Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)

All which seems to show that here is an element in existence, perhaps the initial elemSi^ which we do hot know how to conquer either because it cannot be conquered or because we have not looked at it with a strong and impartial gaze so as to recognise it calmly and feirly and know what it is. We must look existence^ in the face if our aim is to arrive at a right solution, whatever that solution ifiay^be. And to l<x)k existence in the face is to look God in the face ; for the two cannot be s^y^ed* nor the respK>nsibility for the laws of world-existence be shifted away from Him who created them or from That which constituted it. Yet here too we love to palliate and equivocate. We erect a God of Love and Mercy, a God of good, a God just, righteous and virtuous according to our E 65 2own moral conceptions of justice, virtue and righteousness, and all the rest, we say, is not He or is not His, but was made by some diabolical Power which He suffered for some reason to work out its wicked will or by some dark Ahriman counterbalancing our gracious Ormuzd, or was even the fault of selfish and sinful man who has spoiled what was made originally perfect by God. As if man had created the law of death and devouring in the animal world or that tremendous process by which Nature creates indeed and preserves but in the same step and by the same inextricable action slays and destroys. It is only a few religions which have had the courage _tp._ say Without any reserve, like the Indian, that this enigmatic World-Power is one Deity, one Trinity, to lift up the image of the Force that acts in the world in the figure not pjily of the beneficent Duxg3, but of the terrible Kali in her blood-stained dance of destruction and to say, “This too is the Mother ; this also know to be God ; this too, if thou hast the strength, adore.” And it is significant that the religion which has had this unflinching honesty and tremendous courage, has succeeded in creating a profound and wide-spread spirituality such as no other can parallel. For truth is the foundation of jeal spirituality and course is ite^oiiL fasyai satyam dyatanam. '