Chapter (অধ্যায়): XIX THE SWAMI'S ESTIMATE OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY PAGE-229Page: 229 of 336
denly there appeared before him a man tall and largely built, in whose face was a calm so deep and so established, that it seemed to the lad, looking up at him, as if both pain and pleasure had been forgotten during infinite time. The devotee rose from his seat, and prostrated himself before his visitant; then he stood still, lost in an awestruck gaze.
Suddenly it seemed as if the form before him were about to speak. But at this, a fit of terror overcame the boy, and without waiting to hear, he slipped quietly out of the room, and closed the door behind him! This was the vision to which he had referred, when he spoke of the entrance of Buddha into his room, in his youth. "And I fell at his feet, for I knew it was the Lord Himself." Nor would it be easy to measure how much of the throbbing energy of his feeling about Buddha, - the conviction of his overwhelming 'sanity,' the realisation of his infinite sacrifice and compassion, - was born of that hour in his boyhood, when he had felt that He stood revealed before him.
The third and last of these determining visions, - in so far, at least, as is known to those about him - occurred to the Swami on his way home to India, in January of the year 1897. One gathers that during his travels in Catholic Europe, he had been startled, like others before him, to find the identity of Christianity with Hinduism in a thousand points of familiar detail. The Blessed Sacrament appeared to him to be only