rds, the murmur of leaves, or the hum
of the busy village.

The only sound that echoed in its dark dome was that
of incantations which I chanted.

My mind became keen and still like a pointed flame, my
senses swooned in ecstasy.

I knew not how time passed till the thunderstone had
struck the temple, and a pain stung me through the
heart.

The lamp looked pale and ashamed; the carvings on
the walls, like chained dreams, stared meaningless
in the light, as they would fain hide themselves.

I looked at the image on the altar. I saw it smiling and
alive with the living touch of God. The night I had
imprisoned spread its wings and vanished."[8]

The closed temple, I believe, is a true image of the spiritual life of
India, if not at all times, at any rate for many centuries previous to
the advent of the English. Everything seems to point to this--the
symbolic character of Indian art; the absence of history and the
prevalence of religious legend; the cult of the fakir and the wandering
ascetic. In India one feels religion as one feels it nowhere else,
unless it were in Russia. But the religion one feels is peculiar. It is
the religion that denies the value of experience in Time. It is the
religion of the Eternal.

But, it will be urged, how can that be, when India continues to produce
her teeming millions; when these perforce live their brief lives in a
constant and often vain struggle for a bare livelihood; when, in order
to live at all, it is necessary at every point to be straining vitality
in the pursuit of temporal goods or the avoidance of temporal evils?

I make no attempt to disguise or to weaken this paradox. But I suggest
that it is but one of the many paradoxes set up by the conflict between
men's instinct for life and their conscious beliefs. Indians live not
because they believe in life, but because they cannot help it. Their
hold on life is certainly less than that of Western men. Thus I have
been told by administrators of famine relief or of precautions against
plague, that what they have to contend with is not so much the
resistance as the indifference of the population. "Why worry us?" they
say, in effect; "life is not worth the trouble. Let us die and be rid of
it." Life is an evil, that is the root feeling of India; and the escape
is either, for the mass, by death; or for the men of spiritual genius,
by a