more
charitable solution. "The Hindoo," he says, "whatsoever vast
discovery he may have made at an early period of a mysterious Teacher
near him, working on his spirit, who is at the same time Lord over
nature, began the search from himself--he had no other point from
whence to begin--and therefore it ended in himself. The purification
of his individual soul became practically his highest conceivable
end; to carry out that he must separate from society. Yet the more
he tries to escape self the more he finds self; for what are his
thoughts about Brahm, his thoughts about Krishna, save his own
thoughts? Is Brahm a projection of his own soul? To sink in him,
does it mean to be nothing? Am I, after all, my own law? And hence
the downward career into stupid indifferentism, even into Antinomian
profligacy."

The Hebrew, on the other hand, begins from the belief of an objective
external God, but One who cares for more than his individual soul; as
One who is the ever-present guide, and teacher, and ruler of his
whole nation; who regards that nation as a whole, a one person, and
that not merely one present generation, but all, past or future, as a
one "Israel"--lawgivers, prophets, priests, warriors. All classes
are His ministers. He is essentially a political deity, who cares
infinitely for the polity of a nation, and therefore bestows one upon
them--"a law of Jehovah." Gradually, under this teaching, the Hebrew
rises to the very idea of an inward teacher, which the Yogi had, and
to a far purer and clearer form of that idea; but he is not tempted
by it to selfish individualism, or contemplative isolation, as long
as he is true to the old Mosaic belief, that this being is the
Political Deity, "the King of Kings." The Pharisee becomes a selfish
individualist just because he has forgotten this; the Essene, a
selfish "mystic" for the same reason; Philo and the Jewish mystics of
Alexandria lose in like manner all notion that Jehovah is the
lawgiver, and ruler, and archetype of family and of national life.
Christianity retained the idea; it brought out the meaning of the old
Jewish polity in its highest form; for that very reason it was able
to bring out the meaning of the "mystic" idea in its highest form
also, without injury to men's work as members of families, as
citizens, as practical men of the world; and so to conquer at last
that Manichaean hatred of marriage and parentage, which from the
first to the sixteenth c