godhead whose vision he did not have during the period of his sadhana life. Therefore, is innocentlooking declaration “As many faiths, so many paths” should be taken as the quintessence of the universal religion he lived. He sought to point out the inevitability of religious tolerance and the harmony of all religions for the good of mankind. To act upon the belief that ‘My religion and my God alone are true’ was to go against the spirit of religion, besides denying God his infinitude and the inexhaustibility of his ways to man. Sri Ramakrishna’s coming into the midst of men was like a king in disguise moving about among his subjects. There was nothing spectacular that one could notice in the uneventful life of a temple priest. Very few among his devotees and disciples could get anything more than fleeting glimpses of his grandeur. Only Swamiji could look with unblinking eyes at the spiritual sun that shone at Dakshineswar and come to know that its effulgence was soon to envelop the whole world. Had it not been for Swamiji; his coming and going would have gone practically unnoticed. Swamiji alone was able to understand the incomparable excellence of the Master’s life and teachings as well as their pervasive and penetrative impact on the world to last for centuries. It was given to him to mould the disciples of Sri Ramakrishna belonging to the inner circle into an altogether novel monastic order capable of fulfill-
ing its universal mission based on the all-embracing life and message of Sri Ramakrishna. The most important lesson that Swamiji would have learnt from Sri Ramakrishna could well have been that God-realisation was the primary concern of religion and that if that condition were to be fulfilled, religious tolerance and harmony, love for fellow-beings and all other virtues necessary for human welfare would naturally follow. Conversely, religion without God-realisation would merely be a religious skeleton and its inevitable concomitants would be sects and schisms, the exclusiveness of orthodoxy, the intolerance and tyranny of priest craft and such other evils alien to true religion. Or, it could well degenerate into meaningless ritualism or interminable scholastic disputations and such other absurd futilities. Such indeed was the sorry state of affairs in which Swamiji found religion everywhere. The remedy lay in reforming religion patterned on the life and teachings of Sri Ramakrishna. “This World”, Swamiji cautioned Sister Nivedita, “is in chains of superstition…… Religions of the world have become lifeless mockeries. What the world wants is Character.”2 It was Swamiji’s conviction that the future of religion depended on men of character, of purity and holiness of life marked by intense longing for God and by steadfast and singleminded devotion in seeking him for which Sri Ramakrishna would
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