The grand receptions, the smaller dinners and suppers that must have been given for the delegates, the auxiliary sessions, and outside talks were like frills on the main Fabric of the Parliament, but very likely these extras were in themselves enough to open Chicago to Swamiji, for through them there could have been few Chicagoans whom he did not meet and charm. Indeed he was said to be "one of the most popular of guests in Chicago drawing rooms. Years later Prince Woltonsky, a freelance delegate from Russia, commented to Albert Spalding, the famous violinist, on Swamiji's popularity. In Spalding's autobiography, Rise to Follow, one finds the following passage:

Wolkonsky was a delightful conversationalist. I found that he knew my country, having represented Russia in the Congress of Religions at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. I asked him whether by any chance he had met Swami Vivekananda there, Oh, yes, he had, and For some time afterward the two had maintained an active correspondence. But how was it that I came to speak of him? I was, after all, much too young to have remembered. . . .

I explained that my family had been acquainted with the Swami and had often talked about him._x000d_ "He made a-what do you call it? sensational `hit' in your country," said Wolkonsky, "especially with the Chicago ladies. Ah, those Chicago ladies! They seemed to take life and incidentally themselves very seriously.

The Chicago ladies were, as were the women throughout America, asserting themselves in a new found independence. Indeed, the Exposition's Board of Lady Managers, which was made up of representatives from every state, was considered quite an innovation and was no less a cause of general wonder than the array of new inventions presented by the Fair.

Never before had women been appointed to an executive position, and they were determined to prove themselves worthy of this honor.

In certain respects the most fascinating personality was the Brahmin monk, Suami Vivakananda with his flowing orange robe, saffron turban, smooth shaven, shapely, handsome face, large, dark subtle penetrating eye, and with the air of one pleased with the consciousness of being easily master of his situation. His knowledge of English is as though it were his mother tongue.

My mother, sister and I had spent the month of June at the Great Fair of 1893 in Chicago, and we were planning to return for the Congress of Religions in the autumn on our way to Japan and the Orient. A death in the family brought our journey to a halt in a little town in Ohio. Soon after our arrival the Swedenborgian minister, as a courtesy to strangers, invited us to dine with him. We went. The minister himself met us at the door, his face aglow with enthusiasm. He had just returned from the Congress of Religions and he could talk of nothing else._x000d_ He described at length the various sessions of the Congress, dwelling with emphasis on this delegate or that. "But," he continued, "there was one speaker who stood out above all others, because of his learning, his eloquence and his impressive personality. No other could compare with him except two or three Roman Catholic prelates, and they had sent their best men: ' He paused, leaving his brilliant figure without name or nationality. "Who was he?" I asked eagerly. The minister replied quietly; "A Hindu-Swami Vivekananda.

It can be noted here in passing that Swamiji came to be generally known, among other things, as a "Brahmin monk." This was no doubt due to expediency on the part of the news¬paper reporters, to whom, as to most Americans in that age, "a Brahmin" was synonymous with "a high caste Hindu who was a religious teacher." It was a careless but forgivable error and one which Swamiji could not have corrected. The term "Kshatriya," the caste to which he belonged, would not only have conveyed nothing to the public, but would have been a bete noire to the press. "Brahmin" was bad enough. As a matter of fact, Swamiji acquired a sizable assortment of epithets during his stay in America, being known variously as the "Indian Rajah," "The High Priest of Brahma," "The Buddhist Priest ", "Theosophist," and so on. Anything that conveyed the idea to the public that he was noble, religious, and Indian sufficed for a headline. Later, however, Swamiji's enemies made capital out of these casual and typically American errors, imputing to him a deliberate misrepresentation of his status.

Swamiji could not say enough in his letters to India of these American "goddesses: ' "Nowhere in the world are women like those of this country," he wrote. "How pure, independent, self relying and kind hearted! It is the women who are the life and soul of this country. All learning and culture are centered in them. . . . I am struck dumb with wonder at seeing the women of America. . . .

Although the women, generally speaking, may have given more expression than the men to their admiration of Swamiji for women were intent upon expressing themselves men and women alike were drawn to him as to a magnet. The descriptions we have of Swamiji at the Parliament of Religions show him as colorful and dynamic, dominating the scene with the force of his personality and the utter purity of his message. He was glowing with the vigor of his youth, ready to face the entire world and to sacrifice his life for "the poor, the ignorant, the oppressed" of his motherland. And there was yet another reason for his phenomenal popularity.

Never before had the people of America seen one in whom spiritual truths had been fully realized. Though Swamiji's towering spiritual eminence was not consciously recognized by the hundreds who, as he later reminisced, "jostled with one another in the streets of Chicago to have a sight of this Vivekananda," who flocked to hear him speak, who waited interminable hours for even a few words, and who applauded him when he simply crossed the platform, the people through some inner knowledge seemed unerringly to recognize him for what he was and, from start to finish, instinctively to sense that his very presence conferred a blessing. "Darshan" was unheard of in America, but here at the Parliament was a spontaneous and unconscious mani¬festation of the attraction of the human soul to the spiritually great.

Day after day the Parliament went on, the Swami speaking extemporaneously at ifs main sessions many times. He was allowed to speak longer than the usual half hour, and being a popular speaker, he was always scheduled last in order to hold the audience. The people would sit from ten in the morning to ten at night, with only a recess of a half hour for lunch, listening to paper after paper, in which most of them were not interested, to hear their favourite. Such was their enthusiasm.

Months later, the Boston Evening Transcript of April 5, 1894, recalled this evidence of the Swami's popularity:_x000d_ At the Parliament of Religions they used to keep Vivekananda until the end of the programme to make people stay until the end of the session. On a warm day, when a prosy speaker talked too long and people began going home by hundreds, the Chairman would get up and announce that Swami Vivekananda would give a short address just before the benediction. Then he would have the peaceable hundreds perfectly in tether. The four thousand fanning people in the Hall of Columbus would sit smiling and expectant, waiting for an hour or two of other men's speeches, to listen to Vivekananda for fifteen minutes. The Chairman knew the old rule of keeping the best until last.

On all sides his name resounded. Life size pictures of him were seen posted in the streets of Chicago, with the words "The Monk Vivekananda" beneath them, and passers by would stop to do reverence with bowed head. "From the day the wonderful Professor [the Swami] delivered his speech, which was followed by other addresses, he was followed by a crowd wherever he went", a contemporary newspaper reported. "In going in and coming out of the building, he was daily beset by hundreds of women who almost fought with each other for a chance to get near him, and shake his hand." The press rang with his fame. The best known and most conservative of the metropolitan newspapers proclaimed him a Prophet and a Seer. Indeed, the New York Herald spoke of him in these words: "He is undoubtedly the greatest figure in the Parliament of Religions. After hearing him we feel how foolish it is to send missionaries to this learned nation."

Swamiji's now famous paper on Hinduism, which was offi¬cially entitled "Hinduism as a Religion," has been published in volume one of the Complete Works and is well known to students of Swami Vivekananda's teachings. Perhaps Sister Nivedita best summed up the importance of this address when she wrote in her introduction to the Complete Works, "It may be said that when be began to speak, it was of `the religious ideas of the Hindus,' but when he ended, Hinduism had been created." Indeed, in this stunning talk Swamiji gave coherence and unity to the bewildering number of sects and beliefs that through untold ages have gathered and flowered under the name of Hinduism. He revealed the lofty philosophy and aspiration, the great religious goal and drive, the central beliefs common to each widely divergent sect. He made it all not only clear but supremely inspiring, a living religion springing eternally from the very soul of humanity itself._x000d_ The Hindu religion [he said in summary] does not consist in struggles and attempts to believe a certain doctrine or dogma, but in realising-not in believing, but in being and becoming._x000d_ Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to become perfect, to become divine, to reach God and see God; this reaching God, seeing God, becoming perfect even as the Father in Heaven is perfect constitutes the religion of the Hindus. . . ._x000d_ . . . Man is to become divine by realising the divine: Idols or temples or churches or books are only the supports, the helps, of his spiritual childhood; but on and on he must progress._x000d_ . . . To the Hindu, man is not travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower truth to higher truth. . . . And every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more and more strength, till it reaches the glorious sun._x000d_ _x000d_ Throughout, Swamiji drew parallels between the beliefs of Hinduism and the basic theories of modern science, which "seem like echoes" of "the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy." He pointed out that the ideal of Hinduism in its catholicity and universality, its capacity to embrace all creeds, was, if perfectly realized, the only possible idea( for a universal religion-a religion which will be the sum total of a11 creeds "and still have infinite space for development " He wove into his talk both the clear rationality and the intense and pure devotion of the Hindu; he touched upon the various religious paths that wind or leap to the ultimate goal, and he defined that goal in its highest reaches.

Indeed, in this first statement of the Hindu religion that Swamiji made to the American public lay the seeds of all his subsequent teachings. That which he was later to develop and formulate in terms adapted to Western understanding and culture was all there; and perhaps in that moment not only was Hinduism created, but a new religion for the world was given its first enunciation in the West-a religion fulfilling the past, lighting up the future.

