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if lofty flights there be, as the Data of Ethics of Herbert Spencer, as one of the greatest of modern writers-be put beside the ethical teachings of the Lord Buddha, and does the world find in it the inspiration to noble living that His words have exercised for more than 2,000 years?
The evidence is overwhelming. Every religion looks back to its Founder for its highest teachings. Can the Archbishop of to-day rival the teachings of Christ? Can the Musulman Moulvi of to-day rival the teachings of the great Arabian Prophet? Can the Zoroastrian Mobed speak such words of morality as breathe from his own ancient literature? Where is the modern Brahmana who can speak as Shri Krshna and Ramachandra spoke, or give us the noble morality that we find in the ancient literature? I appeal to history against imagination; I appeal to facts against western fancies; and I declare-and I challenge any one who had studied to deny that the proof is clear of Divine Wisdom underlying all religions, that it is the diseased fancy of the comparative mythologist which has seen in ignorance the root of all which has made man heroic, of all which has comforted man in death and ennobled him in life, which has driven the martyr to the stake, which has sent the hero joyfully to death, which has made the happiness and the glory of the Saint and the wisdom of the Sage. Let them be silent before an antiquity that they cannot rival, before the teachings of the divine Guardians of humanity that no modern pigmy can even touch with the tips of his fingers.
THEOSOPHY
