The Brahman had never thought
to be a brother of mankind as well as a child of God. Christ is
the prince of Reformers and Radicals. Many expressions in the
New Testament come naturally to the lips of all Protestants, and
it furnishes the most pregnant and practical texts. There is no
harmless dreaming, no wise speculation in it, but everywhere a
substratum of good sense. It never _reflects_, but it _repents_.
There is no poetry in it, we may say nothing regarded in the
light of beauty merely, but moral truth is its object. All
mortals are convicted by its conscience.
The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality; the best
of the Hindo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality. The reader
is nowhere raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or _rarer_
region of thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta. Warren Hastings, in
his sensible letter recommending the translation of this book to
the Chairman of the East India Company, declares the original to
be "of a sublimity of conception, reasoning, and diction almost
unequalled," and that the writings of the Indian philosophers
"will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long
ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of
wealth and power are lost to remembrance.
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