God and man, but only a recovery of man’s true nature, a remembrance or restoration of his divine nature or of his godhead, which has always been there, though covered for a time by Nescience. After this point has once been reached, there would be no great difficulty in bringing on an agreement between Christianity, such as it was in its original form, and Vedântism, the religious philosophy of India. What seems to us almost blasphemy—a kind of _apotheosis_ of man, is with the Vedântist an act of the highest reverence. It is taken as man’s _anatheosis_, or return to his true Father, a recovery of his true godlike nature. And what is or can be the meaning of God-like? Can anything be godlike that is not originally divine, though hidden for a time by Nescience? After all, though Nescience may represent Manhood as the very opposite of Godhead, what beings are there, or can be imagined to be, that could fill the artificial interval that has been established long ago between God and man, unless we allow our poets to people that interval with angels and devils? The real difficulty is how that interval, that abyss between God and man, was ever created, and if the Vedântist says by Nescience, is that so different from what we say “By human ignorance”? It was necessary to give these somewhat abstruse, explanations—though in reality they are not abstruse, but intelligible to every unsophisticated and childlike mind. These, then, were the ideas that supported our friend Gaurî-_s_a_m_kara, and which support, under different disguises, millions of human beings in India—men, women, and children. On such simple but solid foundations it is easy to erect ever so many religions, to build ever so many temples, and to find room for the most elevated and the most superstitious minds, all yearning for the same Peace of God, and for the same Giver of Peace and Rest. Names may differ and truth may adopt different disguises. But, after all, the peace which Gaurî-_s_a_m_kara enjoyed amid the daily cares of his official life, and which arose from his forgetting himself and finding himself in God, or, as he would say, forgetting his phenomenal in his real Âtman, could it have been so very different from what we call the peace of God that passes all understanding? Such a view of the world as his was, is generally supposed to unfit a man for all practical work, but this, as we see, is by no means a necessary consequence. One thought of Brahman was sufficient to refresh and strengthen him for the battle of life, like a header taken into the waves of an unfathomable ocean. He knew where he was and what he was, and that was enough to keep him afloat.