“Even if thou wert the greatest evil-doer among all the unrighteous,” says Krishna, “thou shalt cross over all sins even by the ark of knowledge.”  “Oh, Arjuna, as blazing fire reduces fuel to ashes, so the fire of knowledge turns all action into ashes.”  But in the first place a knowledge of the infinite within us is unattainable, and in the second place it could not avail us even if attainable.  It is not practical knowledge; it is not a belief unto righteousness.  Faith is not an act of the brain merely, but of the whole moral nature.  The wisdom of self must be laid aside, self-righteousness cast into the dust, the pride and rebellion of the will surrendered, and the whole man become as a little child.  This is the way of knowledge that can be made experimental; this is the knowledge that is unto eternal life.

3.  Another great differential of the New Testament is found in its true doctrine of divine co-operation with the human will.  Our personality is not destroyed that the absolute may take its place, but the two act together.  “For men of renunciation,” says the Bhagavad Gita, “whose hearts are at rest from desire and anger, and knowing the only self, there is on both sides of death effacement (of the individual) in the supreme spirit.”  In such a person, therefore, even on this side of death, there is a cessation of the individual in the supreme.  Over against this the Gospel presents the doctrine of co-operative grace, which instead of crippling our human energies arouses them to their highest and best exertion.  “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.”  The divine acts with and through the human, but does not destroy it.  It imparts the greatest encouragement, the truest inspiration.

4.  We notice but one more out of many points of contrast between the doctrines of the Hindu and the Christian Bibles, viz., the difference between ascetic inaction and the life of Christian activity as means of religious growth.  I am aware that in the earlier chapters of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna urges Arjuna to valiant activity on the battle-field, but that is for a special purpose, viz., the establishment of caste distinctions.  It is wholly foreign to Hindu philosophy; it is even contradictory.  The author of the poem, who seems to be aware of the inconsistency of arousing Arjuna to the mighty activities of the battle-field, and at the same time indoctrinating him in the spirit of a dead and nerveless asceticism, struggles hard with the awkward task of bridging the illogical chasm with three chapters of mystification.