"It is an education and a discipline in the government of self. I speak personally for I have felt my position in my father's house more than a little. You may not see any change in my character, but I know that my views on the brotherhood of man and the Fatherhood of God have altered. I don't mind confessing that my attitude towards the pariah who acted as my servant by my parents' orders has modified. They thought to humiliate me, but they have taught me a lesson. I recognise his humanity and his good qualities." "Yet you can't take the food he brings you?" "No, I can't; to my shame be it said; for it distresses him to see me starve. There's a wide gulf between theory and practice in his case, and for the present I prefer to starve." "Poor, weak, human nature!" said Bopaul with a laugh in which Ananda joined, although the subject was no laughing matter. "And if pain comes into the life of a child who is not old enough to have sinned; how do you account for it?" asked Bopaul returning to the charge. "To reply in detail to this and similar objections would require a greater knowledge of the spiritual world than even the apostles themselves possessed. 'Now we see through a glass darkly,' said St. Paul. Later illumination will assuredly come. The curtain was partly lifted when Christ was born. At His second coming it will be entirely raised, and by that time our eyes will be strong enough to bear the light." There was silence which Bopaul broke with another question. "Does the missionary teach you that after death comes sleep?" "No; there is no stagnation in the spiritual world any more than there is in the material world. The souls of the departed are possessed of conscious memory, and they have a sense of pain and pleasure. I believe," he spoke solemnly and with shining eyes that seemed to look beyond the limit of the Hindu's mental vision, "that Coomara instead of being reborn as a dog or a reptile in this world has entered into new powers of vitality and energy in a spiritual world that far exceeds the limitations of this world. He lived a blameless life according to his lights, and he has entered into another life in which there will be progression and development. With his entry into that new life he will acquire new powers of comprehension. There will be a great movement forward in spirituality between his state here on earth and the new estate in the world he has entered. The step will be as great or greater than if a dog entered the human life and were endowed with human privileges." "Excepting that he died under the ban of broken caste, Coomara was without faults," acquiesced Bopaul. "But I cannot disregard the teaching of the guru who says that because of that broken caste he must suffer."