Page:History of Zoroastrianism.djvu/152

Rh Man looked to God with awe and reverence. He bowed before him, and prayed with folded arms and on bended knees. The Indian mystic philosopher is daring in his intercourse with the divine. He claims intimacy and identity with God, nay, he hails himself God, and assures every human being of potential divinity. When knowledge dawns upon man he can acclaim with sublime ecstasy, 'I am Brahma.' Man thus becomes God and the supreme function of philosophy is to raise man to his proper estate by means of knowledge. Divinity sleeps in man, it has to be awakened. Man is God in the making and knowledge makes him God. In its keen insight into the mystery of existence, its scientific value of philosophical thinking, its boldness of conception, this all-absorbing monism has no equal in the history of philosophy. Brahma, as the apex of existence, is the acme of metaphysical speculation. But being nameless, colourless, and lifeless, it denies definition and defies description. It demands that man shall speak of it in negation only, but better still not speak at all. It is an impersonal neuter abstraction, a phantom god in the world of shadowy reality, a god who is no god.

But the human heart hungers for a God who is a thinking and willing being, a personal God who can hear man's prayers, who can bestow gifts, who can fulfil hopes, who can guide man on the highway of life, who can protect him from harm, who can award merit, who can punish wrong, who can forgive man's trespasses, who can replenish life when it seems hollow and empty, who can brighten it with gleams of sunshine when it seems dark and dreary, who can sustain man when he is downcast, in whom he can find strength in his weakness, before whom he can lay his troubles, upon whom he can lean in his loneliness, in whom he can find refuge when the world seems to fail him, who can console the heavy-hearted, who can heal the bruised and bleeding heart, who can wipe away the tears of those that weep their lives out, and who can respond to the human call whenever and from wherever it comes and whatever it may be.

The philosophers thus dispensed with gods, but they persisted none the less. Like the rise and fall of kings and dynasties, old gods were forgotten, forsaken, but new ones simultaneously succeeded them. The sacred texts habitually explain and accommodate new gods by depicting one as incarnating himself in the person of another or by declaring a new god as being identical