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more attached to our machinery--- all the more because we had ceased to understand the science of social mechanics which they embodied. We attached a superstitious im
portance to maintaining our society exactly in the mould of our Shastras
while in reality that mould had been altered out of recognition centuries ago. We quoted Parasara and
Manu while we followed Raghunandan and custom. This religious fiction was very much like the English superstition about the British constitution which is supposed to be the same thing it was in the days of Lord Somers, but is really a thing Lord Somers would have stared at aghast as an unrecognisable democratic horror. The cause is the same in both. cases-a robust and tenacious society freely developing its machinery in response to its inner needs.
while cherishing and preserving them. Englishman and Hindu have been alike in their tenacions conservatism and their refusal to accept revolution, alike in their respect for law and the thing established, alike in their readiness to change rapidly and steadily if the innovator would only disguise from them the fact that they were changing. The Hindu advanced more slowly because he was an Asiatic in a period of contraction, the Englishinan more quickly because he was an European in a period of expansion. If our social reformers had understood this
Indian characteristic, they might have revolutionized our society with comparatively small friction, but the parade of revolution which they made hampered their cause. Even as it is, Indian Society, in Bengal at least, is changing utterly while all the time loudly protesting that it has not changed and will not change. The mould in which Raghunandan cast society, is disintegrating as utterly as the monk of Para ara or Manu has disintegrated. What will replace 1t, s another matter. Samaj and Shastra.
Every Sanj must have it as tra, written or unwritten. Where there is no Social Scripture, there is none the less a minute and rigid codo of social laws binding inen in their minutest actions. The etiquette of the European is no less binding than the minute scrupulosities of Manu or Raghunandan, and it is
KARMAYOGIN.
even more minute and scrupulous. It is a mistake to think that in Europe men can eat as they will, talk as they will, act as they will with impunity. They cannot-or at least
they could not, though one hears of atinge revollitions, and in the days of the suffragette everything is possible. Society everywhere is exacting, scrupulous, minute, pitiless in punishment of slight departures from its code, however absurd and unreasonable that code may be. But while in India, the sanction is religious, in Europe it is social. In India a inan dreaded spiritual inpurity, in Europe he shrinks from the sneers and dislike of his class or his fellows. Social excommunica
tion is always the ultimate penalty.
Revolution.
But in Europe and India alike we seem to stand on the threshold of a vast revolution, political, social and religious, Whatever nation now is the first to solve the problems which are threatening to hammer Governments, creeds, societies into pieces all the world over, will lead the world in the age that is coming. It is our ambition that India should be that nation. But in order that she should be what we wish, it is necessary that she should be capable of unsparing revolution. She must have the courage of her past knowledge and the immensity of soul that will measure itself with her future. This is impossible to England, it is not impossible to India. She has in her something dacmonic, volcanic, elemental-she
can rise above conventions, she can break through formalities and prejudices. But she will not do so unless she is sure that she has God's command to do it,-unless tho Avatar descends and leads. She will follow a Buddha or a Mohammad wherever he will lead her, because he is to her either God himself, or his servant, because as Sri Ramakrishna would have put it, she saw the chuprus. It was a little of that daemonic, volcanic, elemental thing in the heart of the Indian which Lord Curzon lashed into life in 1905. But the awakening was too narrow in its scope, too gebly supported with strength, too ill-informed in knowledge. Above all the Avatar had not descended. So the movement has drawn back to await a farther and truer impulse. Meanwhile let it inform its intelleet and put moro iron into its heart, a diviner manifestation.
mm
THE STRENGTH OF STILLNESS.
There are two great forces in the universe, silence and speech. Silence prepares, speech creates. Silence tion. Silence compels, speech peracts, speech gives the impulse to acsuades. The immense and inserutable processes of the world all perfect themselves within, in a deep and august silence, covered by a noisy and misleading surface of sound-the stir of innumerable waves above, the fathomless resistless mass of the ocean's waters below, Men see the waves, they hear the rumour and the thousand voices and by these they judge the course of the future and the heart of God's ten they misjudge. Therefore it intention; but in nine cases out of is said that in History it is always the unexpected that happens. Bus it would not be the unexpected if superfices and look into substance, men could turn their eyes from if they accustomed themselves to put beyond them to the secret and disAside appearances and penetrate ing to the noise of life and listened guised reality, if they ceased listenrather to its silence.
The greatest exertions are made with the breath held in; the faster. the breathing, the more the dissipation of energy. He who in action, can cease from breathing,-naturally. spontaneously, is the master of Prana, the energy that acts and oreates throughout the universe. It is a common experience of the
Yogin that when thought ceases,
breathing ceases,-the entire kunbhak effected by the Hathayogin with infinite trouble and gigantie effort, establishes itself easily and happily, but when thought begins again, the breath resumes its activity. But when the thought flows without the resumption of the inbreathing and outbreathing, then the Pran is truly couquered. This is a law of Nature. When we strive to act, the forces of Nature do their will with us; when we grow still, we become their master. But there two kinds of stillness-the helpless stillness of inertia, which heralds dissolution, and the stillness of assured sovereignty which commands the harmony of life. It is the sovereign stillness which is the calm of the Yogin. The more complete the calm, the mightier the yogic power, the greater the force in action.
aru
