l deny. Every believer's bower is blooming
for him in Paradise; every unbeliever's bed is burning for him in
hell. And nothing whatever can avail to change the persons or the
total number elected for each.

There is one theory of salvation scarcely heard of in the West,
but extensively held in the East. The Brahmanic as well as the
Buddhist thinker relies on obtaining salvation by knowledge. Life
in a continual succession of different bodies is his perdition.
His salvation is to be freed from the vortex of births and deaths,
the fret and storm of finite existence. Neither goodness nor piety
can ever release him. Knowledge alone can do it: an unsullied
intellectual vision and a free intellectual grasp of truth and
love alone can rescue him from the turbid sea of forms and
struggles. "As a lump of salt is of uniform taste within and
without, so the soul is nothing but intelligence."21 If the soul
be an entire mass of intelligence, a current of ideas, its real
salvation depends on its becoming pure and eternal truth without
mixture of falsehood or of emotional disturbance. He "must free
himself from virtues as well as from sins; for the confinement of
fetters is the same whether the chain be of gold or of iron."22
Accordingly, the Hindu, to secure emancipation, planes down the
mountainous thoughts and passions of his soul to a desert level of
indifferent insight. And when, in direct personal knowledge, free
from joy and sorrow, free from good and ill, he gazes into the
limitless abyss of Divine truth, then he is sure of the bosom of
Brahm, the door of Nirwana. Then the wheel of the Brahmanic Ixion
ceases revolving, and the Buddhist Ahasuerus flings away his
staff; for salvation is attained.

The conception of salvation by ritual works based on faith either
faith in Deity or in some redemptive agency is exhibited all over
the world. Hani, a Hindu devotee, dwelt in a thicket, and repeated
the name of Krishna a hundred thousand times each day, 23 and thus
saved his soul. The saintly Muni Shukadev said, as is written in
the most popular religious authority of India, "Who even
ignorantly sing the praises of Krishna undoubtedly obtain final
beatitude; just as, if one ignorant of the properties of nectar
should drink it, he would still become immortal. Whoever worships
Hari, with whatever disposition of mind, obtains beatitude."24
"The repetition of the names of Vishnu purifies from all sins,
even when invoked by an evil mind