s but are nowhere else attainable. And thus it is,
with many, a silent acknowledgment of failure and of the belief that in
the rush and struggle of public life a godly, heavenly-minded character is
impossible. According to the Hindu conception, a man may be successful in
business matters, but he cannot be holy or fit for the highest communion
with God unless he spend his time in separation from all his kind.
Therefore the so-called pious and holy men of that land are ascetics. They
eschew human society and seek to renounce all human good and every earthly
ambition.

With this purpose, ostensibly, in view there are, as we saw, about
5,500,000 men in India who have given up all earthly employment, who live
apart as ascetics and spend their time in roaming around the country as
religious mendicants. These people are, in the main, doubtless possessed
of the laudable ambition to be holy and to prepare themselves for union
with Brahm. And yet, as a matter of fact, they are the most pestilential
in their morals of all the people of the land. Many of them, at the same
time, both regard themselves and are regarded by their co-religionists as
the acme of piety. Nevertheless, they daily trample under foot every
command of the decalogue. It is true that a few of them are different from
the mass, and genuinely seek the higher life for the cultivation of which
they have separated themselves. But into their ideal of life altruism
hardly enters at all. It is not to do good unto others, but to escape
contamination from others which is the concern of the Hindu devotee. At
the basis of his higher aspirations concern for self is supreme, thoughts
of others are absent.

A notable illustration of a high realization of the Eastern ideal we see
in the famous Hindu ascetic Swamiji Bhaskara Nanda Sarasvati, of Benares,
who recently died and to whom Dr. Fairbairn has referred so cordially. For
many years he had given himself to devotion and meditation. He had subdued
the body by the rigours of asceticism and had attained preeminence in
self-restraint and in the highest wisdom of _yoga_ culture. He had
therefore retired from the world, spurned all its allurements, denied all
its claims and devoted himself exclusively to thought and meditation. Thus
immured within temple walls in the great city of Benares he was utterly
oblivious to the sin and sorrow of the swarming multitudes of that city
and did nought to relieve the suffering, or to improve the