this life. That
is the only relief possible. To the Hindu the question so often discussed
in Christian lands--"Is life worth living?"--has no interest, since it has
but one answer possible. And even if the Indian sage forgets his present
conditions and pessimism long enough to gaze down the long and dismal
vista of numberless births to the final consummation (_Sayujya_)--the final
union with God--he finds in that nothing which the Christian does not
discover in tenfold richness and beauty in the Bible. To be partaker of
the Divine Nature is a blessed reality to the Christian without his
forfeiting, in the least, the dignity of self-identity and the glory of
separate personal consciousness. To have the "life hid with Christ in
God"; to be able triumphantly to exclaim--"I live; yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me"; to experience the blessedness and power of abiding in
Christ and to realize the answer to Christ's own prayer to the
Father--"that they also may be in us"--all this is the joy and hope of the
Christian in a manner and to a degree utterly impossible to the Hindu
whose union with the supreme spirit is the loss and end of self, including
all those faculties which are capable of enjoyment.

Looking from another standpoint, we perceive that the aim of the religion
of Christ is the banishing of sin from the life and the establishing of
character. Sin is the dark background of Christianity. It explains its
origin and reveals its universality. Its whole concern is with the
emancipation of man from the presence and power of sin. To the Vedantin,
on the other hand, sin, in the Christian sense of it, is an impossibility.
Where God is all and all is God there can be no separate will to
antagonize the divine will. Monism necessarily, in the last analysis,
carries every act and motive back to the supreme Will and establishes an
all-inclusive necessitarianism which is fatal to human freedom; and it
therefore excludes sin as an act of rebellion against God. Much is made of
sin, so called, in the Hindu system, as we shall presently see; but
nowhere is more care needed than here that we may distinguish between
ideas conveyed by this word in these two faiths. In Christianity the
ethical character of sin is emphasized. It is described as a thing of
moral obliquity and spiritual darkness. According to the Upanishads the
only defect of man is an intellectual one. He is in bondage to ignorance.
Plato made ignorance the chief source of