bay,
we read that in 1833, Dr. Wilson went with a visitor to see a celebrated
jogi who was lying in the sun in the street, the nails of whose hands
were grown into his cheek, and on whose head there was the nest of a
bird. The visitor questioned the jogi, "How can one obtain the knowledge
of God?" and the reply of the jogi was, "Do not ask me questions; you
may look at me, for I am God." "Aham Brahman," very probably was his
reply. That is pantheistic salvation, _mukti_, or deliverance from
further human existences and their desires and delusions. At last the
spirit is free, and the galling chains of the lusting and limited body
are broken. But as pantheism is declining, such cases are growing fewer,
and for the educated Hindus, now largely monotheists, the saving
knowledge is rather a beatific vision of the Divine, only vouchsafed to
minds intensely concentrated upon the quest and thought of God, and cut
off from mundane distractions. This is the union with God which is
salvation to many of the modern monotheistic Hindus.

[Sidenote: The quest of the beatific vision still implies the
dissociation of religion and active life.]

[Sidenote: An unproductive religious ideal.]

What concerns us here is that in the conception of the beatific vision,
we still find ourselves in a different religious world from
ours--religion exoteric for the vulgar, and religion esoteric for the
enlightened; religion not for living by, but for a period of retirement;
a religion of spiritual self-culture, not of active sonship and
brotherhood. Far be it from me to say that at this point the West may
not learn as well as teach, for how much thought does the culture of the
spirit receive among us? How little! However that may be, this
conception of the religious life is deeply rooted in educated India. The
impersonal pantheistic conception of the Deity may be passing into the
theistic, and even into Christian theism; the doctrine of transmigration
may be little more than the current orthodox explanation of the coming
of misfortune; the doctrine of Maya or the illusory character of the
phenomena of our consciousness, it may be impossible to utter in this
new practical age; and Jesus Christ may be the object of the highest
reverence; but still the instinctive thought of the educated Hindu is
that there is a period of life for the world's work, and a later period
for devotion to religion. When dissatisfaction with himself or with the
world does ov