_All that exists is One. People only call this One by different names._
THE VEDAS.
_God is love, and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God
abideth in him._ I JOHN iv. 16.
_God is one whole; we are the parts._ EXPOSITION OF THE TEACHING OF THE
VEDAS BY VIVEKANANDA.
I
Do not seek quiet and rest in those earthly realms where delusions and
desires are engendered, for if thou dost, thou wilt be dragged through
the rough wilderness of life, which is far from Me.
Whenever thou feelest that thy feet are becoming entangled in the
interlaced roots of life, know that thou has strayed from the path to
which I beckon thee: for I have placed thee in broad, smooth paths,
which are strewn with flowers. I have put a light before thee, which
thou canst follow and thus run without stumbling. KRISHNA.
I have received your letter and two numbers of your periodical, both of
which interest me extremely. The oppression of a majority by a minority,
and the demoralization inevitably resulting from it, is a phenomenon
that has always occupied me and has done so most particularly of late.
I will try to explain to you what I think about that subject in general,
and particularly about the cause from which the dreadful evils of which
you write in your letter, and in the Hindu periodical you have sent me,
have arisen and continue to arise.
The reason for the astonishing fact that a majority of working people
submit to a handful of idlers who control their labour and their very
lives is always and everywhere the same--whether the oppressors and
oppressed are of one race or whether, as in India and elsewhere, the
oppressors are of a different nation.
This phenomenon seems particularly strange in India, for there more than
two hundred million people, highly gifted both physically and mentally,
find themselves in the power of a small group of people quite alien
to them in thought, and immeasurably inferior to them in religious
morality.
From your letter and the articles in _Free Hindustan_ as well as from
the very interesting writings of the Hindu Swami Vivekananda and
others, it appears that, as is the case in our time with the ills of all
nations, the reason lies in the lack of a reasonable religious teaching
which by explaining the meaning of life would supply a supreme law for
the guidance of conduct and would replace the more than dubious precepts
of pseudo-religion and pseudo-science with the immoral conclusions
deduced from them and commonly called 'civilization'.
Your letter, as well as the articles in _Free Hindustan_ and Indian
political literature generally, shows that most of the leaders of public
opinion among your people no longer attach any significance to the
religious teachings that were and are professed by the peoples of India,
and recognize no possibility of freeing the people from the oppression
they endure except by adopting the irreligious and profoundly immoral
social arrangements under which the English and other pseudo-Christian
nations live to-day.
And yet the chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of the
Indian peoples by the English lies in this very absence of a religious
consciousness and of the guidance for conduct which should flow from
it--a lack common in our day to all nations East and West, from Japan to
England and America alike.