The weaving of the web of a great personality is a wonderful and unique process. The days are the weavers and every ex¬perience a thread; intellect and heart with their variations are the warp and woof; and of these elements the pattern is made by the awakening soul. The spiritual stature of the person in question and his realizations of the Truth, however, depend entirely on his awareness that his real nature is spiritual; with that must go the will to renounce the whole world, if need be, to uncover that nature. Not less clearly does the mandate of renunciation ring from the mouth of the sage who walked the hills of Judea: "What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" than it does from the Indian sages centuries earlier: "All this is Maya-unreal. The real alone matters."

A survey of Naren's youth shows three main factors shaping his character and destiny: his innate spiritual tendency, or, in the terms used above, his awareness of his real nature; the influence of his family and of his studies; and thirdly, the guidance of his spiritual teacher Shri Ramakrishna, who raised him from the mire of unhappiness and scepticism to certainty and Peace. In the foregoing pages we have given an idea of his innate spiritual tendency, evident from his purity, his thirst to know God, his search for one who had seen Him, and his final surrender at the feet of the Master at Dakshineswar.

The influence of his family, exerted mainly through his parents, was far reaching in its effects. It was his mother who imbued him with the ideals of feeling nobly, thinking highly and acting rightly. At her knee he gained his wide knowledge of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the two great Hindu epics, as she read them aloud to him in the twilight. To his father he owed his broadmindedness, manliness and respect for _x000d_ any genuine national tradition. His father's influence served to widen the scope of Naren's learning by directing his attention to the cultures of other lands, This was as it should be, for, as Swami Vivekananda in the making, he needed to develop a sympathetic understanding broad enough to include all cultures and all religions. So we find Naren desirous of encompassing all knowledge, Eastern and Western, in philosophy and history, in the arts and sciences, but especially in Western philosophy. He threw himself into these studies with his usual intensity, determined to discover and master their underlying principles and value.

He was aware that most philosophical systems are only intellectual diagrams, giving no place to the emotions of man, thereby stifling his creative and responsive faculties. Moreover, it requires as great an act of faith to believe in a speculative system of thought as to "believe without understanding" in theological dogmas. Naren did not want diagrams of Truth, no matter how clever: he wanted the Truth. True philosophy should be the mother of spiritual action, the fountain head of creative energy, the highest and noblest stimulus to the will. Short of that, it was worthless.

The philosophy of Herbert Spencer interested him particularly, and later on he used the Spencerian mode of reasoning in his discussion of the doctrines of the Upanishads and the Vedanta. From such study Naren gained a power of thought, penetrating discrimination, and spirit of search for a scientific basis, that stood him in good stead when delivering his message in later years. The philosophy of Spencer is dangerous to traditional theological conceptions. It pulverizes the foundations of belief itself. Only an innate idealism, and the power of a poetic and imaginative temperament, could save any part of Naren's former outlook. It was his inherent capacity for the broader vision that saved him from becoming a fatalist and atheist. The mystic was latent in him, and his spirited soul could not stop its questionings at the agnostic's half way house. He studied the systems of the German philosophers, particularly those of Kant and Schopenhauer: He studied also John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte, and delved into Aristotelian analysis and speculations. For a time he found satisfaction in the Positivist philosophy of Comte which embraces a wide ethical outlook. But never did his enthusiasm for exploration beguile him into accepting any newer and greater vision of Truth without subjecting it to the same keen eyed scrutiny he had given his earlier beliefs, and comparing it with the systems of his own land.

He now was in full rebellion against the Hindu social system. He saw that the whole nation was in bondage to the priestly caste. The net of caste and creed became intolerable to him. With most persons, particularly those of a romantic temper, this phase of revolt is critical, for there is the danger of a dulling of the moral sense. When gods and religious duties, ascetic and spiritual ideals, go, what is left to curb the senses? Truly this was a period of conflict and perplexity for Naren, involving his whole personality; but wonderful was the inner strength which bore him up. His mind was carried beyond the perilous realm of the senses into the world of intellectuality, by his subconscious determination to find a way out of the net of ignorance entangling him ignorance of his own real nature. To find a way to God-if God existed-was for him the im-perative need. To a mind of his mould agnosticism was only a mood. The mystical temperament cannot stop at "I do not know". The problem of life for such a one has to be solved; the Truth has to be attained. His mind is swept by currents peculiar to itself, which, if he is fortunate, carry him past doubts and agnosticism to the haven of realization. Naren, though for the time being lost in a maze of agnosticism, did not lose heart. If philosophy could not help him, if it was not the door to undistorted vision, he felt it would have to be discarded as an abstraction which, interesting though it might be, was not of ultimate worth.

