Then the master summoned the laborer again and said: "You once attempted to please me through others, then brought me gifts of what was my own, and now you have a still more ridiculous plan: you shout and sing concerning me, saying that I am all-powerful, merciful, this and that. You sing and you shout about me, but you do not know me, neither do you seem to want to know me. I need not the pleas of others in your behalf, nor your gifts, nor your praises regarding things you cannot know; all I need of you is your labor."
All God requires of us is good works.
Therein is the entire law of God.
VII.
The Idea of a Reward for a Good Life is Foreign to
True Faith
If a man adheres to a religion merely because he expects all sorts of external future rewards for the fulfilment of the works of his religion, this is not faith, but calculation, and in all cases an erroneous calculation. It is an erroneous calculation, because true faith yields its blessings only in the present, but does not, cannot give any external blessings in the future.
A man set forth to hire himself out as a laborer. And he met two stewards seeking to hire laborers. He told them that he was seeking work. And the two began to invite him each to labor for his master. One said: "Come to my master, for his is a good place. Of course, if you do not please him, he will thrash you and place you in prison; but if you do please him, you cannot have a better life. When your labor is ended, you will live without toiling, enjoying an endless feast with wine, fine meats and entertainments. Only try to please the master, and
алллл
*•*
THE PATHWAY OF LIFE 23
your life will be too wonderful for description." Thus pleaded one of the stewards.
The other steward also invited him to work for his master, but did not tell him how his master would reward him; he did not even mention where and how the laborer would live, whether the task was hard or light, but only stated that his master was good, inflicting no punishments, and that he lived together with his own hired laborers.
And the man thought thus of the first master: **He promises a little too much. In fairness there is no need to promise so much. Tempted by the promise of a life of pleasure, I might find myself very poorly ofT. And the master, doubtless, is very stern, for he punishes severely those who fail to do as he says. I think I will rather go to the second master, for although he promises nothing, they say he is kind and lives in common with his laborers."
The same is true of religious teachings. Some teachers beguile men into good living by terrifying them with threats of punishment and deceiving them with promises of rewards in another world which no one has ever seen. Other teachers teach that love, the principle of life, dwells in the souls of men, and he who unites with it is happy.
3. If you serve God for the sake of bliss everlasting, you do not ser\'e God. but serve your own ends.
4. The principal difference between true and false faith is this: In false faith man desires God to reward him for his sacrifices and prayers. In the true faith man seeks one thing alone: To learn how to please God.
VIII.
Reason Verifies tlie Principles of Faith
1. In order to know the true faith, it is not necessary to suppress the voice of reason, but on the contrary, reason
must be purified and exerted in order that we may examine by it that which is taught by teachers of religion.
2. It is not by reason that we attain faith. But reason is necessary to examine the faith that is taught us.
3. Do not fear to eliminate from your faith all that is superfluous, carnal, visible, amenable to senses, as well as all that is confused and lacking in clearness; the better you purify the spiritual kernel, the more clearly will you grasp the true law of life.
4. Not he is an unbeliever who does not believe all that the people around him believe, but he is truly an unbeliever who thinks and affirms that he believes something which in reality he does not believe.
IX.
The Religious Consciousness of People Strives Constantly After Perfection
1. We must benefit by the teachings of the wise and holy men of old regarding the law of life, but we must examine them by our own reason, accepting all that is in accord with reason, rejecting all that is in conflict therewith.
2. If, in order not to stray from the law of God, man hesitates to leave the faith once adopted by him, he is like unto a man who bound himself with a rope to a post so that he should not lose his way. Lucy Mallory.
3. It is strange that the majority of people believe most firmly in the most ancient religious teachings, which no longer are suitable to our time, but reject all new teachings as superfluous and harmful. Such men forget that if God revealed the truth to the ancients, He still remains the same and can also reveal it to men who lived in latter times and to those who live to-day.
Thoreau.
THE PATHWAY OF LIFE
25
4. The law of life cannot change, but people can grasp it more and more clearly, and learn how to fulfill it in life.
5. Religion is not true for the reason that holy men have preached it, but holy men have preached it for the reason that it is true. Lessing,
6. When rain-water flows from the roof-gutter, it seems to us as though it came from it. But rain, indeeo, falleth from above. Even so with the teachings of wise men and holy: We think that the teachings come from them, but they proceed from God.
From Rama-Krishna,
GOD
GOD
Besides all that is corporeal within us, and in the entire universe, we know something incorporeal which gives life to our body and is connected with it. This incorporeal something, connected with our body, we call our soul. The same incorporeal something, but not connected with anything, and giving life to everything that lives, we call God.
I. God is Known of Man From Within
1. The foundation of all faith is in the fact that in addition to what we see and feel in our bodies and in the bodies of other creatures, there is something else that is invisible, incorporeal, yet giving life to us and to everything that is visible and corporeal.
2. I know that there is something within me without which there would be nothing. This is what I call God.
Angelus.
3. Every man meditating on what he is can not help seeing that he is not all, but a specific separate part of something. And having grasped it, man usually thinks that this something from which he is separated is that material world, which he sees, that earth whereon he lives and whereon his ancestors lived before him, that sky, those stars and that sun which he sees.
But if a man gives this subject a little more thought or discovers that the wise men of this world have thought about it, he must realize that the SOMETHING from which men feel themselves separated is not the material world which extends in every direction in space, and also without end in time, but is something else. If a man meditates more deeply on this subject, and learns what the wise
men have always believed rep^rding it, he must realize that the material world which had no beginning and will have no end and which neither has nor can have any limits in space, is not anything real, but is only a dream of ours, and therefore that SOxVlETHING from which we feel ourselves separated, is something that has neither beginning nor end in time or in space, but is something immaterial, something spiritual.
This spiritual something which man acknowledges as his beginning, is the very thing which all the wise men have always called and still are calling God.
4. To know God is possible only within oneself. Until you find God within yourself, you will nowhere find him.