHAPTER XVII

INDIAN PESSIMISM--ITS BEARING ON BELIEF IN THE HERE AND HEREAFTER

"How many births are past, I cannot tell:
How many yet to come, no man can say:
But this alone I know, and know full well,
That pain and grief embitter all the way."

(_South-Indian Folk-song_, quoted in _Lux Christi_, by Caroline
Atwater Mason.)

"When desire is gone, and the cords of the heart are broken,
then the soul is delivered from the world and is at rest in
God."

[Sidenote: Indian pessimism.]

Two commonplaces about India are that pessimism is her natural
temperament, and that a natural outcome of her pessimism is the Indian
doctrine of the transmigration of souls. The second statement will
require explanation; but as regards the former, there is no denying the
strain of melancholy, the note of hopelessness, that pervades these
words we have quoted, or that they are characteristic of India. In them
life seems a burden; to be born into it, a punishment; and of the
transmigrations of our souls from life to life, seemingly, we should
gladly see the end. All the same, as new India is proving, pessimism is
not the inherent temperament of India, and the hope of the end of the
transmigration, and of the lives of the soul, no more natural in India
than in any other land.

[Sidenote: Due to nature?]

Pessimism is natural in India, say such writers as we have in mind,
because of the spirit-subduing aspects of nature and life amid which
Indians live their lives. Life is of little value to the possessor, they
say, where nature makes it a burden, and where its transitoriness is
constantly being thrust upon us. And that is so in India. Great rivers
keep repeating their contemptuous motto that "men may come and men may
go," and by their floods sometimes devastate whole districts. Sailing up
the Brahmaputra at one place in Assam, the writer saw a not uncommon
occurrence, the g