Empirical science cannot enable one to transcend the realm of the intellect and senses and realize that Eternal Reality which is the foundation and cause of all phenomena. Naren was in accord with the views of Western science and philosophy, that what man knows of the world is the result of the interaction between physical objects and his senses, after the application to sense data of the categories of the understanding, such as time and space. The external world as it is in itself, is thus unknown and unknowable. This last is also true of the internal nature of man. He can never truly know his inner reality, because it is "beyond" the categories of time and space. Narendranath was aware that the sense organs, mind and intellect are incapable of enabling man to solve the riddle of the ultimate nature of the universe, because the sense per-ceptions and still more the ideas which he forms from them, on which he bases his various speculations and theories, are not free from a large quota of subjectivity, and hence are unreliable as representing what is originally given in sense experience. Western savants have failed to establish the existence of the Self apart from objective consciousness and con-sequently have failed to come to a final conclusion regarding the ultimate Truth.

Nevertheless, Narendra had a great respect for Western material science and its analytical processes. He used them to test Shri Ramakrishna's various supernatural experiences and accepted only those which stood the test. Though he was literally pining for Truth, yet he would not accept anything through fear or because of outside pressure. He was even willing to become an honest atheist if that was to be the end of all reasoning. So eager was he to solve the mystery of the universe that he was willing to surrender all the pleasures of the world, nay, even life itself, for a vision of the Truth. In this frame of mind, he pursued his study of Western science and philosophy, accepting whatever was good in them. He did not pursue learning for the sake of material power, but because he desired to realize Truth. Rebelling against his inherited faith, he was forced into much wandering and intellectual struggle, only to return to it in his final illumination.

His researches were not confined to philosophy and physical science. He took a course in Western medicine to acquaint himself with the working of the nervous system especially the brain and spinal cord. He had a passion for history the story of the conditions under which human character and human events developed. History was, to him, the record of the aspirations and realizations of nations through the centuries.

Poetry, because it is the language of ideals, made a strong appeal to Naren. Wordsworth was the fixed star of his poetic firmament. He lived in a world of ideals, where history and philosophy, poetry and all the sciences, are recognized as phases of Reality. He possessed a prophetic vision of learning, wherein thought was seen as subservient to the real purpose of life, ideas and ideals being the fuel which the soul burned in its supreme effort to go beyond intellect, beyond thought.

With all his seriousness there was another side to Naren. He had a great love of fun and gave himself up to it whole heartedly. Thoroughly human and interested in human ways, he was known in college as "a good fellow" because of his stories, wit and merry-making. He was the leader in all innocent revels, and no party was considered complete without him; but amusements were not allowed to interfere with studies. Often, after spending the day with friends, he would plunge late at night into the study of some historical or philo-sophical treatise, not giving over until he had mastered it. His brain was always clear, even when his health was impaired and he was physically weak. In the last days of a life in which he had often subjected his body to the utmost strain, he used to say, "Though my body is worn out, my brain is as clear as ever." Naren's was a personality made up of a variety of moods and qualities. In recreation a boy, in song an artist, in intellectual pursuits a scholar, and in his outlook on life a philosopher.

Naren did whatever was to be done because he saw and understood the fitness of the doing, and not because of some external pressure. Freedom, he was convinced, was the basis of all true self development; but that freedom had to be supplemented, and its use guided, by a right and matured discrimination. Then one obeyed moral laws as a master, not as a slave. He possessed that qualification needed for the attainment of the spiritual consciousness a passion for good. Though his mind plunged into agnosticism, he hated a materialistic outlook on life.

The monastic tendency was natural to him; yet he was a jubilant lover of life. He had the physical vitality of a child with the intellect and detachment of a spiritual genius. It is not strange, therefore, to find him rising from his study, when he was preparing for the B.L. examination and saying to a friend, "Yes, I must abandon the idea of appearing for the examination. What does it all mean! I must be free!" In early youth he recognized marriage to be a barrier to spirituality and said to this same friend, "You are married. You are under the bondage of the householder's life. I am free. Mine will be the monastic life, I am sure." He knew life to be a dream. His very agnosticism had impressed on him the meaninglessness of all things. Hence he looked on the monastic life as the only method of protest against the falseness of it all.

