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SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS.
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captive slave of death, and usually its victim, too, man nevertheless aspires to attain happiness, to avoid all those accidents and incidents which might directly or indirectly tend to embitter life. Alas ! how often has not this dream of everlasting joy, almost beyond the conception of the majority of terror-stricken men and women, been nipped in the bud, by the physical body being taken to be the man? Many think : death is the dissolution of form, and man (body) only a compound; therefore, is it not futile to think of eternal life? And, since eternal life is taken to be a hallucination of the deceitful fantasy, unalloyed joy also becomes a delusion of the intellect.
Such is the conflict of false conceptions and high aspirations of the human soul. Dogmatism, which fears rational intellect, and, therefore, prudently reserves its insinuating eloquence for those whose minds are either too immature or too much paralyzed for consistent thought, offers to help the soul over the stile by its promises of eternal life in the hereafter. Islam, the youngest of creeds, with the exception of Sikhism and one or two other minor faiths, such as the Brahmo-Samaj, may be assumed to be the first to open fire. Asked to prove its doctrine, it declares : 'Did not the Prophet say so; is not his word sufficient? who ever dared to deny his authority?' Christianity, finding the opportunity favourable, now puts in its appearance to ask : whom would you be guided by, the servant, or the Son ? The master, no doubt, is the Son, never the servant, or messenger. Here is the chance which Puranic Hinduism has been seeking, and it quickly silences both with the statement that the Father,
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