red from
Kurukshetra. It has not utterly disappeared. In some districts we find
families belonging to it; but you know well enough that as a caste in
most parts of modern India, you are hard put to find it. Why in the
great counsels of the world's welfare was this done? Not only to teach a
lesson for all time to kings and rulers, that if they would not govern
aright they should not govern at all; but also to lay India open to the
world.

How strange that sounds! To lay her open to invasion? He who loved her
to lay her open to conquest? He who had consecrated her, He who had
hallowed her plains and forests by His treading, and whose voice had
rung through her land? Aye, for He judges not as man judges, and He sees
the end from the beginning. India as she was of old, kept isolated from
all the world, was so kept that she might have the treasure of spiritual
knowledge poured into her and make a vessel for the containing. But when
you fill the vessel, you do not then put that vessel high away on a
shelf, and leave men thirsting for the liquid that it contains. The
mighty One filled His Indian vessel with the water of spiritual
knowledge, and at last the time came when that water should be poured
out for the quenching of the thirst of the world, and should not be left
only for the quenching of the thirst of a single nation, for the use of
a single people. Therefore the Lover of men came, in order that the
water of life might be poured out; He broke down the wall, so that the
foreigner might overstep her borders. The Greeks swept in, the
Mussulmans swept in, invasion after invasion, invasion after invasion,
until the conquerors who now rule India were the latest in time. Do you
see in that only decay, only misery, only that India is under a curse?
Ah no, my brothers! That which seems a curse for the time is for the
world's healing and the world's blessing; and India may well suffer for
a time in order that the world may be redeemed.

What does it mean? I am not speaking politically, but from the
standpoint of a spiritual student, who is trying to understand how the
evolution of the race goes on. The people who last conquered India, who
now rule her as governors, are the people whose language is the most
widely spread of all the languages of the world, and it is likely to
become the world's language. It belongs not only to that little island
of Britain, it belongs also to the great continent of America, to the
great continen