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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
the dazzling garb of devotion. Natural selfishness undergoes a miraculous metamorphosis, and haughtily misappropriates the doubtful glory of the religious fervour of renunciation. Still, to desert a sinking ship with the forlorn hope of reaching the safety of a welco:ne shore can hardly be distinguished as an act of exceptional bravery, even though it implies the risk of drifting in dark and unknown waters.
Under the hopeless conditions of social dissolution, the Christian doctrine of the end of the world was received with frightful credulity. Who would not run away from a world doomed to an early destruction ? And since it was encouraged by the temptation of getting a place in the Kingdom of Heaven, the fearful flight naturally became as it were the stampede of a hungry mob towards an incxhaustible store of food. Similarly, when the Hindu persuades himself that the world is but a hallucination, he casily and often cheerfully foregoes its enjoyments, which are placed beyond his reach by the inequities of a religious society. The preconceived notion about the surety of the eternal bliss of a spiritual existence induces the imaginary renunciation of what is not possessed and will never be possessed. It is so very much like the disappointed fox who consoled himself with the deception that the grapes were sour.
Even such impious and temporal considerations as vanity and worldly power played their part in 250
