Are you
passionate, self-willed, ever seeking to gain your own ends,
self-indulgent, and self-centered; or are you gentle, mild, unselfish, quit
of every form of self-indulgence, and are ever ready to give up your own?
If the former, self is your master; if the latter, Truth is the object of
your affection. Do you strive for riches? Do you fight, with passion, for
your party? Do you lust for power and leadership? Are you given to
ostentation and self-praise? Or have you given up the love of riches? Have
you relinquished all strife? Are you content to take the lowest place, and
to be passed by unnoticed? And have you ceased to talk about yourself and
to regard yourself with self-complacent pride? If the former, even though
you may imagine you worship God, the god of your heart is self. If the
latter, even though you may withhold your lips from worship, you are
dwelling with the Most High.
The signs by which the Truth-lover is known are unmistakable. Hear the Holy
Krishna declare them, in Sir Edwin Arnold's beautiful rendering of the
"Bhagavad Gita":--
"Fearlessness, singleness of soul, the will
Always to strive for wisdom; opened hand
And governed appetites; and piety,
And love of lonely study; humbleness,
Uprightness, heed to injure nought which lives
Truthfulness, slowness unto wrath, a mind
That lightly letteth go what others prize;
And equanimity, and charity
Which spieth no man's faults; and tenderness
Towards all that suffer; a contented heart,
Fluttered by no desires; a bearing mild,
Modest and grave, with manhood nobly mixed,
With patience, fortitude and purity;
An unrevengeful spirit, never given
To rate itself too high--such be the signs,
O Indian Prince! of him whose feet are set
On that fair path which leads to heavenly birth!"
When men, lost in the devious ways of error and self, have forgotten the
"heavenly birth," the state of holiness and Truth, they set up artificial
standards by which to judge one another, and make acceptance of, and
adherence to, their own particular theology, the test of Truth; and so men
are divided one against another, and there is ceaseless enmity and strife,
and unending sorrow and suffering.
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