Book Title: Religious Problem in India
Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophist Office Adyar

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Page 114
________________ 106 THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN INDIA which no modern can match ? Take the Book of the Dead, of Egypt, taking its name from the breasts of the dead from whom it was gathered, and read its snblime utterences, its deep philosophy, its mystic yearnings, and tell me whether in your modern writings, you will find such thought, as that? Does religion grow, has it advanced, is it refined from the crude imaginings of the savage ? Is that the evidence ? or is it the evidence that the Divine Men who gave the knowledge gave the highest at the beginning, and that those who followed have lowered it and not raised it, and by their later ignorance have confused it, instead of illuminating it? I appeal to the literature of the world, as to whose age there is no doubt amongst scholars; I appeal to the Upanishats, even taking them at the miserably short time that the western Orientalist gives to thein; I appeal to the Gāthās of the Zoroastrian ; I appeal to the fragments mburied from the past; and I challenge the modern world— Where is your wisdom that can stand side by side with this ? Ah! yon have a great many facts, you can tell us a great deal abont the outer world, you can explain to as much of the phenomena among which we live; but where is your knowledge of the Divine, where is your knowledge of the heights of morality, and of the depths of philosophic thonght: Your books are child's play beside the thoughts of the ancients, the babbling of children beside the words of the Saviors of the race. In morality, can your loftiest flights of morality

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