Strange facts crowd into memory as one contemplates those graven
footprints,—footprints giant-seeming, yet less so than the human
personality of which they remain the symbol. Twenty-four hundred years
ago, out of solitary meditation upon the pain and the mystery of being,
the mind of an Indian pilgrim brought forth the highest truth ever
taught to men, and in an era barren of science anticipated the
uttermost knowledge of our present evolutional philosophy regarding the
secret unity of life, the endless illusions of matter and of mind, and
the birth and death of universes. He, by pure reason,—and he alone
before our time,—found answers of worth to the questions of the Whence,
the Whither, and the Why;—and he made with these answers another and a
nobler faith than the creed of his fathers. He spoke, and returned to
his dust; and the people worshipped the prints of his dead feet,
because of the love that he had taught them. Thereafter waxed and waned
the name of Alexander, and the power of Rome and the might of
Islam;—nations arose and vanished;—cities grew and were not;—the
children of another civilization, vaster than Romes, begirdled the
earth with conquest, and founded far-off empires, and came at last to
rule in the land of that pilgrim’s birth. And these, rich in the wisdom
of four and twenty centuries, wondered at the beauty of his message,
and caused all that he had said and done to be written down anew in
languages unborn at the time when he lived and taught. Still burn his
footprints in the East; and still the great West, marvelling, follows
their gleam to seek the Supreme Enlightenment. Even thus, of old,
Milinda the king followed the way to the house of Nagasena,—at first
only to question, after the subtle method of the Greeks; yet, later, to
accept with noble reverence the nobler method of the Master.