The great barrier to his final realization at this period was the intellect. But it had to be silenced, not by stunting its growth through the acceptance of some sort of belief, not by suppressing it as one would an evil thought or desire, but by developing it to its highest capacity. It had to have dealt successfully with all phases of uncertainty and to have won through to the perception of reality, before it would be able to join the emotions in the living of the spiritual life. How Naren arrived at this consummation is a mystery. How his intellect became illuminated, no one knows. It was perhaps due to his contact with his teacher Shri Ramakrishna, whose realization was the fulfilment and solution of all intellectual searches and doubts. Do not the scriptures say that when one knows God one knows the universe in its essence? Nature cannot withhold from such a one her secrets. But Naren had still to grope in darkness for some time to come. There were difficulties to be faced, doubts to be settled, before he could resign himself to a teacher and accept his teachings without a **question. He was to fight every inch of the way, accepting nothing until it was no longer rational to deny it. When any point was gained it became insight, illumination. Through all his struggles and sufferings of mind and heart he felt that victory was to be his. He was pure in heart, and such, we are taught, shall see God.

To gain a still clearer view of Naren's personality and the early stage of his mental development, it would be well to quote the observations of one of his fellow students, Dr. Brajendranath Seal, a leading intellect of India in his day. In an article written for the Prabuddha Bharata (April 1907, and reproduced in the Brahmavadin the following month), he says:_x000d_ When I first met Vivekananda in 1881, we were fellow students of Principal William Hastie, scholar, metaphysician, and poet, at the General Assembly's College. He was my senior in age, though I was his senior in the College by one year. Undeniably a gifted youth, sociable, free and unconventional in manners, a sweet singer, the soul of social circles, a brilliant conversationalist, somewhat bitter and caustic, piercing with the shafts of a keen wit the shows and mummeries of the world, sitting in the scorner's chair but hiding the tenderest of hearts under that garb of cynicism; altogether an inspired Bohemian but possessing what Bohemians lack, an iron will; some what peremptory and absolute, speaking with accents of authority and withal possessing a strange power of the eye which could hold his listeners in thrall.

This was patent to all. But what was known to few was the inner man and his struggle the Sturm und Drang of soul which expressed itself in his restless and Bohemian wanderings.

This was the beginning of a critical period in his mental history, during which he awoke to self consciousness and laid the foundations of his future personality. John Stuart Mill's Three Essays on Religion had upset his first boyish theism and easy optimism which he had imbibed from the outer circles of the Brahmo Samaj. The arguments from causality and design were for him broken reeds to lean upon, and he was haunted by the problem of the Evil in Nature and Man which he, by no means, could reconcile with the goodness of an All wise and All powerful Creator. A friend introduced him to the study of Hume's scepticism and Herbert Spencer's doctrine of the Unknowable, and his unbelief gradually assumed the form of a settled philosophical scepticism. His first emotional freshness and naivete were worn out. A certain dryness and incapacity for the old prayerful devotions, an ennui which he concealed under a nonchalant air of habitual mocking and scoffing, troubled his spirit. But music still stirred him as nothing else could, and gave him a weird unearthly sense of unseen realities which brought tears to his eyes.

It was at this time that he came to me being brought by a common friend, the same who had introduced him to the study of Hume and Herbert Spencer. I had had a nodding acquaintance with him before, but now he opened himself to me and spoke of his harassing doubts and his despair of reaching certitude about the Ultimate Reality. He asked for a course of Theistic philosophic reading suited to a beginner in his situation. I named some authorities, but the stock arguments of the Intuitionists and the Scotch common sense school only confirmed him in his unbelief. Besides, he did not appear to me to have sufficient patience for humdrum reading-his faculty was to imbibe not so much from books as from living communion and personal experience. With him it was life kindling life and thought kindling thought._x000d_ I felt deeply drawn towards him, for I now knew that he would grapple with difficulties in earnest.

I gave him a course of readings in Shelley. Shelley's Hymn to the Spirit of Intellectual Beauty, his pantheism of impersonal love and his vision of a glorified millennial humanity moved him as the arguments of the philosophers had failed to move him. The universe was no longer a mere lifeless, loveless mechanism. It contained a spiritual principle of unity.

