which is going to spiritualize the material civilization of the world, … Here spiritual activity existed when even Greece did not exist, when Rome was not thought of, when the very fathers of the modern Europeans lived in the German forest, painting themselves blue, … 'Each race has a peculiar bent,' continues the Swami; 'each race has a peculiar mission to fulfil in the life of the world. Political greatness or military power is never the mission of the Hindus. But there has been the other mission given to us: to accumulate, as it were, into a dynamo all the spiritual energy of the race, and that concentrated energy is to pour forth in a deluge on the world whenever circumstances are propitious. Let the Persian, or the Greek, or the Roman, or the Arab, or the Englishman march his battalions and conquer the world, and link the different nations together, and the philosophy and spirituality of India is ready to flow along the new-made channels into the veins of the nations of the world. The calm Hindu's brain must pour its own quota to give to the sum total of human progress. India's gift to the world is the light spiritual.'
These are the views of an Indian sage, only recently dead, spoken on his first return to India from a three years' mission in America and England, and they seem to me full of wisdom and insight. The ways of Nature are mysterious, and her ends are often accomplished by means for which they seem at first never intended. We were driven originally to India for nothing better than trade, to find the wherewithal to supplement our food and dress, and the adornment of our dwellings. But, having gone there, we now find ourselves the means of affording a highly spiritual people the opportunity to develop their peculiar genius, just as the Jews were able to develop their special gift under the Pax Romana, when they had that leisure and freedom from absorption in political affairs which enabled them to develop to the full their spiritual tendencies and found Christianity, while the communications the Romans established
