f the usual type, courteous but opposed. He
asked to look at my books. I had a Bible, a lyric book, and a book of
stanzas bearing upon the Truth, copied from the old Tamil classics. He
pounced upon this. Then he began to chant the stanzas in their
inimitable way, and at the sound several other old men drew round the
verandah, till soon a dozen or more were listening with that
appreciative expression they seem to reserve for their own beloved
poetry.

After the reader had chanted through a dozen or more stanzas, he stopped
abruptly and asked me if I really cared for it. Of course I said I did
immensely, and only wished I knew more, for the Tamil classics are a
study in themselves, and these beautiful ancient verses I had copied out
were only gleanings from two large volumes, full of the wisdom of the
East.

They were all thoroughly friendly now, and we got into conversation. One
of the group held that there are three co-eternal substances--God, the
Soul, and Sin. Sin is eternally bound up in the soul, as verdigris is
inherent in copper. It can be removed eventually by intense meditation
upon God, and by the performance of arduous works of merit. But these
exercises they all admitted were incompatible with the ordinary life of
most people, and generally impracticable. And so the fact is, the
verdigris of sin remains.

I remember the delight with which I discovered that Isaiah i. 25 uses
this very illustration; for the word translated "dross" in English is
the colloquial word for verdigris in Tamil; so the verse reads, "I will
turn My hand to thee, and thoroughly purify thee, _so as to remove thy
verdigris_."

Most of the others held a diametrically opposite view. So far from Soul
and Sin being co-eternal with God they are not really existent at all.
Both are illusory. There is only one existent entity. It is the Divine
Spirit, and it has neither personality nor any personal qualities. All
apparent separate existences are delusive. Meditation, of the same
absorbing type held necessary by the other, is the only way to reach the
stage of enlightenment which leads to reabsorption into the Divine
essence, in which we finally merge, and lose what appeared to be our
separate identity. We are lost in God, as a drop is lost in the ocean.

Some of the men advocated a phase of truth which reminds one of
Calvinism gone mad, and others exactly opposite are extravagantly
Arminian. The Calvinists illustrate their belief by a singl