I spoke to him now of a higher unity than Shelley had conceived, the unity of the Para Brahman as the Universal Reason. My own position at that time sought to fuse into one, three essential elements, the pure monism of the Vedanta, the dialectics of the Absolute idea of Hegel and the Gospel of Equality, Liberty and Fraternity of the French Revolution. The principle of individuation was with me the principle of Evil. The Universal Reason was all in all, Nature, life, history being the progressive unfolding of the Absolute idea. All ethical, social and political creeds and principles were to be tested by their conformity to Pure Reason. The element of feeling appeared to me merely pathological, a disturbance of sanity and order. How to overcome the resistance of matter, of individuality and of unreason, to the manifestation of the Pure Reason was the great problem of life and society, of education and legislation. I also held with the ardour of a young inexperienced visionary that the deliverance of the race from the bondage of unreason would come about through a new revolutionary polity of which the watchwords were Equality, Liberty and Fraternity.

The sovereignty of Universal Reason, and the negation of the individual as the principle of morals, were ideas that soon came to satisfy Vivekananda's intellect and gave him an assured conquest over scepticism and materialism. What was more, they furnished him with the card and compass of life, as it were. But this brought him no peace. The conflict now entered deeper into his soul, for the creed of Universal Reason called on him to suppress the yearnings and susceptibilities of his artist nature and Bohemian temperament. His senses were keen and acute, his natural cravings and passions strong and imperious, his youthful susceptibilities tender, his conviviality free and merry. To suppress these was to kill his natural spontaneity-almost to suppress his self. The struggle soon took a seriously ethical turn reason struggling for mastery with passion and sense. The fascinations of the sense and the cravings of a youthful nature now appeared to him as impure, as gross and carnal. This was the hour of darkest trial for him. His musical gifts brought him asso¬ciates for whose manners and morals he had bitter and undisguised contempt. But his convivial temperament proved too strong for him. It was, therefore, some relief to him when I occasionally kept him company of an evening when he went out for a musical soiree.

I saw and recognized in him a high, ardent and pure nature, vibrant and resonant with impassioned sensibilities. He was certainly no sour or cross-grained puritan, no normal hypochondriac; he would indulge cynically in unconventional language except when he would spare my innocence. He took an almost morbid delight in shocking conventionality in its tabernacles, respectability in its booths; and in the pursuit of his sport would appear other than he was, puzzling and mystifying those outside his inner circle of friends. But in the recesses of his soul he wrestled with the fierce and fell spirit of Desire, the subtle and illusive spirit of Fancy.

To his repeated quest for some power which would deliver him from bondage and unavailing struggle, I could only point to the sovereignty of Pure Reason and the ineffable peace that comes of identifying the self with the Reason in the Universe. Those were for me days of a victorious Platonic transcendentalism. The experience of a refractory flesh or rebellious temperament had not come to me. I had not sufficient patience For the mood or attitude of mind which surrenders the sovereign right of self-government to artificial props or outside help, such as grace or mediation. I felt no need of conciliating feeling and nature in the cult of Reason, nor had had any experience of a will divided in its allegiance to the Self. The experience of a discord between the Ideal and the Real, between Nature and Spirit, had indeed come to me already in an objective way as an outstanding reality and was to come afterwards in subjective fashion though in forma quite other than what obtained in Vivekananda's case. But at the time, his problems were not mine, nor were my difficulties his.

He confessed that though his intellect was conquered by the universal, his heart owned the allegiance of the individual Ego and complained that a pale bloodless reason, sovereign de jure but not de facto, could not hold out arms to save him in the hour of temptation. He wanted to know if my philosophy could satisfy his senses, could mediate bodily, as it were, for the soul's deliverance; in short, he wanted a flesh and blood reality visible in form and glory; above all, he cried out for a hand to save, to uplift, to protect, a Shakti or power outside himself which could cure him of his impotence and cover his nothingness with glory a Guru or master who by embodying perfection in the flesh would still the commotion in his soul.

