Chapter (অধ্যায়): I IN LONDON, 1895 PAGE-11Page: 11 of 336
for six long years, with the result that I know every inch of the way! Every inch of the way!"
One or two impressions, however, stand out from those first discourses. Christianity had once meant to me the realisation of God as the Father. But I had long mourned over my own loss of faith in this symbolism, and had desired to study its value as an idea, apart from its objective truth or untruth. For I suspected that such a conception would have its own effect on the character and perhaps on the civilisation of those who held it. This question, however, I had been unable to follow up, for want of material of comparison. And here was one who told us of no less than five systems of worship, founded on similar personifications of the divine idea. He preached a religion which began with the classification of religious ideas!
I was very much struck, further, by the strangeness, as well as the dignity, of some of the Indian conceptions which I now heard of for the first time. The very newness of these metaphors, and of the turn of thought, made them an acquisition. There was the tale, for instance, of the saint who ran after a thief, with the vessels he had dropped in his terror at being discovered, and cast them all at his feet, crying, "O Lord, I knew not that Thou wast there! Take them, they are Thine! Pardon me Thy child!" And again, of the same saint, we heard how he described the bite of a cobra, when at nightfall he recovered by