The highest which man can comprehend is man. One step only he may go beyond, and say that what is beyond may be different, but it cannot be less perfect than the present; the future cannot be worse than the past.... That much-decried philosophy of evolution, if it teaches us anything, teaches us a firm belief in a better future, and in a higher perfection which man is destined to reach.
Hibbert Lectures.
In our longings for the departed we often think of them as young or old, we think of them as man or woman, as father or mother, as husband or wife. Even nationality and language are supposed to remain after death, and we often hear expressions, 'Oh! if the souls are without all this, without age, and sex, and national character, without even their native language, what will they be to us?' The answer is, They will really be the same to us they were in this life. Unless we can bring ourselves to believe that a soul has a beginning, and that our soul sprang into being at the time of our birth, the soul within us must have existed before. But however convinced we may be of the soul's eternal existence, we shall always remain ignorant as to how it existed. And yet we do not murmur or complain. Our soul on awakening here is not quite a stranger to itself, and the souls who, as our parents, our wives, and husbands, our children, and our friends, have greeted us at first as strangers in this life, have become to us as if we had known them for ever, and as if we could never lose them again. If it were to be so again in the next life, if there also we should meet at first as strangers till drawn together by the same mysterious love that has drawn us together here, why should we murmur or complain? Thousands of years ago we read of a husband telling his wife, 'Verily a wife is not dear that you may love the wife, but that you may love the soul, therefore a wife is dear.' What does that mean? It means that true love consists not in loving what is perishable, but in discovering and loving what is eternal in man or woman. In Sanscrit that eternal part is called by many names, but the best seems that used in this passage, Atma. We translate it by Soul, but it is even higher and purer than Soul, it is best translated by the word Self. That which constitutes the true Self, the looker-on, the witness within us, that which is everywhere in the body and yet nowhere to be touched, that which cannot die or expire, because it never breathed, that is the Infinite in man which philosophers have been groping for, though 'he is not far from every one of us.' It is the Divine or God-like in man.
Gifford Lectures, III.
The southern Aryans were absorbed in the struggles of thought: their past is the problem of creation, their future the problem of existence, and the present, which ought to be the solution of both, seems never to have attracted their attention, or called forth their energies. There never was a nation believing so firmly in another world, and so little concerned about this. Their condition on earth was to them a problem; their real and eternal life a simple fact. Though this is true chiefly before they were brought in contact with foreign conquerors, traces of this character are still visible in the Hindus as described by the companions of Alexander, nay, even in the Hindus of the present day. The only sphere in which the Indian mind finds itself at liberty to act, to create, and to worship is the sphere of religion and philosophy, and nowhere have religious and metaphysical ideas struck root so deeply in the mind of a nation as in India. History supplies no second instance where the inward life of the soul has so completely absorbed all the other faculties of a people.
India.
Our happiness here is but a foretaste of our blessed life hereafter. We must never forget that. We shall be called away, but we shall meet again.
Life.
We must have patience—and we all cling to life as long as there are those who love us here. Those who love us there are always ours. Nothing is lost in the world. How it will be, we know not, but if we have recognised the working of a divine wisdom and love here on earth, we can take comfort, and wait patiently for that which is to come.
Life.