At the time, this appeared to me a weakness born of unreason, this demand for perfection in the flesh and for a power out of ourselves to save-this sacrifice of reason to sense. My young inexperienced self, confronted with this demand of a soul striving with itself, knew not wherewith satisfy it, and Vivekananda soon after betook himself to the ministers and missionaries of the Brahmo Samaj, asking Brahmos with an unconscious Socratic Irony for an ideal made real to sense, for truth made visible, for a power unto deliverance. Here he had enough, he bitterly complained, of moral disquisitions, principles, intuitions for pabulum which to him appeared tasteless and insipid. He tried diverse teachers, creeds and cults, and it was this quest that brought him, though at first in a doubting spirit, to the Paramahamsa of Dakshineswar, who spoke to him with an authority an none had spoken before, and by his Shakti brought peace into his soul and healed the wounds of his spirit. But his rebellious intellect scarcely yet owned the Master. His mind misgave him and he doubted if the peace which would possess his soul in the presence of the Master was not illusory. It was only gradually that the doubts of that keen intellect were vanquished by the calm assurance that belongs to ocular demonstration.

I watched with intense interest the transformation that went on under my eyes. The attitude of a young and rampant Vedantist cum Hegelian cum Revolutionary like myself towards the cult of religious ecstasy and Kali-worship, may be easily imagined; and the spectacle of a born iconoclast and free thinker like Vivekananda, a creative and dominating intelligence, a tamer of souls, himself caught in the meshes of what appeared to me an uncouth, supernatural mysticism, was a riddle which my philosophy of the Pure Reason could scarcely read at the time. But Vivekananda, "the loved and lost" was loved, and mourned most in what I could not but then regard as his defection; and it was personal feeling, after all, the hated pathological element of individual preference and individual relationship, which most impelled me, when at last I went on what to a home keeping recluse like myself was an adventurous journey to Dakshineswar, to see and hear Vivekananda's Master, and spent the greater part of a long summer day in the shady and peaceful solitude of the Temple garden, returning as the sun set amidst the whirl and rush and roar and the awful gloom of a blinding thunder storm, with a sense of bewilderment as well moral as physical, and a lurking perception of the truth that the majesty of Law orders the apparently irregular and grotesque, that there may be self mastery in apparent self alienation, that sense even in its errors is only incipient Reason and that faith in a Saving Power ab extra is but the dim reflex of an original act of self determination. And a significant confirmation of all this came in the subsequent life history of Vivekananda who, after he had found the firm assurance he sought in the saving Grace and Power of his Master, went about preaching and teaching the creed of the Universal Man, and the absolute and inalienable sovereignty of the Self.

Naren yearned sincerely for knowledge, sure, real, permanent and satisfactory. He wanted to get out of the quagmire of doubt and uncertainty. To him the voice of agnosticism was the voice of anguish, causing him much mental tribulation and stress of soul. A feeling of emptiness and sadness obsessed him. Why, he could not explain. He entered that world in which every glance and every step is suffering, because it is the world of uncertainty in which man says, "I do not know the way". The ordinary philosopher says this with indifference; the saint to be, with a laden heart. The worldly man is heedless whether the world of idealism and tradition stands or falls; he is unaware of the suffering which disillusionment gives rise to.

In all this agnosticism and confusion of intellect Naren continued his spiritual exercises. He practised meditation. It gave him great mental peace, this effort to quiet the mind in meditation. And when silence and stillness came, he would sometimes pass into the innermost recesses of himself. There the doubting mind could not follow. During this period the visions he had had on the first few visits to Dakshineswar helped him keep his mind firm in the belief in an ultimate Reality. Shri Ramakrishna's words were comforting and steadying, no matter what the tumult of his mind: "God listens to the sincere prayer of the human mind. I swear that you can see Him more intensely than you see me. You can talk to Him more intimately than you talk to me. One can hear His words and feel His touch." Again: "You may not believe in various divine forms and may discard them as products of the human imagination. But if you believe in some ultimate Reality which is the regulator of the universe, you can pray thus: `O God, I do not know Thee. Graciously reveal to me Thy real nature!'-He must listen to you if your prayer is sincere." These words of the Master encouraged Naren a great deal and helped turn his mind more and more to the practice of spiritual exercises. He had been impressed with the view of Hamilton that the human intellect can only gain hints of the truth of a God who regulates the universe. It is beyond the power of intellect to arrive at a correct knowledge of God. Here philosophy ends and religion begins. Naren would often refer to this. Though he was now giving much time and energy to spiritual practices, he did not throw away his philosophical books. Study, music and meditation wholly occupied his mind.

