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THE ASPIRANT AND THE TEACHER.
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scholars. You will find that no one of the great treachers of the world ever went into these various explanations of the texts ; there is with them no attempt at “'text-torturing," no eternal playing upon the meaning of words and their roots. They simply taught, while others who have nothing to teach, have taken up a word sometimes, and written a three volume book on its origin, on the man who used it first, and on what that man was accustomed to eat, and how long he slept and so on !
Bhagavan Ramakrishna used to tell a story of some men who went into a mangoorchard and busied themselves in counting the leaves, twigs, and branches of the trees, examining their colour, comparing their size, and noting down everything most carefully, and then getting up a learned discussion on each of these topics, which were undoubtedly highly interesting to them. But one of them, more sensible than the others, did not care for all these things, and
