It matters not where you go, East or West, it is always the same. In
England, or France, or Russia, among the Hindus, the Chinese, the
Japanese, the Parsees. It makes no matter if you will but look aright.
For you must know how to look and where. You must learn what to read. It
is never books I would ask you to read, never creeds, never theologies,
never reasons, nor arguments. You will not find what you search in
libraries nor yet in places of worship, in ceremonies, in temples,
great and beautiful as they may be. Not in even their inmost recesses is
the secret hid, the secret of all religions. I would have you listen to
no preachers, to no theologians. They are the last to know. But I would
have you go to the temple of the heart of man and read what is written
there, written not in words, but in the inarticulate emotions of the
heart. I would have you go and kneel beside the Mahommedan as he prays
at the sunset hour, and put your heart to his and wait for the echo that
will surely come. Yes, surely, if you be as a man who would learn, who
can learn. I would have you go to the hillman smearing the stone with
butter that his god may be pleased, to the woman crying to the forest
god for her sick child, to the boy before his monks learning to be good.
No matter where you go, no matter what the faith is called, if you have
the hearing ear, if your heart is in unison with the heart of the world,
you will hear always the same song. Far down below the noises of the
warring creeds, the clash of words and forms, the differences of
peoples, of climes, of civilisations, of ideals, far down below all this
lies that which you would hear. I know not what you would call it. Maybe
it is the Voice of God telling us for ever the secret of the world, but
in unknown tongue. For me it is like the unceasing surge of a shoreless
sea answering to the night, a melody beyond words.
The creeds and faiths are the words that men have set to that melody;
they are the interpretations of that wordless song. Each is true to him
whom it suits. Every nation has translated it into his own tongue. But
never forget that those are only your own interpretations. Whatever your
faith may be, you have no monopoly of religion. I confess that to me
there is nothing so repellent as the hate of faith for faith. To hear
their professors malign and abuse each other, as if each had the
monopoly of truth, is terrible. It is as a strife in families where
brother is killing brother, and the younger trying to disinherit the
elder. I doubt if in all this warfare they can listen for the voice that
is for ever telling the secret of the world. Whence came all the faiths
but from that inexplicable feeling of the heart, that surge and swell
arising we know not whence? If you would malign another's faith remember
your own. If you cannot understand his belief stop and consider. Can you
understand your own? Do you know whence came these emotions that have
risen and made your faith?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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