4. In the Bhagavad Gita little is said of the character of the salvation which is to be achieved by the devotee of Krishna. Indeed, the nature of this consummation is left very much in mystery. We are told that Krishna's worshipper will come to him. "He who, with the highest devotion to me, will proclaim this supreme mystery among my devotees will come to me freed from all doubts." Again we are taught that such a devotee, "understanding me, truly enters into my essence." This carries the definite and universal thought of Hinduism, that man will be absorbed in the Deity. In another place we are told that the worshipper "who is purified by the penance of knowledge has come into my essence." This is the eschatology of all Hindu _Shastras_. The peculiar teaching of the Bhagavad Gita concerning action and its emphasis upon a strenuous life in this world would have led us to expect the teaching of a future of some kind of activity. Instead of that, it falls back upon the old and hackneyed pantheistic idea, that the human soul, being ultimately divested of its human bodies, both gross and fine, passes on in its nakedness into oneness with the Absolute, and thus loses all the faculties which, so far as we know, constitute its greatness, power, and glory. In this condition of absorption the human soul is not only deprived of its separate existence, but also of all self-knowledge, which is the true basis of personality. As to the process of this salvation we are here taught, as in all Hindu writing, that it is attained through metempsychosis, or reincarnation. The human soul, like the divine, in Brahmanism, passes through many incarnations (some writers say 8,400,000) before it receives the crown of perfection, or of absorption. Krishna says: "As a man, casting off old clothes, puts on others and new ones, so the embodied self, casting off old bodies, goes to others and new ones." "I have passed through many births, O Arjuna, and you, also," says Krishna; "I know them all, but you, O terror of your foes! do not know them." This devious and tedious path of reincarnation is the one over which every soul must pass. And between every incarnation and that which follows, the soul, clothed upon with a subtle body, passes through many heavens and hells in order to eat the fruits of its past actions. And there is a remnant of these fruits left which necessitates the return to a new body and a new human existence.