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“You are a Ksahtree, a soldier; your duty is to fight. Do your duty, and leave the consequences of it to him who commanded the duty. You cannot kill these men’s souls any more than they can yours. You can only kill their mortal bodies; the fate of their souls and yours depends on their moral state. Kill their bodies, then, if it be your duty, instead of tormenting yourself with scruples, which are not really scruples of conscience, only selfish fears of harm to yourself, and leave their souls to the care of Him who made them, and knows them, and cares more for them than you do.”

This seems to be the plain outcome of the teaching. What is it, mutatis mutandis, but the sermon “cold-blooded” or not, which every righteous soldier has to preach to himself, day by day, as long as his duty commands him to kill his human brothers?

Yet the fact is undeniable that Hindoo Mysticism has failed of practical result–that it has died down into brutal fakeerism. We look in vain, however, in Mr. Vaughan’s chapter for an explanation of this fact, save his assertion, which we deny, that Hindoo Mysticism was in essence and at its root wrong and rotten. Mr. Maurice (“Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy,” p. 46) seems to point to a more charitable solution. “The Hindoo,” he says, “whatsoever vast discovery he may have made at an early period of a mysterious Teacher near him, working on his spirit, who is at the same time Lord over nature, began the search from himself–he had no other point from whence to begin–and therefore it ended in himself. The purification of his individual soul became practically his highest conceivable end; to carry out that he must separate from society. Yet the more he tries to escape self the more he finds self; for what are his thoughts about Brahm, his thoughts about Krishna, save his own thoughts? Is Brahm a projection of his own soul? To sink in him, does it mean to be nothing? Am I, after all, my own law? And hence the downward career into stupid indifferentism, even into Antinomian profligacy.”

The Hebrew, on the other hand, begins from the belief of an objective external God, but One who cares for more than his individual soul; as One who is the ever-present guide, and teacher, and ruler of his whole nation; who regards that nation as a whole, a one person, and that not merely one present generation, but all, past or future, as a one “Israel”–lawgivers, prophets, priests, warriors. All classes are His ministers. He is essentially a political deity, who cares infinitely for the polity of a nation, and therefore bestows one upon them–“a law of Jehovah.” Gradually, under this teaching, the Hebrew rises to the very idea of an inward teacher, which the Yogi had, and to a far purer and clearer form of that idea; but he is not tempted by it to selfish individualism, or contemplative isolation, as long as he is true to the old Mosaic belief, that this being is the Political Deity, “the King of Kings.” The Pharisee becomes a selfish individualist just because he has forgotten this; the Essene, a selfish “mystic” for the same reason; Philo and the Jewish mystics of Alexandria lose in like manner all notion that Jehovah is the lawgiver, and ruler, and archetype of family and of national life. Christianity retained the idea; it brought out the meaning of the old Jewish polity in its highest form; for that very reason it was able to bring out the meaning of the “mystic” idea in its highest form also, without injury to men’s work as members of families, as citizens, as practical men of the world; and so to conquer at last that Manichaean hatred of marriage and parentage, which from the first to the sixteenth century shed its Upas shade over the Church.