________________
CHAPTER V. WE HELP OURSELVES, NOT THE WORLD.
Before considering further how devotion to duty helps us in our spiritual progress, let me place before you in as brief a compass as possible another aspect of what we in India mean by Karma. In every religion there are three parts ; first, there is the philosophy; then there is the mythology; and lastly, there is the ritual. The philosophy is, of course, the essence of every one of the religions ; the mythology gives expression tó, that philosophy and .explains and illustrates it by means of the more or less legendary lives of great men and stories and fables of wonderful things and so on; ritual gives to that philosophy a still more concrete form so that every one may grasp it--ritual is in fact concretised philosophy.
This ritual is Karma; it is necessary in every . religion, because most of us cannot understand
abstract spiritual things until we grow.very much
