explaining the meaning of life would supply a supreme law for
the guidance of conduct and would replace the more than dubious precepts
of pseudo-religion and pseudo-science with the immoral conclusions
deduced from them and commonly called 'civilization'.

Your letter, as well as the articles in _Free Hindustan_ and Indian
political literature generally, shows that most of the leaders of public
opinion among your people no longer attach any significance to the
religious teachings that were and are professed by the peoples of India,
and recognize no possibility of freeing the people from the oppression
they endure except by adopting the irreligious and profoundly immoral
social arrangements under which the English and other pseudo-Christian
nations live to-day.

And yet the chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of the
Indian peoples by the English lies in this very absence of a religious
consciousness and of the guidance for conduct which should flow from
it--a lack common in our day to all nations East and West, from Japan to
England and America alike.

II

_O ye, who see perplexities over your heads, beneath your feet, and to
the right and left of you; you will be an eternal enigma unto yourselves
until ye become humble and joyful as children. Then will ye find Me, and
having found Me in yourselves, you will rule over worlds, and looking
out from the great world within to the little world without, you will
bless everything that is, and find all is well with time and with you._
KRISHNA.

To make my thoughts clear to you I must go farther back. We do not,
cannot, and I venture to say need not, know how men lived millions of
years ago or even ten thousand years ago, but we do know positively
that, as far back as we have any knowledge of mankind, it has always
lived in special groups of families, tribes, and nations in which
the majority, in the conviction that it must be so, submissively and
willingly bowed to the rule of one or more persons--that is to a very
small minority. Despite all varieties of circumstances and personalities
these relations manifested themselves among the various peoples of
whose origin we have any knowledge; and the farther back we go the more
absolutely necessary did this arrangement appear, both to the rulers and
the ruled, to make it possible for people to live peacefully together.

So it was everywhere. But though this external form of life existed for
centuries and