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THE CHOSEN JDEAL. mania. They want to hear new things just to get a sort of temporary nervous excitement, and when one such exciting influence has had its effect on them, they are ready for another. Religion is with these people a sort of intellectual opium-eating, and there it ends. “There is another sort of men,” says Bhagavân Ramakrishna, "who are like the pearl oyster of the story. The pearl oyster leaves its bed at the bottom of the sea, and comes up to the surface, to catch the rain water when the star Svati is in the ascendant. It floats about on the surface of the sea with its shell wide open until it has succeeded in catching a drop of the rain water, and then it dives deep down to its sea-bed and there rests until it has succeeded in fashioning a beautiful pearl out of that rain drop.”
This is indeed the most poetical and forcible way in which the theory of Ishta Nishtha has ever been put. This Eka
