He has a scholar meditating under him—­Mina Bahadur Rana—­but we did not see him.  He wears clothes and is very imperfect.  He has written a little pamphlet about his master, and I have that.  It contains a wood-cut of the master and himself seated on a rug in the garden.  The portrait of the master is very good indeed.  The posture is exactly that which Brahma himself affects, and it requires long arms and limber legs, and can be accumulated only by gods and the india-rubber man.  There is a life-size marble relief of Shri 108, S.B.S. in the garden.  It represents him in this same posture.

Dear me!  It is a strange world.  Particularly the Indian division of it.  This pupil, Mina Bahadur Rana, is not a commonplace person, but a man of distinguished capacities and attainments, and, apparently, he had a fine worldly career in front of him.  He was serving the Nepal Government in a high capacity at the Court of the Viceroy of India, twenty years ago.  He was an able man, educated, a thinker, a man of property.  But the longing to devote himself to a religious life came upon him, and he resigned his place, turned his back upon the vanities and comforts of the world, and went away into the solitudes to live in a hut and study the sacred writings and meditate upon virtue and holiness and seek to attain them.  This sort of religion resembles ours.  Christ recommended the rich to give away all their property and follow Him in poverty, not in worldly comfort.  American and English millionaires do it every day, and thus verify and confirm to the world the tremendous forces that lie in religion.  Yet many people scoff at them for this loyalty to duty, and many will scoff at Mina Bahadur Rana and call him a crank.  Like many Christians of great character and intellect, he has made the study of his Scriptures and the writing of books of commentaries upon them the loving labor of his life.  Like them, he has believed that his was not an idle and foolish waste of his life, but a most worthy and honorable employment of it.  Yet, there are many people who will see in those others, men worthy of homage and deep reverence, but in him merely a crank.  But I shall not.  He has my reverence.  And I don’t offer it as a common thing and poor, but as an unusual thing and of value.  The ordinary reverence, the reverence defined and explained by the dictionary costs nothing.  Reverence for one’s own sacred things—­parents, religion, flag, laws, and respect for one’s own beliefs—­these are feelings which we cannot even help.  They come natural to us; they are involuntary, like breathing.  There is no personal merit in breathing.  But the reverence which is difficult, and which has personal merit in it, is the respect which you pay, without compulsion, to the political or religious attitude of a man whose beliefs are not yours.  You can’t revere his gods or his politics, and no one expects you to do that, but you could respect his belief in them if you tried hard enough; and you could respect him, too, if you tried hard enough.  But it is very, very difficult; it is next to impossible, and so we hardly ever try.  If the man doesn’t believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it.  I mean it does nowadays, because now we can’t burn him.