Swamiji's concluding words though he meant them as an accolade to the ideal of universality that lay behind the Parliament-could well apply to his Master's message and his own:_x000d_ The star arose in the East; it travelled steadily towards the West, sometimes dimmed and sometimes effulgent, till it made a circuit of the world; and now it is again rising on the very horizon of the East, the borders of the Pacific,* a thousandfold more effulgent than it ever was before._x000d_ _x000d_ * In all the early reports of Swamiji paper on Hinduism (which he had evidently written in longhand and given to the press) the word “Pacific” was transcribed as “Tasifu,” which the reporters may have thought was some far away inland sea of Oriental mystery and romance. The plain fact of the matter was that Swamiji’s Ps looked like Ts; and his “Pacific” like “Tasifu.” By some unknown process, “Tasifu” became “Sanpo” (a Tibetan name for the Brahmaputra River) in the Complete Works; thus the “horizon of the East” receded ever farther. But, characteristically, Swamiji used_x000d_ words understandable to everyone in his talks before the Parliament; indeed, never when speaking to the public (or, as far as we known, in private) was he esoteric or obscure. “Pacific,” clear, simple, and sensible, was surely what he wrote in his paper and what he said.

Something of the effect of Swamiji's paper on Hinduism can be gathered from the following undated, unidentified newspaper article, which clearly referred to this particular address:_x000d_ One [of] the most interesting personages to the multitude, is Professor Swami Vivekanunda, a Hindu theologian of great learning. Professor Vivekanunda, who is of pleasing appearance, and young to be so well filled with ,the ancient lore of India, made an address which captured the Congress, so to speak. There were bishops and ministers of nearly every Christian church present, and they were all taken by storm. The eloquence of the man with, intellect beaming from his , yellow face, his splendid English in describing the beauties of his time¬ honoured faith, all conspired to make a deep impression on the audience. From the day the wonderful Professor delivered his speech, which was followed by other addresses, he was followed by a crowd wherever he went. In going in and coming out of the building, he was daily beset by hundreds of women who almost fought with each other for a chance to get near him, and shake his hand. It may safely be set down that there were women of every denomination among his worshippers. Some of them were votaries of fashion who did not care what became of their fine toilets in the struggle, while others were the "mothers in Israel" of the various churches of Chicago and else-where. The Professor seemed surprised at this homage, but he received it graciously enough until it became tire¬some from repetition, and then he made his entries and exits at times when there were no crowds of women in the vestibule and corridors. Other strangers from the far East, in picturesque garb, and with a Midways plaisance [the amusement section at the Fair] flavor about them, were also much sought after, but in a less degree: This talk in the sessions of the Congress was a revelation to many people, even of education and much reading. That men so well endowed with brains, astute thinkers, should adhere to those heathenish religions, was a surprise to many people, more thoughtful than the women who made a lion of Professor Vivekanunda. It was from the Christian theologians on the platform, however, that the women took their cue.

. . . We all carry about with us unsolved problems of adjustment to this many angled world-without formulating questions, we are living quests, unless by some rare chance our philosophy of life is entirely settled. And to meet some person may resolve a quest wholly without his knowledge; it may be simply mode of being that brings the release._x000d_ This was in some measure the story of my first encounter with Swami Vivekananda, though I was only one of an immense audience. . . . I was a casual visitor at the Fair, just turning twenty, interested in a dozen exhibits on the Midway. . . . But aside from all this, I had a quietly rankiing problem of my own._x000d_ I had been reading Herbert Spencer, all I could get of his works. . . . I was convinced by him; . . . but it was somehow a vital injury to think of man as of the animals. birth, growth, mating, death-and nothing more-finis. I had had my religion-Methodism-an experience of conversion with a strange enlightenment which gave me three days of what felt like a new vision of things, strangely lifted up; Spencer had explained that all away as an emotional flurry-the world must be faced with a steady objective eye. The Christian cosmology was fancy._x000d_ But still, Christianity was not the only religion. There were to be speakers from other traditions. They might have some insight that would relieve the tension. I would go for an hour and listen. I didn't know the program. It happened to be Vivekananda's period._x000d_ . . . He spoke not as arguing from a tradition, or from a book, but as from an experience and certitude of his own. I do not recall the steps of his address. But there was a passage toward the end, in which I can still hear the ring of his voice, and feel the silence of the crowd-almost as if shocked. The audience was well-mixed, but could be taken as one in assuming that there had been a "Fall of man" resulting in a state of "original sin," such that "All men have sinned and come short of the glory of . " But what is the speaker saying? I hear his emphatic rebuke:_x000d_ _x000d_ "Call men sinners??¬_x000d_ It is a SIN to call men sinners!"_x000d_ . . . Through the silence I felt something like a gasp running through the hall as the audience waited for the affirmation which must follow this blow.* What his follow¬ing words were, I cannot recall with the same verbal clarity: they carried the message that in all men there is that divine essence, undivided and eternal: reality is One, and that One, which is Brahman, constitutes the central being of each one of us._x000d_ For me, this doctrine was a startling departure from anything which my scientific psychology could then recognize. One must live with these ideas and consider how one's inner experience could entertain them. But what I could feel and understand was that this man was speaking from what he knew, not from what he had been told. He was well aware of the books; but he was more immediately aware of his own experience and his own status in the world; and what he said would have to be taken into account in any final world-view. I began to realize that Spencer could not be allowed the last word. And further more, that this religious experience of mine, which Spencer would dismiss as a psychological flurry, was very akin to the grounds of Vivekananda's own certitude._x000d_ _x000d_ * “Aunt Hannah” had heard the audience roar “with approving roar”; but whether the response was approving roar or stunned silence, the fact remains: a thunderbolt had struck.

The face and dress which attracted the most notice, especially from the ladies, was that of Swami Vivekananda, a young man exceptionally handsome and with features that would command attention anywhere. His dress was bright orange, and he wore a long coat and regulation turban of that color. Vivekananda is a Brahmin monk, and Prof. Wright of Harvard is quoted as saying that he is one of the best educated men in the world.

On the second evening an even larger reception was given by President Bonney for all the delegates in the decorated upper floor and halls of the Art Institute, where thousands milled about to the strains of a mandolin orchestra.

The following evening (September 12) a huge public reception was given by the President of the Parliament; the Hon. Charles C. Bonney, in the halls of the Art Institute.

Even the assurance of Swamiji's appearance on the platform could rescue a dull session. As early as the evening of the third day, for instance, a session of three papers by orthodox Christian ministers was saved by the device of making Swamiji the chairman! Whether or not he spoke a few words that evening is not recorded, but one can be almost certain that the audience remained seated in hopes that he would.

On the following Thursday, the fourth evening, Mrs. Potter Palmer, president of the Lady Managers of the Fair and the unquestioned queen of Chicago's social and cultural life, whom Swamiji later spoke of as having been very kind to him in America, entertained the members of the Parliament at the Woman's Building in the Exposition grounds.

Here electric launches (an innovation in those days) were provided to carry the foreign delegates probably Swamiji among them through the Fair's lagoons, that they might witness "the beautiful illuminations in the Court of Honor."

Edison's newly perfected light bulbs, glowing magically and reflected in the dark waters, were no doubt a sight to behold. Indeed they called forth rhapsodies of prose: "After dark any night a walk about the court of honor is like walking through the nebulae of aurora borealis. Light, light, light in every conceivable gradation or vagary of color. Search lights leaping through mists of liquid white, soft rose and violet, pale gold and deep sky blue, green that seems alive and growing and streaks of red like fountain sprays of blood. . .

At Mrs. Palmer's reception at the Woman's Building on the evening of September 14, Swamiji is said to have given a brief talk on the condition of women in India. "It was Mrs. Palmer's earnest wish," writes Barrows, "to secure authoritative statements with regard to the condition of women in other lands, and appropriate addresses in response to her desires were made by the Archbishop of Zante, Hon. Pung Kwang Yu, Mr. Dharmapala, Mr. Mazoomdar, and Mr. Vivekananda:

on Thursday evening, September 14, Mrs. Potter Palmer, President of the Board of Lady Managers of the Columbian Exposition, gave a reception to all the delegates at the Woman's Building of the Fair. On this last occasion, the Swami, in re¬sponse to Mrs. Palmer's request, gave a short talk on the condition of women in his country.

I will tell you a little story. You have heard the eloquent speaker who has just finished say, "Let us cease from abusing each other," and he was very sorry that there should be always so much variance.

But I think I should tell you a story which would illustrate the cause of this variance. A frog lived in a well. It had lived there for a long time. It was born there and brought up there, and yet was a little, small frog. Of course the evolutionists were not there then to tell us whether the frog lost its eyes or not, but, for our story's sake, we must take it for granted that it had its eyes, and that it every day cleansed the water of all the worms and bacilli that lived in it with an energy that would do credit to our modern bacteriologists. In this way it went on and became a little sleek and fat. Well, one day another frog that lived in the sea came and fell into the well._x000d_ "Where are you from?"_x000d_ "I am from the sea."_x000d_ "The sea! How big is that? Is it as big as my well?" and he took a leap from one side of the well to the other._x000d_ "My friend," said the frog of the sea, "how do you compare the sea with your little well?"_x000d_ Then the frog took another leap and asked, "Is your sea so big?"_x000d_ "What nonsense you speak, to compare the sea with your well!"_x000d_ "Well, then," said the frog of the well, "nothing can be bigger than my well; there can be nothing bigger than this; this fellow is a liar, so turn him out."_x000d_ That has been the difficulty all the while.

