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13. UNIVERSAL WORSHIP
'External worship, material worship, is the lowest stage; struggle to rise high for mental prayer is the next stage; the highest stage is where the Lord has been realised.
Even as we kneel before the image we repeat: 'Him the sun cannot express, nor the moon, nor the stars; this lightning cannot express Him, nor what we speak of as fire. Through Him do they all shine' (Upanishad)
Every kind of worship is a necessary stage - '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? Man does not travel from error to Truth, but from Truth to Truth - from lower to higher Truth. 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. A universal religion, then, is the sum total of all and still has infinite space for development.'
[This passage from a talk on Worship given by Swami Vivekananda at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions was quoted by Swami Tripulananda at a WCF Conference on MultiFaith Worship.]
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