Naren took a new method of mediation. Formerly he used to meditate on God, following the Brahmo belief, as formless but endowed with attributes. Now he prayed from the bottom of his heart, "O God, be gracious and reveal to me Thy real nature, which is the embodiment of Truth!" Then he would banish from his mind all other thoughts. After a while his mind would dive so deeply into his soul that he would lose consciousness of body and of time. He would meditate in this manner at night when everybody in the house had retired. He would feel an ineffable peace within; and afterwards, a sort of intoxication which made it difficult For him to leave his seat. On one such occasion as he was thus seated after meditation, he was blessed with the vision of the Buddha.

This is how Swami Saradananda remembers him to have related what happened:_x000d_ When I kept my mind still and devoid of all objects, there flowed in it a current of serene bliss. Under its influence, I felt a sort of intoxication for a long time even after the end of the meditation; so I did not feel inclined to leave my seat and get up immediately. One day when I was sitting in that condition at the end of the meditation, I saw the wonderful figure of a monk appear suddenly-from where I did not know-and stand before me at a little distance, filling the room with a divine effulgence. He was in ochre robes with a Kaman¬dalu (water-pot) in his hand. His face bore such a calm and serene expression of inwardness born of indifference to all things, that I was amazed and felt much drawn to him. He walked towards me with a slow step, his eyes steadfastly fixed on me, as if he wanted to say something. But I was seized with fear and could not keep still. I got up from my seat, opened the door, and quickly left the room. The next moment I thought, "Why this foolish fear?" I became bold and went back into the room to listen to the monk, who, alas, was no longer there. I waited long in vain, feeling dejected and repenting that I had been so stupid as to flee without listening to him. I have seen many monks, but never have I seen such an extraordinary expression on any other face. That face has been indelibly printed on my heart. It may have been a hallucination; but very often I think that I had the good Fortune of seeing Lord Buddha that day.

Time passed and the days were marked by various higher experiences. The man was in the making, stern with himself in his search for Reality. All the passionate longing, which, in ordinary persons, is related to the senses, was in Naren directed to the understanding of life and its problems. Where there is such sincerity of effort realization must come. The result of his study in the wisdom of man brought him to the conclusion that all worldly knowledge and experience is vanity and vexation of spirit. He gradually became convinced; by an intellectual process, of the existence of an Ultimate Reality, conscious and indescribable, from which all phenomena have emanated. The gods might be false, thought Naren, but not God.

It must be remembered, however, that there were other factors as important as his power of thought and discrimination, in Naren's finding of this intellectual, or rather spiritual, position. He began to build, though slowly at first, an enlightened life, under the watchful eye of an everwakeful spiritual guide. It was a long way from the agnostic to the prayerful state; but prayer and contemplation were gradually awakened in Naren as he began to lead the life of the quieting of the senses and of renunciation, and to centre the strength and intensity of his thought upon these noble ideals. Indeed, was not such concentration of thought, in itself, prayer? There came a longing for divine vision, where thought has become direct perception. The idea that God exists must become the direct perception that God is. And when one has that perception, who can say to him, "This is true and this is not true"? Intellectual truth is debatable; spiritual Truth is beyond debate. To feel such a longing, even just to believe in such an exalted state of consciousness, is spirituality.

Naren pondered deeply on the idea of God. He would reflect day after day on the infinite consciousness. Meditation became a habit with him. The Desire to see, to know, the Truth had become so intense that the thought-built walls of his intellect were being undermined and washed away, leaving the way open for the intuitive mind, the chief servant of the soul. In the dream consciousness he would see dimly things which were beyond mortal dreaming, or in the morning would wake up with a feeling of exaltation-experiences which could only be explained on the ground that his dream and sleep were not of the ordinary kind. The exaltations, the temporary glimpses of Reality, were daily happenings with him. Fre-quently at this time it seemed to him that he was separate from his body.

When he met the Master, his spiritual guide and companion, he felt that he had found a haven of peace and the end of all his struggles; but he was unable to accept the teacher in him in toto. As the Master tried to kindle the sleeping spirituality of his disciple, the latter brought his intellectual strength to bear. He opposed and he fretted. But the Master, to use his own expression, was not a harmless water-snake: he was a deadly cobra whose bite was fatal. Gradually Naren's opposition died away in complete surrender.