I am a Hindu. I am sitting in my own little well and thinking that the whole world is my little well. The Christian sits in his little well and thinks the whole world is his well. The Mohammedan sits in his little well and thinks that is the whole world. I have to thank you of America for the great attempt you are making to break down the barriers of this little world of ours, and hope that, in the future, the Lord will help you to accomplish your purpose.

On September 15, the Swami gave a short address on "Why We Disagree". Here he pointed out, by referring to the frog in the well who thought his little well to be the whole universe, that the insularity of religious outlook was the source of fanaticism.

On the fifth day, however, the Scientific Section of the Parliament was opened, and thenceforth the spectators were divided between the Parliament proper and this adjunct, the purpose of which was to collect and examine impartially the data of all religions and, in the words of its idealistic president, the Honorable Merwin-Marie Snell, to prepare thereby the way "for the complete annihilation of vital religious differences and the placing of the facts and principles of religions upon an absolutely inexpugnable basis.

It was the purpose of the Scientific Section to study and compare the religions of the world from a technical point of view.

These days were strenuous for the delegates. Papers were read not only at the Parliament proper, but at side meetings.

It is known, for instance, that Swamiji spoke at least four times at the erudite Scientific Section, which, as has been said, was opened on the fifth day.* _x000d_ *According to the Life (1965 edition, p.310), in addition to Swamiji’s four known talks before the Scientific Section, “four other addresses in these conferences were given by the Swami.” The source of this information is not known to the present writer.

It is a great misfortune that these talks are missing from all known reports of the Parliament; their dates and titles.

1) 22.9.1893 Friday Morning Addressed the section and condudted a Conference on "Orthodox Hindiusm and Vendata Philosophy"._x000d_ _x000d_ 2) 22.9.1893 Friday Afternoon Conducted alongwith Mr. Merwin Marie Snell a conference on "Modern Religions of India"._x000d_ _x000d_ 3) 23.9.1893 Saturday ---- Addressed and Conducted a Conference on " Rinzai Zen of Japanese Buddhism"._x000d_ _x000d_ 4) 25.9.1893 Monday Afternoon Addressed on " The essence of the Hindu Religion".

on the fifth day at the end of a long afternoon session, during which three learned papers had been read, "Swami Vivekananda, a royal looking Hindoo gorgeous in his golden turban, and who has come to be known as the `Prince of gentlemen in the orange garb,' was called upon" (as the audience may well have been promised he would be). Swamiji amiably responded with a fable that brought forth laughter and applause. In brief, there was a fat, pompous, self satisfied little frog, who thought the well in which he lived comprised the universe: nothing could possibly be bigger, and no one could persuade him to the contrary. "And that," said Swamiji, "has been the difficulty all along." _x000d_ _x000d_ I am a Hindu [he continued]. I am sitting in my own little well and thinking that the whole world is my well. The Christian sits in his little well and thinks the whole world is his well. The Mohammedan sits in his little well and thinks the whole world that.

the following afternoon, "the handsome home of Mr. and Mrs. E. W. Blatchford at No. 375 LaSalle Avenue was . . . the scene of another of those cosmopolitan gatherings which shall make the social history of the last week memorable for many years to come.

It was a gala affair, at which everyone of any importance seems to have been present and to have received an enthusiastic welcome. But the "delegates most sought were those in the quaint, picturesque costumes of the Orient.... Those reverend gentlemen from the far-off East were always surrounded by anxious listeners, and the hours of receiving were all too short. .

Still another large reception was given to the delegates on Saturday afternoon, September 16, by Mr. and Mrs. E. W. Blatchford at their home on La Salle Avenue. Besides them many other leading residents of Chicago, including prominent Christian ministers and Jewish rabbis, extended their hospitality in their homes and churches to the foreign delegates, and from the Chicago newspaper reports it is evident that the Swami was always one of the notables present on these occasions.

