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Thus no moral teaching whatever is contained either in the Purinas or in the Védintist treatises. The Purinas, by their praise of sinful gods, openly incite people to sin; and though the V&dintist books do not go so far as this, yet inasmuch as they teach that good morals and virtuous dispositions arc unnecessary to those who are truly wise”; that what are called“both works,” that is, both cood works and evil works, are obstacles to heavenly bliss, that ons soul or“self” is God; and that the world does not really exist, but is only like a picture painted on one’s own mind, those treatises have a worse effect than even the Purdnas themselves in hardening men’s hearts and in discouraging virtue.
I now ask you to compare Christianity and the religions of India with respect to this point. There are some people who say that all rolizions are one and the same. Dut can a religion which teaches morality be one and the same with a relizion which despises morality!
?
3. The worship celebrated in Curistian churches tends also
Lo promote virtue and goodness.
Ou Sundays and other days, when the members of the Christian congregation are assembled in church, the guru, or minister, reads for thei instruction the lessons of virtue which are contained in the Bible, and urges the people in a sermon to love God with all their minds and their neighbours as themselves, and to depart from evil and do good. Moreover, he and they together confess their faults to God, and beseech the merciful King of Ieaven to for
give their offences and to give them grace to keep Ilis
just laws in future. They also beseech the Lord to grant that Kings and their subjects and all the inhabitants of the