usually called Svāmī Vivekānanda, he had two types of conversation, as may be seen from the following paragraph:1

He was a wonderful mixture of God and man. In his ordinary state he would talk of himself as servant of all men and women. He looked upon them all as God. He himself would never be addressed as Guru, or teacher. Never would he claim for himself any high position. He would touch the ground reverently where his disciples had trodden. But every now and then strange fits of God-consciousness came upon him. He then spoke of himself as being able to do and know everything. He spoke as if he had the power of giving anything to anybody. He would speak of himself as the same soul that had been born before as Rama, as Krishna, as Jesus, or as Buddha, born again as Ramakrishna. He told Mathuranatha long before anybody knew him, that he had many disciples who would come to him shortly, and he knew all of them. He said that he was free from all eternity, and the practices and struggles after religion which he went through were only meant to show the people the way to salvation. He had done all for them alone. He would say he was a Nitya-mukta, or eternally free, and an incarnation of God Himself.

3. The character of Rāmakṛishṇa was singularly simple. He seemed to be capable of only a single motive, namely, a passion for God. That ruled and filled him. So completely did it dominate him that many regarded him as a useless, ineffective man, while others said he was mad. His idea of God seems crude and thin to a Christian; yet it had mastered him; and, when we follow that clue, every detail of his character and life falls into place. For this end he became a sannyāsī, renouncing caste, marriage, property, money. In order that his renunciation might be utterly real, he put himself through a tremendous discipline of repression, until his hatred of money had become so instinctive that his body would shrink back convulsively if he were touched with a coin, when asleep;2 2 My Master, 61.

1 Ramakrishna, 58.

and he had so conquered the sex instinct that every woman was to him a mother. On this latter point P. C. Mozoomdar,1 the Brahma, says:

For long years, therefore, he says, he made the utmost efforts to be delivered from the influence of women.

His heartrending supplications and prayers for such deliverance sometimes uttered aloud in his retreat on the river-side, brought crowds of people who bitterly cried when he cried, and could not help blessing him and wishing him success with their whole hearts.

This same passion for God, taken along with the Hindu idea of God, will explain also the more curious and eccentric points of his character. One of his own sayings is:

A true devotee who has drunk deep of the Divine Love is like a veritable drunkard, and, as such, cannot always observe the rules of propriety.2

It is from this point of view that we can understand another of Mozoomdar's statements about him:

His speech at times was abominably filthy."

He believed God in His true essence to be impersonal, unknowable, beyond the reach of man. On the other hand, every human being, indeed everything that is, is a manifestation of God. Everything that happens is, in a sense, done by Him:

God tells the thief to go and steal, and at the same time warns the householder against the thief.1

God is thus so truly all that is, that in Him moral distinctions become obliterated.5 Here we get a glimpse of the radical distinction between Christianity and Hinduism. Another point in his conduct will enable us to understand still more clearly. Since every human being is a manifestation of God,

1 Paramahamsa Rāmakṛishņa, 13. Ib., 62.

4

▲ Ib., 103.

2 Rāmakrishna, 121. 5 Gospel of R., 72.

if Rāmakrishna happened to meet an unfortunate, he would bow down before her in adoration. Contrast with this the mind of Christ, who loved the unfortunate as a child of God, but could not be content, unless she came to repentance.

Like every ordinary Hindu, Rāmakrishņa regarded all deities as manifestations of the impersonal Supreme. He recognizes the goddess Kāli as one of the chief manifestations of God. She was to him the divine mother of the universe, and he worshipped her more than any other divinity. He worshipped her by means of idols; for he implicitly believed the Hindu doctrine, that the divinity fills every one of his own idols with his presence.1 He also held the ordinary Hindu idea of the guru. Here is one of his sayings:

The disciple should never criticise his own Guru. He must implicitly obey whatever his Guru says. Says a Bengali couplet:

Though my Guru may visit tavern and still,

My Guru is holy Rai Nityananda still.2

He was thus a true Hindu, and was ready at any moment to defend the whole of Hinduism.

Thus far Rāmakrishna was simply a very devoted Hindu. Had there been nothing more in him, he might have lived at any time during the last two thousand years. There have been multitudes of men like him in India. But the living forces which are making the new India pressed in upon him from every side. Though he had no English education, the new thought came to him by many channels. Christianity was demanding acceptance from Hindus, claiming to be the one religion for the whole world, urging its ethics on all men. Islam was also present, but far less active. What was his response to the situation? He declared that all religions were true, that in their inner essence they were identical, and that 2 Rāmakrishna, 133.

1 See above, p. 189, and Gospel of R., 187.

each man should remain in the religion in which he had been born:

A truly religious man should think that other religions also are paths leading to the truth.1

Every man should follow his own religion. A Christian should follow Christianity, a Mohammedan should follow Mohammedanism, and so on. For the Hindus the ancient path, the path of the Aryan Rishis, is the best.2

4. One of Rāmakrishna's disciples, a wealthy Calcutta man, named Surendranath Mitter, was keenly interested in the result produced on Keshab Chandra Sen by his master's teaching on this point, and employed a painter to produce a symbolical picture, embodying the idea of the harmony of all religions and of the part played by Rāmakrishna in introducing it to Keshab. I have not been able to discover with certainty when the picture was painted, but it was already in existence on the 27th of October, 1882.5 When it was shewn to Keshab, he exclaimed, "Blessed is the man who conceived the idea of this picture." At a later date the picture was reproduced and published as a supplement to Unity and the Minister, a weekly paper representing one of the sub-divisions into which the Church of the New Dispensation split up after the great leader's death. This picture is reproduced here. In the background are a Christian church, a Muḥammadan mosque, and a Hindu temple. In front of the church stand Keshab and Rāmakṛishṇa, Keshab carrying the symbol of the New Dispensation described above, and Rāmakṛishṇa calling Keshab's attention to the group of figures arranged in front of the mosque and the temple. In the middle of this group Christ and Chaitanya, a Bengali religious leader of the sixteenth century, are represented dancing together, while a