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He had at an early age lost faith in the Hindu Pantheon, and to this extent he was a genuine religious reformer, for he waged relentless war against the worship of idols, and whether his claims to Vedantic learning be or be not conceded, his creed was "Back to the Vedas."
Compared to this Vedantic concept of the Absolute, the Christian's simple, and very empirical ideal of eternal happiness is preferable.
When one begins to compare the picture of the Christian Incarnation with that of any and of all those that occupy the Hindu mind, and fill many volumes of Hindu literature, we pass from noon-day light into Egyptian darkness. The doctrine of âtma, or the human self, or soul, is more in accordance with the Sankya than the Vedantic school.
But the Bhagavad Gita does not teach clearly even this Vedantic doctrine. Selfishness is too much stamped upon the Hindu faith. It is too exclusively an individualistic religion. It is every one for himself in the great struggle of man for redemption.
There is a great deal more in this line of the indestructibility of the soul; but nothing is said of the Vedantic idea that the soul has no real, separate existence, and that even this illusory existence, in human conditions, will terminate when the self shall be recognized to be, as it really is, an unsevered and inseparable part of the Supreme Soul.
Himself, steeped in the threefold culture of his country Vedantic, Islamic, and European he came very near the prevailing ideal of composite Indian nationality. Yet was he not deceived. In seventy years of life, he had seen intellectual India pass through many phases, from ardent admiration of the West and all its works, to no less ardent denunciation.
I recall also the passage in Amor Proximi where it is said that the earth will again be placed in Solis punctum. I have mentioned the vedantic teachings, whose agreement with alchemy has also been noticed by Hitchcock.
And it must be confessed that in many respects this doctrine is inferior to the Vedantic, which emphasizes the spiritual character, and the divine origin and destiny, of the soul. The doctrine of Liberation, or of Redemption, as found in the Bhagavad Gita, is a strange combination of all the ways which Brahmanism has inculcated through its many schools, with other ways here added.
The late Samuel Johnson, in his chapter on "The Morality and Piety of Pantheism," undertakes to defend both the Vedantic and the Spinozan philosophy by pointing out a distinction between an "external compulsion and an inner force which merges us in the Infinite.
Another argument which the Vedantists advance in support of the theory of Reincarnation is that "Nothing is destroyed in the universe." Destruction in the sense of the annihilation of a thing is unknown to the Vedantic philosophers, just as it is unknown to the modern scientists.
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