o denying the range of his conjecture.
The Eastern saint has sought to answer for himself and in his own way
those compelling questions which lie behind all religion--Whence? and
Whither? and Why? He, too, has sought to come into right relations with
the power which manifests itself in the universe and he has sought, with
an intensity of effort to which the West is strange, for a real
communion with the power he has discovered. And above all, he has sought
deliverance.

_Why the West Questions the East_

He has not been so conscious of the need of forgiveness, since
forgiveness plays no great part in his understanding of the sequences of
life, but he is anxious enough to be set free from pain and weariness
and at his best he has traced the relation of moral cause and effect far
more analytically than his Western brother. He has, indeed, introduced
greatly speculative elements in his balancing of life's accounts, but
the West has done that also, for the accounts of life persistently
refuse to be balanced unless something beyond ordinary experience is
taken into account. The longing of the East for deliverance has, on the
whole, however, been less theological and more simple than the longing
of the West. The West has been led to turn to the East for teaching and
deliverance through a combination of forces. I have noticed already the
very direct way in which New Thought, once committed to free speculation
about life and God, found congenial guidance in the Eastern cults, but
other elements enter. The West has begun to share something of the
disillusionment of the East; so many things which promised to deliver us
have seemingly failed us. Our sciences have immeasurably enlarged our
knowledge and increased our power; they have added to our material
well-being; they have worked their miracles for us; but they have
brought us neither peace nor true happiness. They have instead added
their own disturbances to our other perplexities and they have
ultimately simply extended the frontiers of the mysterious and given a
new and vaster quality to our problems.

Our democracies and our humanitarian movements have shown us that the
keys both to liberty and progress are still in human nature and not in
forms of organization and government. As our civilizations have grown
older and particularly as they have wasted themselves in war, some
shadow of the age-old weariness of the East has begun to fall across our
Western world. We have