Consider first the religious ideals which dominate this land and the "Far West." Hinduism has exalted asceticism as the highest type of life and the best method of holy attainment. From time immemorial the religious mendicant, with his ideals of self-renunciation and ascetic practices, has found universal admiration among this people, and his motives and methods stand as the most highly approved in all the annals of this religion. It is true that this was universally exalted above all other forms of life among Christians also at one time, as it continues to be among, perhaps, the majority to-day. And is not the Cross, which is the emblem of self-renunciation and self-effacement, the motive power of our faith, as it is also the embodied ideal of our Life? True; but there is this marked difference between the two faiths. In Christianity the Cross is only a means. The Cross of self-effacement is the pathway of Christ and of the Christian to the crown of self-realization. We despise the lower good in order that we may attain unto the higher. In Hinduism, the rigours of asceticism are, indeed, sometimes a means to an end; but that end is not character or any spiritual achievement, but power with the gods. Nearly all the notable instances of religious austerities and self-torture practised by _yogis_, and recorded in Hindu legend and history, were undertaken for the purpose of accumulating thereby a great store of merit through which power might be acquired over men or gods. Thus many an ascetic is said to have so subdued and afflicted his body that nearly the whole Hindu pantheon trembled in the presence of the power thus acquired by him. But when the Hindu ascetic has not this object in self-renunciation, his austerities are an end in themselves. He renounces all--not simply the mean things of life, but also the noblest ambitions and the most heavenly sentiments--because they are a fetter which bind him to the world. He indeed calls a good deed, or a holy thought, a "golden fetter," but it is, just the same, regarded by him as an evil which prolongs his human existence; and these human conditions must be ended as soon as possible. The Christian, on the other hand, suppresses his passions in order that his holy desires may prevail; the Hindu struggles equally against the worst passions and the noblest sentiments of his heart; for they all delay that calm equilibrium of the _self_ which is the doorway into _sayutchia_ (absorption). Thus character, or the prevalence of the nobler sentiments of our nature above the meaner, is not, and never has been, the aim of Hindu asceticism. And in consonance with this fact is the other, namely, that nine-tenths of the five and a half million ascetics, sadhus, and fakhirs of India are universally recognized as pestilential in their morals, and as distinguished examples of what the laity of the land should avoid being or becoming.