ered by the development of his inventive genius,
this vast cathedral of God's own architecture should have been made
the chosen place of worship of the race, where the more devout spirits
strove not only to worship and adore, but to shake off the trammels of
a mere mundane corporal existence, till the spirit was as free as the
birds in the air around, as clear from earthly dross as the limpid
waters below, and as integral a part of the great eternal whole as
Nature around, so diverse in its manifestations, yet knitted together
in one congruous whole by a pervading and uniform natural law. But
facilis descensus Averni! How often the most glorious inspirations
are dragged down and down till they subserve the basest instincts
of man! So here a little farther on--at Hardwar--we were to have the
spiritual elation engendered by the natural scene cruelly shattered by
a sight of the vileness and sordidness of the most repulsive aspects
of humanity, and by realizing how the most Divine conceptions can be
dragged down and abased to pander to all that is brutal and evil in
man. Not, of course, that all the Sadhus at Hardwar and Rishikes have
debased their holy profession. Many among them, as I shall shortly
describe, are as earnest seekers after Divine illumination as could
be met with in any country; but, by one of those strange paradoxes so
common in the East, they live side by side with the basest charlatans
and the most immoral caricatures of their own ideals without evincing
any consciousness of the impropriety of it, or resentment at their
profession being thus debased before the public eye.

The individualistic idea eclipses that of the public weal, and each is
so intent on perfecting his own salvation, and drawing himself nearer,
step by step, to his goal of absorption in the Eternal Spirit, that
he has come to forget that man has a duty to those around him from
which he cannot absolve himself. St. Paul tells us, "No man liveth to
himself, and no man dieth to himself." The Sadhu says each unit is
only concerned in building up its own karma, or balance of good and
evil actions, whereby it must work out its own destiny regardless of
the weal and woe of those around. The Hindu idea connects the soul
with those other souls before and behind it in a long concatenation
of births; the Christian idea connects the soul with the other souls
around it, contemporaneous with its own corporeal existence, and linked
with it by the good a