Three religions now stand in the world which have come down to us from time prehistoric--Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism. They have all received tremendous shocks and all of them prove by their survival their internal strength. But while Judaism failed to absorb Christianity and was driven out of its place of birth by its all-conquering daughter, and a handful of Parsees is all that remains to tell the tale of their grand religion, sect after sect arose in India and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its very foundations, but like the waters of the seashore in a tremendous earthquake it receded only for a while, only to return in an all-absorbing flood, a thousand times more vigorous, and when the tumult of the rush was over, these sects were all sucked in, absorbed, and assimilated into the immense body of the mother faith._x000d_ From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists, and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu's religion._x000d_ Where then, the question arises, where is the common centre to which all these widely diverging radii converge? Where is the common basis upon which all these seemingly hopeless contradictions rest? And this is the question I shall attempt to answer._x000d_ The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral, ethical, and spiritual relations between soul and soul and between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits, were there before their discovery, and would remain even if we forgot them._x000d_ The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we honour them as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very greatest of them were women. Here it may be said that these laws as laws may be without end, but they must have had a beginning. The Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning or end. Science is said to have proved that the sum total of cosmic energy is always the same. Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where was all this manifested energy? Some say it was in a potential form in God. In that case God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which would make Him mutable. Everything mutable is a compound, and everything compound must undergo that change which is called destruction. So God would die, which is absurd. Therefore there never was a time when there was no creation._x000d_ If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator are two lines, without beginning and without end, running parallel to each other. God is the ever active providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a time and again destroyed. This is what the Brahmin boy repeats every day: "The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and moons of previous cycles." And this agrees with modern science._x000d_ Here I stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my existence, "I", "I", "I", what is the idea before me? The idea of a body. Am I, then, nothing but a combination of material substances? The Vedas declare, "No". I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the body. The body will die, but I shall not die. Here am I in this body; it will fall, but I shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul was not created, for creation means a combination which means a certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must die. Some are born happy, enjoy perfect health, with beautiful body, mental vigour and all wants supplied. Others are born miserable, some are without hands or feet, others again are idiots and only drag on a wretched existence. Why, if they are all created, why does a just and merciful God create one happy and another unhappy, why is He so partial? Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold that those who are miserable in this life will be happy in a future one. Why should a man be miserable even here in the reign of a just and merciful God?_x000d_ In the second place, the idea of a creator God does not explain the anomaly, but simply expresses the cruel fiat of an all-powerful being. There must have been causes, then, before his birth, to make a man miserable or happy and those were his past actions._x000d_ Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for by inherited aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of existence--one of the mind, the other of matter. If matter and its transformations answer for all that we have, there is no necessity for supposing the existence of a soul. But it cannot be proved that thought has been evolved out of matter, and if a philosophical monism is inevitable, spiritual monism is certainly logical and no less desirable than a materialistic monism; but neither of these is necessary here._x000d_ We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity, but those tendencies only mean the physical configuration, through which a peculiar mind alone can act in a peculiar way. There are other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by its past actions. And a soul with a certain tendency would by the laws of affinity take birth in a body which is the fittest instrument for the display of that tendency. This is in accord with science, for science wants to explain everything by habit, and habit is got through repetitions. So repetitions are necessary to explain the natural habits of a new-born soul. And since they were not obtained in this present life, they must have come down from past lives._x000d_ There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted, how is it that I do not remember anything of my past life? This can be easily explained. I am now speaking English. It is not my mother tongue, in fact no words of my mother tongue are now present in my consciousness; but let me try to bring them up, and they rush in. That shows that consciousness is only the surface of the mental ocean, and within its depths are stored up all our experiences. Try and struggle, they would come up and you would be conscious even of your past life. _x000d_ This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the world by the Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which the very depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up--try it and you would get a complete reminiscence of your past life._x000d_ So then the Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him the sword cannot pierce--him the fire cannot burn--him the water cannot melt--him the air cannot dry. The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere, but whose centre is located in the body, and that death means the change of this centre from body to body. Nor is the soul bound by the conditions of matter. In its very essence it is free, unbounded, holy, pure, and perfect. But somehow or other it finds itself tied down to matter, and thinks of itself as matter._x000d_ Why should the free, perfect, and pure being be thus under the thraldom of matter, is the next question. How can the perfect soul be deluded into the belief that it is imperfect? We have been told that the Hindus shirk the question and say that no such question can be there. Some thinkers want to answer it by positing one or more quasi-perfect beings, and use big scientific names to fill up the gap. But naming is not explaining. The question remains the same. How can the perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure, the absolute, change even a microscopic particle of its nature? But the Hindu is sincere. He does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He is brave enough to face the question in a manly fashion; and his answer is: "I do not know. I do not know how the perfect being, the soul, came to think of itself as imperfect, as joined to and conditioned by matter." But the fact is a fact for all that. It is a fact in everybody's consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the body. The Hindu does not attempt to explain why one thinks one is the body. The answer that it is the will of God is no explanation. This is nothing more than what the Hindu says, "I do not know."_x000d_ Well, then, the human soul is eternal and immortal, perfect and infinite, and death means only a change of centre from one body to another. The present is determined by our past actions, and the future by the present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting back from birth to birth and death to death. But here is another question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the next, rolling to and fro at the mercy of good and bad actions--a powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing, uncompromising current of cause and effect; a little moth placed under the wheel of causation which rolls on crushing everything in its way and waits not for the widow's tears or the orphan's cry? The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of Nature. Is there no hope? Is there no escape?--was the cry that went up from the bottom of the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words of hope and consolation came down and inspired a Vedic sage, and he stood up before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad tidings: "Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! even ye that reside in higher spheres! I have found the Ancient One who is beyond all darkness, all delusion: knowing Him alone you shall be saved from death over again." "Children of immortal bliss" --what a sweet, what a hopeful name! Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet name--heirs of immortal bliss--yea, the Hindu refuses to call you sinners. Ye are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth--sinners! It is a sin to call a man so; it is a standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are not bodies; matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter._x000d_ Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of unforgiving laws, not an endless prison of cause and effect, but that at the head of all these laws, in and through every particle of matter and force, stands One "by whose command the wind blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain, and death stalks upon the earth."_x000d_ And what is His nature?_x000d_ He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the All-merciful. "Thou art our father, Thou art our mother, Thou art our beloved friend, Thou art the source of all strength; give us strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the universe; help me bear the little burden of this life." Thus sang the Rishis of the Vedas. And how to worship Him? Through love. "He is to be worshipped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next life." This is the doctrine of love declared in the Vedas, and let us see how it is fully developed and taught by Krishna, whom the Hindus believe to have been God incarnate on earth._x000d_ He taught that a man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf, which grows in water but is never moistened by water; so a man ought to live in the world--his heart to God and his hands to work._x000d_ It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the next world, but it is better to love God for love's sake, and the prayer goes: "Lord, I do not want wealth, nor children, nor learning. If it be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth, but grant me this, that I may love Thee without the hope of reward--love unselfishly for love's sake." One of the disciples of Krishna, the then Emperor of India, was driven from his kingdom by his enemies and had to take shelter with his queen in a forest in the Himalayas, and there one day the queen asked him how it was that he, the most virtuous of men, should suffer so much misery. Yudhishthira answered, "Behold, my queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love them. They do not give me anything, but my nature is to love the grand, the beautiful, therefore I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He is the source of all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only object to be loved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do not pray for anything; I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me wherever He likes. I must love Him for love's sake. I cannot trade love."_x000d_ The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage of matter; perfection will be reached when this bond will burst, and the word they use for it is therefore, Mukti--freedom, freedom from the bonds of imperfection, freedom from death and misery. And this bondage can only fall off through the mercy of God, and this mercy comes on the pure. So purity is the condition of His mercy. How does that mercy act? He reveals Himself to the pure heart; the pure and the stainless see God, yea, even in this life; then and then only all the crookedness of the heart is made straight. Then all doubt ceases. He is no more the freak of a terrible law of causation. This is the very centre, the very vital conception of Hinduism. The Hindu does not want to live upon words and theories. If there are existences beyond the ordinary sensuous existence, he wants to come face to face with them. If there is a soul in him which is not matter, if there is an all-merciful universal Soul, he will go to Him direct. He must see Him, and that alone can destroy all doubts. So the best proof a Hindu sage gives about the soul, about God, is: "I have seen the soul; I have seen God." And that is the only condition of perfection. The Hindu religion does not consist in struggles and attempts to believe a certain doctrine or dogma, but in realising--not in believing, but in being and becoming._x000d_ Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to become perfect, to become divine, to reach God and see God, and this reaching God, seeing God, becoming perfect even as the Father in Heaven is perfect, constitutes the religion of the Hindus._x000d_ And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He lives a life of bliss infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect bliss, having obtained the only thing in which man ought to have pleasure, namely God, and enjoys the bliss with God._x000d_ So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common religion of all the sects of India; but, then, perfection is absolute, and the absolute cannot be two or three. It cannot have any qualities. It cannot be an individual. And so when a soul becomes perfect and absolute, it must become one with Brahman, and it would only realise the Lord as the perfection, the reality, of its own nature and existence, the existence absolute, knowledge absolute, and bliss absolute. We have often and often read this called the losing of individuality and becoming a stock or a stone. _x000d_ "He jests at scars that never felt a wound."_x000d_ I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to enjoy the consciousness of this small body, it must be greater happiness to enjoy the consciousness of two bodies, the measure of happiness increasing with the consciousness of an increasing number of bodies, the aim, the ultimate of happiness being reached when it would become a universal consciousness._x000d_ Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality, this miserable little prison-individuality must go. Then alone can death cease when I am one with life, then alone can misery cease when I am one with happiness itself, then alone can all errors cease when I am one with knowledge itself; and this is the necessary scientific conclusion. Science has proved to me that physical individuality is a delusion, that really my body is one little continuously changing body in an unbroken ocean of matter; and Advaita (unity) is the necessary conclusion with my other counterpart, soul._x000d_ Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science would reach perfect unity, it would stop from further progress, because it would reach the goal. Thus Chemistry could not progress farther when it would discover one element out of which all others could be made. Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfil its services in discovering one energy of which all the others are but manifestations, and the science of religion becomes perfect when it would discover Him who is the one life in a universe of death, Him who is the constant basis of an ever-changing world. One who is the only Soul of which all souls are but delusive manifestations. Thus is it, through multiplicity and duality, that the ultimate unity is reached. Religion can go no farther. This is the goal of all science._x000d_ All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run. Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today, and the Hindu is only glad that what he has been cherishing in his bosom for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language, and with further light from the latest conclusions of science._x000d_ Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the religion of the ignorant. At the very outset, I may tell you that there is no polytheism in India. In every temple, if one stands by and listens, one will find the worshippers applying all the attributes of God, including omnipresence, to the images. It is not polytheism, nor would the name henotheism explain the situation. "The rose called by any other name would smell as sweet." Names are not explanations._x000d_ I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach to a crowd in India. Among other sweet things he was telling them was that if he gave a blow to their idol with his stick, what could it do? One of his hearers sharply answered, "If I abuse your God, what can He do?" "You would be punished," said the preacher, "when you die." "So my idol will punish you when you die," retorted the Hindu._x000d_ The tree is known by its fruits. When I have seen amongst them that are called idolaters, men, the like of whom in morality and spirituality and love I have never seen anywhere, I stop and ask myself, "Can sin beget holiness?"_x000d_ Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse. Why does a Christian go to church? Why is the cross holy? Why is the face turned toward the sky in prayer? Why are there so many images in the Catholic Church? Why are there so many images in the minds of Protestants when they pray? My brethren, we can no more think about anything without a mental image than we can live without breathing. By the law of association, the material image calls up the mental idea and vice versa. This is why the Hindu uses an external symbol when he worships. He will tell you, it helps to keep his mind fixed on the Being to whom he prays. He knows as well as you do that the image is not God, is not omnipresent. After all, how much does omnipresence mean to almost the whole world? It stands merely as a word, a symbol. Has God superficial area? If not, when we repeat that word "omnipresent", we think of the extended sky or of space, that is all._x000d_ As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental constitution, we have to associate our ideas of infinity with the image of the blue sky, or of the sea, so we naturally connect our idea of holiness with the image of a church, a mosque, or a cross. The Hindus have associated the idea of holiness, purity, truth, omnipresence, and such other ideas with different images and forms. But with this difference that while some people devote their whole lives to their idol of a church and never rise higher, because with them religion means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and doing good to their fellows, the whole religion of the Hindu is centred in realisation. Man is to become divine by realising the divine. Idols or temples or churches or books are only the supports, the helps, of his spiritual childhood: but on and on he must progress._x000d_ He must not stop anywhere. "External worship, material worship," say the scriptures, "is the lowest stage; struggling to rise high, mental prayer is the next stage, but the highest stage is when the Lord has been realised. " Mark, the same earnest man who is kneeling before the idol tells you, "Him the sun cannot express, nor the moon, nor the stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what we speak of as fire; through Him they shine. " But he does not abuse any one's idol or call its worship sin. He recognises in it a necessary stage of life. "The child is father of the man. " Would it be right for an old man to say that childhood is a sin or youth a sin?_x000d_ If a man can realise his divine nature with the help of an image, would it be right to call that a sin? Nor even when he has passed that stage, should he call it an error. To the Hindu, man is not travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To him all the religions, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more and more strength, till it reaches the Glorious Sun._x000d_ Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognised it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas, and tries to force society to adopt them. It places before society only one coat which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If it does not fit John or Henry, he must go without a coat to cover his body. The Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be realised, or thought of, or stated, through the relative, and the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols--so many pegs to hang the spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for every one, but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism._x000d_ One thing I must tell you. Idolatry in India does not mean anything horrible. It is not the mother of harlots. On the other hand, it is the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths. The Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their exceptions; but mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and never for cutting the throats of their neighbours. If the Hindu fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition. And even this cannot be laid at the door of his religion any more than the burning of witches can be laid at the door of Christianity._x000d_ To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only a travelling, a coming up, of different men and women, through various conditions and circumstances, to the same goal. Every religion is only evolving a God out of the material man, and the same God is the inspirer of all of them. Why, then, are there so many contradictions? They are only apparent, says the Hindu. The contradictions come from the same truth adapting itself to the varying circumstances of different natures._x000d_ It is the same light coming through glasses of different colours. And these little variations are necessary for purposes of adaptation. But in the heart of everything the same truth reigns. The Lord has declared to the Hindu in His incarnation as Krishna, "I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there ." And what has been the result? I challenge the world to find, throughout the whole system of Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as that the Hindu alone will be saved and not others. Says Vyasa, "We find perfect men even beyond the pale of our caste and creed. " One thing more. How, then, can the Hindu, whose whole fabric of thought centres in God, believe in Buddhism which is agnostic, or in Jainism which is atheistic? _x000d_ The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also._x000d_ This, brethren, is a short sketch of the religious ideas of the Hindus. The Hindu may have failed to carry out all his plans, but if there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will have no location in place or time; which will be infinite like the God it will preach, and whose sun will shine upon the followers of Krishna and of Christ, on saints and sinners alike; which will not be Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammedan, but the sum total of all these, and still have infinite space for development; which in its catholicity will embrace in its infinite arms, and find a place for, every human being, from the lowest grovelling savage not far removed from the brute, to the highest man towering by the virtues of his head and heart almost above humanity, making society stand in awe of him and doubt his human nature. It will be a religion which will have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which will recognise divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force, will be created in aiding humanity to realise its own true, divine nature._x000d_ Offer such a religion, and all the nations will follow you. Asoka's council was a council of the Buddhist faith. Akbar's, though more to the purpose, was only a parlour-meeting. It was reserved for America to proclaim to all quarters of the globe that the Lord is in every religion._x000d_ May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews, the Father in Heaven of the Christians, give strength to you to carry out your noble idea! The star arose in the East; it travelled steadily towards the West, sometimes dimmed and sometimes effulgent, till it made a circuit of the world; and now it is again rising on the very horizon of the East, the borders of the Sanpo, a thousandfold more effulgent than it ever was before._x000d_ Hail, Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been given to thee, who never dipped her hand in her neighbour's blood, who never found out that the shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing one's neighbours, it has been given to thee to march at the vanguard of civilisation with the flag of harmony.

