The Yogi looks round upon his fellow-men, and sees that all their misery and shame come from self-will; he looks within, and finds that all which makes him miserable, angry, lustful, greedy after this and that, comes from the same self-will.  And he asks himself:  How shall I escape from this torment of self?—­how shall I tame my wayward will, till it shall become one with the harmonious, beautiful, and absolute Will which made all things?  At least I will try to do it, whatever it shall cost me.  I will give up all for which men live—­ wife and child, the sights, scents, sounds of this fair earth, all things, whatever they be, which men call enjoyment; I will make this life one long torture, if need be; but this rebel will of mine I will conquer.  I ask for no reward.  That may come in some future life.  But what care I?  I am now miserable by reason of the lusts which war in my members; the peace which I shall gain in being freed from them will be its own reward.  After all I give up little.  All those things round me—­the primeval forest, and the sacred stream of Ganga, the mighty Himalaya, mount of God, ay, the illimitable vault of heaven above me, sun and stars—­what are they but “such stuff as dreams are made of”?  Brahm thought, and they became something and somewhere.  He may think again, and they will become nothing and nowhere.  Are these eternal, greater than I, worth troubling my mind about?  Nothing is eternal, but the Thought which made them, and will unmake them.  They are only venerable in my eyes, because each of them is a thought of Brahm’s.  And I too have thought; I alone of all the kinds of living things.  Am I not, then, akin to God? what better for me than to sit down and think, as Brahm thinks, and so enjoy my eternal heritage, leaving for those who cannot think the passions and pleasures which they share in common with the beasts of the field?  So I shall become more and more like Brahm—­will his will, think his thoughts, till I lose utterly this house-fiend of self, and become one with God.

Is this a man to be despised?  Is he a sickly dreamer, or a too valiant hero? and if any one be shocked at this last utterance, let him consider carefully the words which he may hear on Sunday:  “Then we dwell in Christ, and Christ in us; we are one with Christ, and Christ with us.”  That belief is surely not a false one.  Shall we abhor the Yogi because he has seen, sitting alone there amid idolatry and licentiousness, despotism and priestcraft, that the ideal goal of man is what we confess it to be in the communion service?  Shall we not rather wonder and rejoice over the magnificent utterance in that Bhagavat-Gita which Mr. Vaughan takes for the text-book of Hindoo Mysticism, where Krishna, the teacher human, and yet God himself, speaks thus: