I believe that there is. I think it will be found that the different phases of Indian thought are susceptible of union in one great idea, and that in this union lies her message to the world. That idea is human life. The message of India is the proclamation of the pilgrim's progress-the earliest announcement of the stages of that journey which has since been traversed by myriads of souls. Here, for the first time in history, we have a description of man's spiritual road—a description of the path over which the religious life is bound to travel if it would be a complete and rounded life. One corner of the earth is, as it were, selected to be a mirror and a miniature of the normal experience of each individual soul, and we are permitted to see within the compass of a single nation that process of religious evolution which has been the rule for all nations and for all men.

What, then, are the stages of the spiritual life? It is a question of individual experience. It requires for its answer no consultation of books or authorities; one has only to look within. The edu cation of every completed life has passed through three stages. The opening or initial stage is one of hope. Its peculiarity consists in the fact that the spectator of life underrates its difficulties. The first impression of the youth in gazing upon this world is not, as we should expect, an impression of fear. He looks upon surrounding things with an eye al

most of patronage. He is impressed with a sense of the world's comparative smallness-of its smallness in comparison with his own mighty power. He feels himself to be perfectly adequate, to be more than adequate, to the task before him. The goal towards which he is going shines with an illusory clearness; the sense of distance is lost, and tomorrow is already recognised as a portion of to-day. By-and-by there comes a change. The relative aspect of the world to himself is transformed; it becomes large and he becomes small. He begins to awake to the conviction that his first view of life was an illusion. He finds that what he had imagined to be only a mole-hill has become a mountain. The waters which in fancy he had held in the hollow of his hand expand into the dimensions of a vast ocean; the isles which in imagination he had taken up as a very little thing are found to be separated from each other by almost interminable tracts of sea. Originally his entire hope had rested in the realisation of his worldly dream; his only object now is to awake from that dream. The present system is illusory; if he would find reality, he must rise above that system into a light and a life which are now inaccessible. His daily course becomes a straining after the invisible, his daily occupation a search for things as yet not seen. The prize of peace lies for him behind the veil, and the more. distant is the object from the day and hour, the

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more surely it becomes the hope of his rest. At last this second stage also passes away, and a third and final scene appears. The world, as a world, still seems an object of illusion; but it is no longer to the future that he looks for redemption from it. Instead of straining his eyes into the invisible, he begins to centre his gaze upon one corner-humanity. Instead of looking for peace to the advent of a new order of things, he begins to look for it here and now. He still believes that emancipation from care can only be reached by death; but he finds. that death can itself be reached without leaving the world. He finds that it is possible to lose himself in the thought of others, to surrender his own personality by entering into the personality of his brotherman. He finds that he can get above the earth without going out of it, that he can be redeemed from the illusions of sense and time by being redeemed from the thought of self. He realises, in short, the truth that loss of life comes from loving it, and that the burden of individual care drops from the arms of him who has entered into the life of humanity.

Such in its completeness is the rhythm of all human life. It has been the message of India to foretell and foreshadow this rhythm. On a large national scale she represents to us for the first time these successive phases of the life of man. Let us unfold them one by one. Let us begin with the

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earliest phase known to us of Indian history. It is that which appears in the Mantras or songs of her first sacred book-the 'Rig Veda.' It is distinctively an age of hope. There is not a trace of pessimism nor a note of despair. The worshipper looks out upon this world with the eye and the heart of a child. He sees in it a theatre made for himself, and exactly suited to the part he is to play. He is altogether unappalled by the majesty of the surrounding scenery-although it is the same scenery which afterwards appals him. The objects before which he is in after-years to tremble are at the beginning the sources of his freedom and his power. He looks up to the forces of nature and worships them, but he worships them rather as allies than as despots. He makes them the object of his prayers, but his prayers themselves are acts of merchandise. He deals with the powers of nature as a man in business deals with his brothercraftsman. He offers them his adoration, and he expects in return their sustenance. He gives them his homage in order that he may receive from them those balmy influences of wind and weather which make life go smooth. His religious sacrifices are from beginning to end a commercial transaction;

1 As I wish to avoid all technical details, I refer for the meaning of this word to Colebrooke, 'Miscellaneous Essays,' i. p. 308; Max Müller, 'Ancient Sanskrit Literature,' p. 343; and Goldstücker's 'Pânini,' p. 69.

they are not the emptying of himself but the lading of his ship; he gives something that he may get more. All this indicates an over-estimate of his own powers, an under-estimate of the powers of nature. It indicates that at this stage he is a totally different man from what he was afterwards to become. So far from shrinking before the universe, he is not even adequately impressed with its greatness; so far from feeling his own nothingness, he has an overweening sense of his necessity to the gods.1 He stands like Jacob under the stars of heaven and strikes a bargain for his own profit, promises his piety and his offerings if he shall have bread to eat and raiment to put on.

I have said that at this stage the Indian worships the powers of nature. I do not mean that he worships them as powers of nature. He looks up to the dawn, to the meridian, to the setting, but he sees in them more than the eye sees. They are to him at this stage unconsciously what at an afterstage they became consciously-the forms of divine. incarnations, the respective embodiments of distinct celestial beings. These natural powers, indeed, are nowhere equally worshipped at one time; each has its own day, each has its season for empire. Can we determine the order of their separate reigns?

1 The spirit of Indian mythology is described by F. von Schlegel as one of boundless enthusiasm (Philosophy of History, p. 154. Lond., 1847).