On this date he read his celebrated paper on "Hinduism"-a summary of the philosophy, psychology, and general ideas and statements of Hinduism. Though the Swami was not the only Indian or even the only Bengali present, he was the only representative of Hinduism proper. The other Hindu delegates stood for societies or churches or sects, but the Swami stood for Hinduism in its universal aspect. He gave forth the ideas of the Hindus concerning the soul and its destiny; he expounded the doctrines of the Vedanta philosophy, which harmonizes all religious ideals and all forms of worship, viewing them as various presentations of truth and as various paths to its realization. He preached the religious philosophy of Hinduism, which declares the soul to be eternally pure, eternally free, only appearing under the bondage of matter as limited and manifold. He spoke of the attainment of the goal -the perception of Oneness-as the result of innumerable efforts of many lives. He asserted that the soul was never created. And he went on to say that death meant only a change of centre from one body to another, and that one's present was determined by one's past action, and one's future by the present. He said that in order to realize Divinity, the self that says "I" and "mine" must vanish. This, however, did not mean the denial of true individuality; it meant, rather, its utmost fulfillment. By overcoming the small egoistical self, centred in selfishness, one attained to infinite, universal individuality. "Then alone", he said, "can death cease when I am one with life; then alone can misery cease when I am one with happiness itself; then alone can all errors cease when I am one with knowledge itself; and this is the necessary scientific conclusion. Science has proved to me that physical individuality is a delusion, that really my body is one continuously changing mass in an unbroken ocean of matter; and Advaita (Unity) is the necessary conclusion with my other counterpart, the soul." The pervasive spirit of his address was the sense of Oneness. And he insisted that the realization of the Self-that is, becoming and being Divinity inevitably led to seeing Divinity manifest everywhere.

And inspired with this vision like another Vedic sage, he addressed the vast mass of humanity before him as "heirs of Immortal Bliss" and exclaimed with apostolic power:

Yea, the Hindu refuses to call you sinners! Ye are the children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth sinners? It is a sin to call a man so; it is a standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are not bodies; matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter.

Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of unforgiving laws, not an endless prison of cause and effect, but that at the head of all these laws, in and through every particle of matter and force, stands One, "by whose command the wind blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain, and death stalks upon the earth." And what is His nature? "He is everywhere, the Pure and formless One, the Almighty and the All merciful. . . ." [And the Swami had said earlier:] "Knowing Him alone you shall be saved from death over again", and attain Immortality.

But what of the polytheism in Hinduism? He explained the psychological necessity of lower forms of religious ideas and worship; of prayers and ceremonies as aids to the purifica¬tion of mind, and image-worship as a help to spiritual con¬centration. There can be no idolatry where the image stands as an objectified symbol of Divinity. And he said that with the Hindus, moreover, religion is not centred in doctrinal assent or dissent, but in realization. Surveyed in this light, forms and symbols and ceremonials are seen to be the supports, the helps of spiritual childhood, which the Hindu gradually transcends as he progresses towards spiritual manhood; even these helps are not necessary for everyone or compulsory in Hinduism. The Swami saw Unity in variety in religion, and said, "Contradictions come from the same truth adapting itself to the varying circumstances of different natures. And these little variations are necessary for purposes of adaptation. But in the heart of everything the same truth reigns." In conclusion he presented the ideal of a universal religion, having no temporal, spatial, or sectarian bounds but including every attitude of the human mind, from the savage to the most enlightened, in a grand synthesis, all going in their own way towards the Goal. The Swami closed his address with the following words:

Offer such a religion and all the nations will follow you. Asoka's council was a council of the Buddhist faith. Akbar's, though more to the purpose, was only a parlour meeting. It was reserved for America to proclaim to all quarters of the globe that the Lord is in every religion.

May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews, the Father in Heaven of the Christians, give strength to you to carry out your noble idea. The star arose in the East; it travelled steadily towards the West, sometimes dimmed and sometimes effulgent, till it made a circuit of the world, and now it is again rising on the very horizon of the East, the borders of the Sanpo, a thousand fold more effulgent than it ever was before.

Hail Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been given to thee, who never dipped her hand in her neighbour's blood, who never found out that the shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing one's neighbours, it has been given to thee to march at the vanguard of civilization with the flag of harmony.

Certainly it is not going beyond the bounds of just apprecia¬tion to say that the Swami's paper on Hinduism was the most far-reaching and prophetic utterance in the history of religions, pointing out as it did the truth of Oneness, of Realization, and of the Divinity of Man. Its ringing declarations of an all-inclusive ideal sounded the death-knell of the sectarianism which had drenched the earth so often with human blood and barred the progress of civilization in the name of religion. Its unique features were its acceptance of all faiths and creeds as valid paths, and its spirit of religious cooperation and harmony. It had no note of criticism or of antagonism. It went counter to many of the dogmas of the various sects; yet none were attacked; indeed his definition of a universal religion, so startling in its novelty, struck at the very root of all sectarian thought. He spoke with authority, for he was a man of realization. In all the solemnity of direct vision, he preached the realization of spiritual truth as opposed to the blind credulity that most creeds uncompromisingly demand. Through him the whole import and effulgence of Divine consciousness bore in upon the Parliament, and thousands of those who were brought up in a particular religious belief saw on that day the universality of Truth and the oneness of all religious realization.

The Swami was undoubtedly in that hour at the summit of his illustrious career, preaching, through the Parliament, to all peoples of the earth, the sovereignty of human nature, its divinity, and the unity of all souls. And in that hour he was acclaimed by this vast representative assembly of nations an apostle of a new order of religious thought; he became a world figure, his name ever to be associated with the gospel of the divinity of man. He made Christianity itself revalue its contents.

But his greatest service was to India, for by revealing the unity of Indian religious ideals, a unity that had not yet found self conscious expression in the communal consciousness of Hinduism, he conferred a great dignity upon the Hindu outlook on life. Definitely stated, the principal contribution to Hinduism that the Swami's address embodied was: first, his philosophical and religious synthesis of the faith of his forefathers; second, the idea of the Mother-Church, embracing all the forms, from the lowest to the highest, of its religious vision; and third, though not least, the unshakeable position that he won for Hinduism by his scholarly and spiritual interpretation, thus giving it prestige among the enlightened thinkers and theologians of the West and raising it in the estimation of the whole Western world. And the most eloquent elements in all these triumphs were his commanding personality, his supreme personal realization, and the unimpeachable authority of his statements.

