on to return
again to Parabrahma, whence it sprung.

Why did it spring? He did not know. For good or for evil? He could not
say. What he knew he knew, and what he did not know he did not. "Some
say there is no God and no Soul." He smiled. "Let them!" His certainty
was complete. "Can the souls of men be reincarnated as animals?" He
shrugged his shoulders. "Who can say?" I tried to put in a plea for the
life of action, but he was adamant; contemplation and contemplation
alone can deliver us. "Our good men," I said, "desire to make the world
better, rather than to save their own souls." "Our sages," he replied,
"are sorry for the world, but they know they cannot help it." His
religion, I urged, denied all sense to the process of history. "There
may be process in matter," he replied, "but there is none in God." I
protested that I loved individual souls, and did not want them absorbed
in Parabrahma. He laughed his good cheery laugh, out of his black beard,
but it was clear that he held me to be a child, imprisoned in the Ego. I
felt like that, and I hugged my Ego; so presently he ministered to it
with sweetmeats. He even ate with us, and smoked a cigarette. He was the
most human of men; so human that I thought his religion could not be as
inhuman as it sounded. But it was the religion of the East, not of the
West. It refused all significance to the temporal world; it took no
account of society and its needs; it sought to destroy, not to develop,
the sense and the power of Individuality. It did not say, but it
implied, that creation was a mistake; and if it did not profess
pessimism, pessimism was its logical outcome. I do not know whether it
is the religion of a wise race; but I am sure it could never be that of
a strong one.

But I loved the saint, and felt that he was a brother. Next morning, as
we drifted past the long line of ghats, watching the bright figures on
the terraces and stairs, the brown bodies in the water, and the Brahmins
squatting on the shore, we saw him among the bathers, and he called to
us cheerily. We waved our hands and passed on, never to see him again.
East had not met West, but at least they had shaken hands across the
gulf. The gulf, however, was profound; for many and many incarnations
will be needed before one soul at least can come even to wish to
annihilate itself in the Universal.

VII

A VILLAGE IN BENGAL

At 6 A.M. we got out of the train at a station on the Ganges; and after