________________
152
JAINISM, CHRISTIANITY & SCIENCE
this world of transmigratory life is so full of suffering and pain that you have hardly got over one affiction when its place has been filled up with a dozen others. He who regards himself as happy on account of the possession of wealth and other like objects of desire, has only got hold of a big delusion. The good things of the world aggravate the heat and fever of lust, and depart sooner or later without producing anything like satisfaction, that is, happiness and rest and peace. It is an act of folly to regard oneself as happy when enjoying material prosperity and the like, which are acquired with a lot of trouble and exertion and whichi involve a great deal of additional trouble in guarding and protecting, and which, notwithstanding all this worry and trouble, are ultimately bound to depart, being perishable by nature ! (5) The world is wicked and evil.
" Consider the roads blócked up by robbers, the seas beset with pirates, wars scattered all over the earth with the bloody horror of camps. The whole world 18 wet with mutual blood; and murder, which in the case of an individual is admitted to be a crime, 18 alled a virtue when it is committed wholesale. Impunity 18 claimed or the wicked deeds, not on the plea that they are guiltless, but ecause the cruelty is perpetrated on : grand scale.
"And now, if you turn your eyes and your regards to the cities hemselves, you will behold a concourse more fraught with sadness han any solitude. The gladiatorial games are prepared, that blood bay gladden the lust of cruel eyes. The body is fed up with stronger ood, and the vigorous mass of limbs is enriched with brawn and auscle, that the wretch fattened for punishment may die & harder eath. Man is slaughtered that man may be gratified, and the skill that is best able to kill is an exercise and an art. Crime is not only committed but is taught. What can be said more inhuman,--what more repulsive? Training is undergone to acquire the power of murder, and the achievement of murder is its glory...