Of the Swami's address before the Parliament of Religions, it may be said that when he began to speak, it was of the religious ideas of the Hindus; but when he ended, Hinduism had been created. . . .

For it was no experience of his own that rose to the lips of the Swami Vivekananda there. He did not even take advantage of the occasion, to tell the story of his Master. Instead of either of these, it was the religious consciousness of India that spoke through him, the message of his whole people, as determined by their whole past. And as he spoke in the youth and noonday of the West, a nation, sleeping in the shadows of the darkened half of earth, on the far side of the Pacific, waited in spirit for the words that would be borne on the dawn that was travelling towards them, to reveal to them the secret of their own greatness and strength.

Others stood beside the Swami Vivekananda, on the same platform as he, as apostles of particular creeds and churches. But it was his glory that he came to preach a religion to which each of these was, in his own words, "only a travelling, a coming up, of different men and women, through various conditions and circumstances to the same goal." He stood there, as he declared, to tell of One who had said of them all, not that one or another was true, in this or that respect, or for this or that reason, but that "All these are threaded upon Me, as pearls upon a string. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power, raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there." To the Hindu, says Vivekananda, "Man is not travelling from error to truth, but climbing up from truth to truth, from truth that is lower to truth that is higher." This, and the teaching of Mukti-the doctrine that "Man is to become divine by realizing the divine," that religion is perfected in us only when it has led us to "Him who is the one life in a universe of death, Him who is the constant basis of an ever changing world, that One who is the only soul, of which all souls are but delusive manifestations"-may be taken as the two great outstanding truths which, authenticated by the longest and most complex experience in human history, India proclaimed through him to the modern world of the West.

For India herself, the short address forms, as has been said, a chief Charter of Enfranchisement. Hinduism in its wholeness, the speaker bases on the Vedas, but he spiritualizes our conception of the word, even while he utters it. To him, all that is true is Veda. "By the Vedas," he says, "no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times." Incidentally, he discloses his conception of the Sanatana Dharma. . . . To his mind, there could be no sect, no school, no sincere religious experience of the Indian people however like an aberration it might seem to the individual-that might rightly be excluded from the embrace of Hinduism. And of this Indian Mother-Church, according to him, the distinctive doctrine is that of the Ishta devata, the right of each soul to chose its own path, and to seek God in its own way. . . .

Yet would not this inclusion of all, this freedom of each, be the glory of Hinduism that it is, were it not for her supreme call, of sweetest promise: "Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! Even ye that dwell in higher spheres! For I have found that Ancient One who is beyond all darkness, all delusion. And knowing Him, ye also shall be saved from death." Here is the word for the sake of which all the rest exists and has existed. Here is the crowning realization, into which all others are resolvable.

Perhaps it was precisely because the women of the 1890s took life and themselves so seriously that they took Swamiji seriously, instinctively finding in him a symbol of the freedom and dignity which they knew to be their birthright and which they were inexorably winning for themselves.

From the very start, Swamiji's Christian opponents attributed his tremendous popularity among the American women to the brilliant color of his robe and turban.

The fact was, however, that women had taken over the cultural life of the nation. While the men attended to mating money hand over fist, the women saw to it that the country did not thereby become brutalized. Although American women still had no economic freedom or political voice, their position was, on the whole and for that age, an exalted one.

"Nowhere were they more honored and protected, nowhere given wider scope for the employment of their talents and virtues," Henry Steele Commanger wrote of the late ¬nineteenth-century American woman. "In all matters of church and school, women took the lead. . . . Women not only controlled education and religion but largely dictated the standards of literature and art and clothed culture so ostentatiously in feminine garb that the term itself came to have connotations of effeminacy

Christians must always be ready for good criticism, and I hardly think that you will mind if I make a little criticism. You Christians, who are so fond of sending out missionaries to save the soul of the heathen--why do you not try to save their bodies from starvation? In India, during the terrible famines, thousands died from hunger, yet you Christians did nothing. You erect churches all through India, but the crying evil in the East is not religion--they have religion enough--but it is bread that the suffering millions of burning India cry out for with parched throats. They ask us for bread, but we give them stones. It is an insult to a starving people to offer them religion; it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics. In India a priest that preached for money would lose caste and be spat upon by the people. I came here to seek aid for my impoverished people, and I fully realised how difficult it was to get help for heathens from Christians in a Christian land.

On September 20, the day following his paper on Hinduism, the Swami commented on the fact that it was not religion of which the Indians were in crying need, but bread. It was a short impromptu address-later entitled "Religion Not the Crying Need of India"-but it embodied his solution of India's pressing problems. He stated also, that what had brought him to the far West was to seek aid for his impoverished people. By his forthright words the Parliament was made aware that the man who stood before it was not only a monk, but a patriot as well.

On this day, Houghton tells us, "The Hall of Columbus . . . could not accommodate all who endeavored to gain admittance." And from the Chicago Inter Ocean of September 20 one learns that_x000d_ Great crowds of people, the most of whom were women, pressed around the doors leading to the hall of Columbus, an hour before the time stated for opening the afternoon session, for it had been announced that Swami Vivekananda, the popular Hindu Monk, who looks so much like McCullough's Othello, was to speak. Ladies, ladies everywhere filled the great auditorium._x000d_ _x000d_ Men were, of course, also present among those crowds: ministers, priests, and laymen. There was, no doubt, electricity in the air, and before long it began to crackle, eventually calling forth one of Swamiji's short but flaming rebukes.

Swamiji's "cantankerous remarks" were by way of preface to his central and official statement to the Parliament-his paper on Hinduism, which had been scheduled to come last on the afternoon's program and for which the audience had waited with fortitude._x000d_ They gave no outward sign of impatience through the delivery of three classic essays which separated them from Vivekananda's eloquence [the Inter Ocean commented], but it was evident from the applause which greeted the Oriental about 5 o'clock, as in his orange garb he arose to speak, that had he spoken first instead of last some of the great audience might not have been present at the close of the session.

It was when the applause died down that Swamiji dashed -into what the Dubuque Times chose to call his "savage attack on Christian nations: ' The Chicago Tribune of September 20, which touched on his preliminary remarks in two articles, gave quite a different picture. There Swamiji is seen as neither "savage" nor "cantankerous." Indeed, "heroic" would be a more appropriate word. The first article read in part as follows:_x000d_ In the afternoon Swami Vivekananda, a Hindoo monk, was the orator, who, with his quick eloquence and graceful manner, caught the sympathy of the audience as Dr. Haweis had in the morning. He spoke of the patronizing way in which he and his fellow Orientals had been treated by some of the speakers at the parliament. . . ._x000d_ The Tribune's second mention of Swamiji's rebuke of the outspoken intolerance that had marked the afternoon read in part:_x000d_ Dr. Noble then presented Swami Vivekananda, the Hindoo monk, who was applauded loudly as he stepped forward to the center of the platform. He wore an orange robe, bound with a scarlet sash, and a pale yellow turban. The customary smile was on his handsome face and his eyes shone with animation. Said he: [The quotation here reads identically with that in the Dubuque Times and then continues:] I have sat here today and I have heard the height of intolerance. I have heard the creed of the Moslem applauded, when today the Moslem sword is carrying destruction into India. Blood and the sword are not for the Hindu, whose religion is based on the law of love._x000d_ (When the applause had ceased Mr. Vivekananda went [on] to read his paper. . . .)

The Swami was not only brilliant but strong in the hour of his unparalleled success. Just before reading his paper on Hinduism he again took the Parliament to task. Of this incident the Chicago Tribune of September 20 wrote:_x000d_ _x000d_ Dr. Noble presented Swami Vivekananda, the Hindu monk, who was applauded loudly as he stepped forward to the centre of the platform. He wore an orange robe, bound with a scarlet sash, and a pale yellow turban. The customary smile was on his handsome face and his eyes shone with animation. Said he; "We, who have come from the East, have sat here day after day and have been told in a patronizing way that we ought to accept Christianity because Christian nations are the most prosperous. We look about us and we see England the most prosperous Christian nation in the world, with her foot on the neck of 250,000,000 Asiatics. We look back into history and see that the prosperity of Christian Europe began with Spain. Spain's prosperity began with the invasion of Mexico. Christianity wins its prosperity by cutting the throats of its fellow men. At such a price the Hindoo will not have prosperity. I have sat here today and I have heard the height of intolerance. . . . Blood and the sword are not for the Hindu, whose religion is based on the law of love."_x000d_ When the applause had ceased, Mr. Vivekananda went [on] to read his paper._x000d_ Never catering to popularity, the Swami could assume a severely critical attitude. But his love was too deep and sincere to be misunderstood, and his rebukes were accepted by a large majority of the audience in the same spirit of brotherhood in which he gave them. So also was accepted his valiant defence of Hinduism. He found that India and her spiritual ideas had indeed been misrepresented and felt that he must constantly reveal and uphold the merits of the Hindu religion. He always sought to give Hinduism its rightful status in the West. And to the incredulous jubilation of the Indian people he succeeded.

