your character, flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood, and breath of your breath. Will you not allow him thus to abide in you? Apply the same argument, my friends, to all the other prophets and saints, ancient and modern, Eastern and Western. You may talk of your devotion to these masters, but if you have not assimilated their character your devotion cannot be real. If your lives belie them, you must be classed among Pharisees and hypocrites. Let your flesh and blood bear living testimony to your fidelity to Christ and Paul, Moses and Isaiah, and all the saints of modern and ancient times. And in this assimilation of many characters behold a wonderful harmony and unity. The plurality of objects is lost and absorbed in the unity of the subject. You take in the divinity that dwelleth in each, and make it your own. In God are the sons of God united. If you take the different phases of truth and character in different individuals, you are lost in vision and schism. But accept them in their divine source, and you have unity. The New Dispensation never preaches goodness; it preaches godliness. Goodness is human; godliness is divine. Christ rejected the former and put on the latter. His will was the Divine will. His word was God's. His work was the Father's. It was not he that spoke, but the Lord spoke through him. In the depths of his consciousness he felt so thoroughly identified with the spirit and nature of God that he boldly and frankly said, "I and my Father are one.' The son did not proclaim himself the Father, but he claimed to be one with Him. What Christ claimed and revealed in his own character was only subjective divinity, not objective Deity. He was God-consciousness, not God. He was a partaker of

the Divine nature. And what are we? Partakers of Christ and of God in Christ. Paul, who had really put on Christ, and than whom perhaps none in ancient or modern times hath proved a truer disciple, often used this significant expression in his epistles. Nothing could be clearer or more appropriate than this expression. It indicates the deep spirituality and subjectivity of the relation in which Paul stood to his master. In fact, this idea of spiritual assimilation is altogether a Christian idea. Christ's teachings and Paul's epistles are full of it. The New Testament abounds with such passages as," Abide in me and I in you;" "Put ye on the Lord Jesus ;" "I live; yet not I but Christ liveth in me;" "To be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man.' The world may not comprehend the height and depth of this great doctrine. But if you deny this doctrine, you deny philosophy and you deny Christ. The foolish Jews may wonder "how can this man give us his flesh to eat," yet the voice of Christ shall go forth rolling through centuries and ages," he that eateth me even he shall live by me :" "he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever." Though ridiculed and laughed at, this eminently philosophical and Christian principle of mutual absorption challenges universal assent. You may wonder, you may smile; the fact, however, is indisputable that in all ages devout and godly men have eaten the flesh of saints and been in turn eaten by others, Divinity went into the flesh of Christ. Then Christ was eaten by Paul and Peter. They were eaten by the fathers and the martyrs and all the saints in Christendom, and all these have we of modern times eaten, assimilated and absorbed, making their ideas and character our own. Thus one nation may

swallow another, and be identified with it. Thus one generation may draw into itself the character and faith of another generation. And we too may enter into each other and dwell in each other. We Hindus are specially endowed with, and distinguished for, the yoga faculty, which is nothing but this power of spiritual communion and absorption. This faculty, which we have inherited from our forefathers, enables us to annihilate space and time, and bring home to our minds an external Deity and an external humanity. Waving the magic wand of yoga, we say to the Ural mountains and the river Ural, vanish, and lo! they disappear. And we command Europe to enter into the heart of Asia, and Asia to enter into the mind of Europe, and they obey us, and we instantly realize within ourselves an European Asia and an Asiatic Europe, a commingling of oriental and occidental ideas and principles. We say to the Pacific, pour thy waters into the Atlantic; and we say to the West, roll back to the East. We summon ancient India to come into modern India with all her rishis and saints, her asceticism and communion and simplicity of character, and behold a transfiguration ! The educated modern Hindu cast in Vedic mould! How by yoga one nation becomes another! How Asia eats the flesh and drinks the blood of Europe! How the Hindu absorbs the Christian; how the Christian assimilates the Hindu ! Cultivate this communion, my brethren, and continually absorb all that is good and noble in each other. Do not hate, do not exclude others, as the sectarians dó, but include and absorb all humanity and all truth, Let there be no antagonism, no exclusion. Let the embankment which each sect, each nation, has raised, be swept away by the flood of cosmopolitan

to age.

truth, and let all the barriers and partitions which separate man from man be pulled down, so that truth and love and purity may flow freely through millions of hearts and through hundreds of successive generations, from country to country, from age Thus shall the deficiencies of individual and national character be complemented, and humanity shall attain a fuller and more perfect standard of religious and moral life. There is no reason, my European friends, why you should move eternally in your narrow groove, rejecting every thing which is Eastern and Asiatic. Why should you not add to your national virtues those of the East? Why should you not add to your philosophy and science and civilization the transcendental faith and poetry of Asia? The grammar of modern theology must be condemned by every scientific man as bad grammar. It makes no mention of the copulative conjunction. The disjunctive Or reigns supreme; the copulative And finds no place. The European seems to argue that he is justified in accepting one or other of the many possible phases of goodness and truth as represented by different nations, and that he is, therefore, right in choosing only the Western type of character and excluding the Eastern. He treats the various ideas and principles of religion as optional subjects of study and culture, and he prefers those only which suit his convenience and chime in with his tastes and traditions. He will insist upon disjoining, and protest against conjoining the different elements of character. problem of salvation which he thinks he has to deal with is,--Shall I have knowledge or faith, science or yoga, dogmatism or devotion, prudence or asceticism, philosophy or poetry,-the one or the other? Say rather we shall have both the one and the

The

other. You have in you what is good and great in European character. Now must ye superadd the excellencies of oriental nations. In your hearts Asia's deep spiritual life has yet to be subjectified. To you, my Hindu countrymen, allow me to administer the same warning and the same counsel. Will you rest content with your nationality and your Hinduism, repudiating Christianity as yavana, and European civilization as а mass of lies and impurity? Will you remain shut up in your small homes, and say that the sun of truth shines not on the outside world? Is godliness the Hindu's monopoly? Will you have only the small and mutilated and one-sided creed of your country, and refuse to enter into fellowship with the great nations of the West? Shun jealousy and narrow-minded bigotry, and so enlarge and distend your hearts that not only Asia but all Europe and America may find place therein. India! absorb England. Asia! assimilate Christian Europe. A vast world of objective truth yet lies before you, brethren, and the Lord God summons you to convert it into your flesh and blood, into your life and character. When all nations and countries will thus eat and absorb each other's goodness and purity, then shall the inward kingdom of heaven be realized on earth, which ancient prophets sang and predicted. All truth shall then be harmonized and reduced to a beautiful subjective synthesis in the life of humanity. No longer do you see jealousies and enmities dividing the world. The battle-cry is hushed, and the sword of sectarian hate has found rest in the sheath. No longer do we see scriptures arrayed against scriptures, churches against churches, sects against sects, endless groups of fighting zealots. It is one undivided spirit-world, in which there is neither