Page:The Heart of Jainism (IA heartofjainism00stevuoft).djvu/320

 292 THE EMPTY HEART OF JAINISM king, and each left his high estate for a hfe of poverty and insult. Each wandered homeless through sunny lands, followed by a band of twelve disciples, proclaiming the beauty of poverty of spirit, of meekness, of righteous- ness, of mercy, of purity, of peace, and of patient suffering. Alike they illustrated their teaching from the every-day life of the countryside, showing how much greater a thing it was * to be ' than ' to do ', and how perilous * to have ' ; but each teacher gave his followers a different motive to rule their lives, for the command of the one was to love and of the other to escape. No The Jaina do not beheve in one supreme God. Innumer- supreme able men of like passions with themselves have, by steadily eradicating all that belongs to personality, passed to take their places amongst the Siddha in a still land of endless in- activity ; but none of these are first and none second : all are equal ; and none take any interest in the human toilers who are climbing the steep ascent leading to the goal which they themselves have reached. The loss suffered by those who have relinquished their belief in a supreme God it is impossible adequately to gauge. For instance, the Jaina can have no conception of the for- giveness of sin, for to them there is no God against whom they have sinned, but whose property it is to show mercy, and who, by pardoning past failure, can give an oppor- tunity for future conquest. The Jaina, when they do wrong, only feel that they sin against themselves, injure their own characters, and so lose ground on the upward way, and that such lost progress can only be made up after countless ages of useless (because unremembered) suffering. Prayer. Again, a system without a God has no room for prayer, for it knows of no almighty and most merciful Father to whose love and wisdom His children can confide their secret desires ; and to this day the Jaina count it a sin if a mother, watching beside her suffering child, should appeal to some higher power to save the little life. Forgive- ness.