But these combined fragments did not add up to a quarter of the whole. The Christian Herald of October 11, gave a few additional quotations; but it was the Chicago Inter Ocean of September 21 that printed what appears to have been the full address, taken down on the spot.

Another session held on Friday morning [September 22] was devoted to orthodox Hinduism. Swami Vivekananda, a Brahmin Sanyasi or monk, spoke of the teachings of his religion and answered questions put by the audience. Hundreds of questions were asked by men and women of various creeds, Catholics, Protestants, Clergymen, Theosophists, nationalists, etc. The hall was crowded and immense enthusiasm prevailed; and yet between this heterogeneous audience and this pagan teacher there was no disagreeable friction whatever.

We have seen earlier that in addition to speaking at the plenary session of the Parliament, the Swami gave a number of addresses before the Scientific Section, whose President, the Honourable Merwin-Marie Snell, became a great friend of his and an ardent advocate of Hinduism. The first time the Swami spoke in these conferences, as recorded in the Rev. J. H. Barrows's The World's Parliament of Religions, was on the morning of September 22, when he discussed "Orthodox Hinduism and the Vedanta Philosophy". "Hall III was crowded to over-flowing," the Chicago Interocean wrote of this occasion, "and hundreds of questions were asked by uditors and answered by the great sannyasi with wonderful skill and lucidity."

According to reports in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Inter Ocean and several other Chicago newspapers, Hall 7 was crowded to discomfort that afternoon, and all of the "bright robed delegates, who occupied the platform with Mrs. Potter Palmer and Mrs. Charles Henrotin, made it very clear that the condition of women in the East was not at all what Westerners had been led to believe. Swamiji, for one, said in part:

. . . The idea of perfect womanhood is perfect independence. The central idea of the life of a modern Hindu lady is her chastity. The wife is the centre of a circle, the fixity of which depends upon her chastity. . . . The Hindu women are very spiritual and very religious, perhaps more so than any other women in the world. If we can preserve these beautiful characteristics and at the same time develop the intellects of our women, the Hindu woman of the Future will be the ideal woman of the world!

This had been a crowded day for Swamiji. He had spoken both morning and afternoon at the Scientific Section, where many questions had been asked him, and had then somehow managed to be present at Mrs. Palmer's special session on women.

These talks evidently pleased Mrs. Pahner very much indeed, for on the afternoon of Friday, September 22, a repeat performance, so to speak, was held in Hall 7 of the Art Institute.

Swami Vivekananda, at a special meeting, discussed the present and future of the women of the East. He said, "The best thermometer to the progress of a nation is its treatment of its women. In ancient Greece there was absolutely no difference in the state of man and woman. The idea of perfect equality existed. No Hindu can be a priest until he is married, the idea being that a single man is only half a man, and imperfect. The idea of perfect womanhood is perfect independence. The central idea of the life of a modern Hindu lady is her chastity. The wife is the centre of a circle, the fixity of which depends upon her chastity. It was the extreme of this idea which caused Hindu widows to be burnt. The Hindu women are very spiritual and very religious, perhaps more so than any other women in the world. If we can preserve these beautiful characteristics and at the same time develop the intellects of our women, the Hindu woman of the future will be the ideal woman of the world."

In the Scientific Section yesterday morning Swami Vivekananda spoke on "Orthodox Hinduism." Hall 3 was crowded to overflowing and hundreds of questions were asked by auditors and answered by the great Sannyasi with wonderful skill and lucidity. At the close of the session he was thronged with eager questioners who begged him to give a semi-public lecture somewhere on the subject of his religion. He said that he already had the project under consideration.

Swami Vivekananda said, "All the words spoken at this parliament come to the common conclusion that the brotherhood of man is the much-to-be-desired end. Much has been said for this brotherhood as being a natural condition, since we are all children of one God. Now, there are sects that do not admit of the existence of God--that is, a Personal God. Unless we wish to leave those sects out in the cold--and in that case our brotherhood will not be universal--we must have our platform broad enough to embrace all mankind. It has been said here that we should do good to our fellow men, because every bad or mean deed reacts on the doer. This appears to me to savour of the shopkeeper--ourselves first, our brothers afterwards. I think we should love our brother whether we believe in the universal fatherhood of God or not, because every religion and every creed recognises man as divine, and you should do him no harm that you might not injure that which is divine in him."

His days were crowded indeed; yet while the Parliament was in session he spoke on invitation at least once outside its halls, delivering on Sunday, September 24, a lecture entitled "The Love of God" at the Third Unitarian Church in Chicago. This was the first of many lectures he was to give from a Unitarian pulpit in the United States.

In addition to speaking again at least once, and possibly twice, at the Scientific Section, he spoke at an afternoon session of the Universal Religious Unity Congress. It is true that his talk before this congress, as quoted in the Chicago papers (and in volume eight of the Complete Works), seems to have been brief, yet one cannot but remember that hie appearance at such sessions involved not only speaking, but sitting and listening at times endlessly. Nor was the brevity of Swamiji's talk before the Religious Unity Congress any measure of the force behind it or of its impact. The few sentences that have come down to us constitute a treatise on comparative ethics that must have shattered the more complacent among his Christian brothers. Yet he spoke quietly:_x000d_ _x000d_ . . . Much has been said for [the brotherhood of man] as being a natural condition, since we are all children of one God. Now, there are sects that do not admit of the existence of God that is, a Personal God. Unless we to leave those sects out in the cold and in that case our brotherhood will not be universal we must have our platform broad enough to embrace all mankind. It has been said here that we should do good to our fellowmen, because every bad or mean deed reacts on the doer. This appears to me to savour of the shopkeeper ourselves first, our brothers afterwards, I think we should love our brother whether we believe in the universal fatherhood of God or not, because every religion and every creed recognises man as divine, and you should do him no harm that you might not injure that which is divine in him._x000d_ Thus it was the "heathen" who pointed out to his Christian brethren the universal basis for religious unity among mennot vice versa.

An audience that filled the auditorium of the Third Unitarian Church at Laflin and Monroe streets heard Swami Vivekananda preach yesterday morning. The subject of his sermon was the love of God, and his treatment of the theme was eloquent and unique. He said that God was worshipped in all parts of the world, but by different names and in different ways. It is natural for men, he said, to worship the grand and the beautiful, and that religion was a portion of their nature. The need of God was felt by all, and His love prompted them to deeds of charity, mercy, and justice. All men loved God because He was love itself. The speaker had heard since coming to Chicago a great deal about the brotherhood of man. He believed that a still stronger tie connected them, in that all are the offsprings of the love of God. The brotherhood of man was the logical sequence of God as the Father of all. The speaker said he had travelled in the forests of India and slept in caves, and from his observation of nature he had drawn the belief that there was something above the natural law that kept men from wrong, and that, he concluded, was the love of God. If God had spoken to Christ, Mohammed, and the Rishis of the Vedas, why did He not speak also to him, one of his children?_x000d_ "Indeed, he does speak to me", the Swami continued, "and to all His children. We see Him all around us and are impressed continually by the boundlessness of His love, and from that love we draw the inspiration for our well-being and well-doing."

On page 200 of volume eight of the Complete Works is a report of a lecture entitled "The Love of God," which Swamiji delivered on Sunday, September 24, at the Third Unitarian Church, and which may have been the semipublic lecture he had been requested to give. This lecture was the first he delivered from a Unitarian pulpit and marked the beginning of a hospitality on the part of Unitarian ministers that was to stand the American public in good stead, Unitarian pulpits being almost the only ones in America open to a Hindu monk¬ particularly to a Hindu monk as forthright as Swamiji. The above mentioned report, taken from the Chicago Herald of September 25, has not been reproduced in full in the Complete Works, and as the omitted portion gives an insight into the stance that was necessary for the Unitarian minister of the Midwest to take in connection with Swamiji, that portion is given here:

The pastor, Rev. Mr. Blake, said that he was glad to invite Mr. Vivekenanda into his pulpit and to introduce him, believing still in the faith of his fathers. Rev. Mr. Blake said he would turn his hand neither one way or the other to make such a man a Christian. He would do all he could to make such a man think for himself along the lines of the exalted spiritual conceptions which he had acquired.

I am not a Buddhist, as you have heard, and yet I am. If China, or Japan, or Ceylon follow the teachings of the Great Master, India worships him as God incarnate on earth. You have just now heard that I am going to criticise Buddhism, but by that I wish you to understand only this. Far be it from me to criticise him whom I worship as God incarnate on earth. But our views about Buddha are that he was not understood properly by his disciples. The relation between Hinduism (by Hinduism, I mean the religion of the Vedas) and what is called Buddhism at the present day is nearly the same as between Judaism and Christianity. Jesus Christ was a Jew, and Shakya Muni was a Hindu. The Jews rejected Jesus Christ, nay, crucified him, and the Hindus have accepted Shakya Muni as God and worship him. But the real difference that we Hindus want to show between modern Buddhism and what we should understand as the teachings of Lord Buddha lies principally in this: Shakya Muni came to preach nothing new. He also, like Jesus, came to fulfil and not to destroy. Only, in the case of Jesus, it was the old people, the Jews, who did not understand him, while in the case of Buddha, it was his own followers who did not realise the import of this teachings. As the Jew did not understand the fulfilment of the Old Testament, so the Buddhist did not understand the fulfilment of the truths of the Hindu religion. Again, I repeat, Shakya Muni came not to destroy, but he was the fulfilment, the logical conclusion, the logical development of the religion of the Hindus.

