the basis of morality, these
reformers have rendered morality entirely baseless. A man has to do
what is represented to be a thing "dear unto the Lord" out of gratitude
for the many blessings He has heaped upon him. But as a matter of fact
he finds that the Lord has heaped upon him curses as well as blessings.
A helpless orphan is expected to be grateful to him for having removed
the props of his life, his parents, because he is told in consolation
that such a calamity is but apparently an evil, but in reality the
All-Merciful has underneath it hidden the greatest possible good. With
equal reason might a preacher of the Avenging Ahriman exhort men to
believe that under the apparent blessings of the "Merciful" Father there
lurks the serpent of evil.

The modern Utilitarians, though the range of their vision is so narrow,
have sterner logic in their teachings. That which tends to a man's
happiness is good, and must be followed, and the contrary shunned as
evil. So far so good. But the practical application of the doctrine is
fraught with mischief. Cribbed, cabined, and confined, by rank
Materialism, within the short space between birth and death, the
Utilitarians' scheme of happiness is merely a deformed torso, which
cannot certainly be considered as the fair goddess of our devotion.

The only scientific basis of morality is to be sought for in the
soul-consoling doctrines of Lord Buddha or Sri Sankaracharya. The
starting-point of the "pantheistic" (we use the word for want of a better
one) system of morality is a clear perception of the unity of the one
energy operating in the manifested Cosmos, the grand result which it is
incessantly striving to produce, and the affinity of the immortal human
spirit and its latent powers with that energy, and its capacity to
cooperate with the one life in achieving its mighty object.

Now knowledge or jnanam is divided into two classes by Adwaitee
philosophers--Paroksha and Aparoksha. The former kind of knowledge
consists in intellectual assent to a stated proposition, the latter in
the actual realization of it. The object which a Buddhist or Adwaitee
Yogi sets before himself is the realization of the oneness of existence,
and the practice of morality is the most powerful means to that end, as
we proceed to show. The principal obstacle to the realization of this
oneness is the inborn habit of man of always placing himself at the
centre of the Universe. Whatever a man might