The religion of the Hindus is divided into two parts: the ceremonial and the spiritual. The spiritual portion is specially studied by the monks. In that there is no caste. A man from the highest caste and a man from the lowest may become a monk in India, and the two castes become equal. In religion there is no caste; caste is simply a social institution. Shakya Muni himself was a monk, and it was his glory that he had the large-heartedness to bring out the truths from the hidden Vedas and throw them broadcast all over the world. He was the first being in the world who brought missionarising into practice nay, he was the first to conceive the idea of proselytising.

The great glory of the Master lay in his wonderful sympathy for everybody, especially for the ignorant and the poor. Some of his disciples were Brahmins. When Buddha was teaching, Sanskrit was no more the spoken language in India. It was then only in the books of the learned. Some of Buddha's Brahmin disciples wanted to translate his teachings into Sanskrit, but he distinctly told them, "I am for the poor, for the people; let me speak in the tongue of the people." And so to this day the great bulk of his teachings are in the vernacular of that day in India.

Whatever may be the position of philosophy, whatever may be the position of metaphysics, so long as there is such a thing as death in the world, so long as there is such a thing as weakness in the human heart, so long as there is a cry going out of the heart of man in his very weakness, there shall be a faith in God.

On the philosophic side the disciples of the Great Master dashed themselves against the eternal rocks of the Vedas and could not crush them, and on the other side they took away from the nation that eternal God to which every one, man or woman, clings so fondly. And the result was that Buddhism had to die a natural death in India. At the present day there is not one who calls oneself a Buddhist in India, the land of its birth. But at the same time, Brahminism lost something that reforming zeal, that wonderful sympathy and charity for everybody, that wonderful leaven which Buddhism had brought to the masses and which had rendered Indian society so great that a Greek historian who wrote about India of that time was led to say that no Hindu was known to tell an untruth and no Hindu woman was known to be unchaste.

Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor Buddhism without Hinduism. Then realise what the separation has shown to us, that the Buddhists cannot stand without the brain and philosophy of the Brahmins, nor the Brahmin without the heart of the Buddhist. This separation between the Buddhists and the Brahmins is the cause of the downfall of India. That is why India is populated by three hundred millions of beggars, and that is why India has been the slave of conquerors for the last thousand years. Let us then join the wonderful intellect of the Brahmins with the heart, the noble soul, the wonderful humanising power of the Great Master.

On the 26th the Swami delivered before the Parliament a short address called "Buddhism, the fulfillment of Hinduism". He pointed out that Hinduism was divided, as it were, into two branches, one being the ceremonial and the other the purely spiritual. The Buddha interpreted the spiritual elements of the dharma, with their natural social conclusions, to the people. He was the first Teacher in the world to carry on missionary work and to conceive the idea of proselytizing. "Shakya Muni", said the Swami, "came not to destroy, but he was the fulfillment, the logical conclusion, the logical development of the religion of the Hindus." At the close he said, "Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor Buddhism without Hinduism", and he emphasized that the need in India today was to "join the wonderful intellect of the Brahmin with the heart, the noble soul, the wonderful humanizing power of the Great Master".

He had been invited to give this last on the evening of September 26, at the end (again) of a long session devoted to Buddhist papers, both Japanese and Indian, some of which were read by interpreters and almost all of which were exceedingly dry.

The World's Parliament of Religions has become an accomplished fact, and the merciful Father has helped those who laboured to bring it into existence, and crowned with success their most unselfish labour._x000d_ My thanks to those noble souls whose large hearts and love of truth first dreamed this wonderful dream and then realised it. My thanks to the shower of liberal sentiments that has overflowed this platform. My thanks to this enlightened audience for their uniform kindness to me and for their appreciation of every thought that tends to smooth the friction of religions. A few jarring notes were heard from time to time in this harmony. My special thanks to them, for they have, by their striking contrast, made general harmony the sweeter._x000d_ Much has been said of the common ground of religious unity. I am not going just now to venture my own theory. But if any one here hopes that this unity will come by the triumph of any one of the religions and the destruction of the other, to him I say, "Brother, yours is an impossible hope." Do I wish that the Christian would become Hindu? God forbid. Do I wish that the Hindu or Buddhist would become Christian? God forbid._x000d_ The seed is put in the ground, and earth and air and water are placed around it. Does the seed become the earth, or the air, or the water? No. It becomes a plant, it develops after the law of its own growth, assimilates the air, the earth, and the water, converts them into plant substance, and grows into a plant._x000d_ Similar is the case with religion. The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth._x000d_ If the Parliament of Religions has shown anything to the world it is this: It has proved to the world that holiness, purity and charity are not the exclusive possessions of any church in the world, and that every system has produced men and women of the most exalted character. In the face of this evidence, if anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and point out to him that upon the banner of every religion will soon be written, in spite of resistance: "Help and not Fight," "Assimilation and not Destruction," "Harmony and Peace and not Dissension."

On September 27, the Swami delivered his "Address at the Final Session", and here he again rose to one of his most prophetic and luminous moods; he declared:_x000d_ The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth. . . ._x000d_ If the Parliament of Religions has shown anything to the world it is this: It has proved to the world that holiness, purity, and charity are not the exclusive possessions of any church in the world, and that every system has produced men and women of the most exalted character. In the face of this evidence, if anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and point out to him that upon the banner of every religion will soon be written, in spite of resistance: "Help and not Fight", "Assimilation and not Destruction", "Harmony and Peace and not Dissension".

Long before the hour for the opening of the evening session the capacity of the great hall was taxed to the utmost. The subject of the evening, "The Defense of Buddhism," was frequently applauded. Dharmapala, the Buddhist of Ceylon, Vivekananda, and other Hindoo monks were heartily cheered as they took their seats upon the platform. Dr. Alfred W. Momerie, of London, filled the chair. . . ._x000d_ At the conclusion of his paper Mr. Dharmapala asked Mr. Vivekananda, the Brahman monk, to criticise Buddhism. He said that Vivekananda being a priest in a different faith, his criticism would not be partial to the Buddhist. Vivekananda is always received with applause in the parliament and as he stepped forward at the side of Dr. Momerie, the chairman, he was received with generous enthusiasm. The Hindoo monk made a masterly plea for truth in whatever faith it might be found. . . . He had nothing but kind words for Buddhism, and as he gave evidence of his culture in the history which underlies the different Oriental faiths, he closed with that sentiment which has characterized the utterance of all the priests from the Orient and the Occident [?]-a plea for tolerance, and the recognition of essential truth, wherever it may be found. The scholarly language in which he clothed his appeal for a fair hearing and a calm consideration of the qualities which have kept alive the faith to which his life's work is devoted, struck a responsive chord in the audience, and he retired amid a thunder of applause. _x000d_ Perhaps that applause was inspired as well by the breadth of the idea Swamiji expressed at the close of his talk-an idea he was to return to often during his visit in America. "Addressing the picturesque group of Buddhists on the platform, he said," the report continues,_x000d_ We cannot live without you, nor you without us. Then believe what separation has shown to us, that you cannot stand without the brain and philosophy of the Brahman, nor we without your heart. This separation between the Buddhist and the Brahman is the cause of the downfall of India. That is why India is populated by three hundred millions of beggars, and that is why India has been the slave of conquerors for the last one thousand years. Let us, then, join the wonderful intellect of the Brahmans with the heart, the noble soul, the wonderful humanizing power of the great Master.

An eye witness reports: ". . . The last and closing scene of the great Parliament of Religions is one that will live forever in the memory of those who were so fortunate as to be spectators. The great Hall of Columbus was illuminated by a myriad of lights. Every inch of room was used by the greatest crowd that ever sat within its walls. On the stage, beneath the folds of the flags of all nations, were the representatives of all religions. The dull, black and somber raiment of the West only intensified the radiantly contrasted garbs of the Oriental priests." Twice during the evening flashlight photographs were taken of the historic group on the platform.

(In passing it should be noted that in Barrows's history there are three published photographs of "the historic group on the platform:' These were taken on the morning of September 14, the morning of September 21, and the evening of September 27. In the second of these, which has been reproduced in the second edition of the Life, Swamiji has been tentatively identified in the front row of the delegates; I am sorry to say that a comparison with an enlarged and annotated copy of the same picture shows that this is not Swamiji but that "loafer" Narasimhacharya. In the photograph taken on September 27, however, it is probable, though not at present certain, that Swamiji does indeed appear, seated with regal unconcern in the second row of delegates. This scene of the Parliament on the evening of the closing day has been included in the present volume, in addition to a closeup of the platform, showing, among others, Swamiji and Dharmapala.)