March 11, 1898 — Star Theatre, Calcutta, India

I am here tonight to sound a note of no doubt, no fear, no weakness, no failure, and no hesitation whatever. I am here tonight to sound a note of infinite joy and victory.

The name of the Inaugural Meeting of the Ramakrishna Mission is wrongly applied to this assembly. That Mission held its true inaugural meeting, I think, one day long years ago, in the shadowy gardens up there at Dakshineswar, when the Master sent His disciples forth to all the world, as the greatest teachers have always done, to preach the gospel to every creature. And perhaps some of you may consider that the inaugural meeting of the Ramakrishna Mission took place on that other day, not long ago, when his friends went to say Godspeed to a wandering Sannyasin, going friendless and ill-provided, to a rich and powerful country in the West. This mission is, to the national life of India, as a great symphony of many movements. One movement is already over, and the first chord of the second is struck. In the passage that is ended, there have been discords, there have been moments of great anxiety and doubt, perhaps even of fear and sadness. But all that is gone, and at this moment, I say with all sincerity, there is no doubt, no fear, and no discord; it is all hope and strength. We know that we will win and shall not fail. I am not afraid of overestimating or exaggerating the importance of this movement to Indian national life; it would be easier, I think, to make too little of it than too much. Great are these doings we are living through, and great is the Ramakrishna Mission, and I say that this Mission is bound to be a success after all.

I am here to tell you something definite about the work done in England about a year-and-a-half ago in spreading your spiritual thoughts among us. I am not here to give you the details that newspapers have given you. I am not here to lavish personal praise upon one who is present with us here on this platform. But I am here to try in a few words to tell you something of the significance to us in England of the message you sent to us through him. You in India have deep and subtle and profound views on destiny. You know that no success like that of Swami Vivekananda is ever achieved unless there are souls waiting whose destiny it is to hear the message and to use it. These waiting souls in the West number thousands and tens of thousands. Some few have heard, but many have not yet heard the message. I may just try for one moment to say some of the reasons why this message of India to the world is so really needed by us. For the last fifty years, in the West of Europe, we have been religiously and spiritually the most intellectual men and women of the day. For some years, however, it has been the position indeed of overwhelming and complete despair. I do not mean to tell you in India how there comes a moment in the life of any man who has been brought up according to the method of mythology, when that man will find his life a life of complete rupture from all the associations of his childhood, when his intellect is growing and expanding day by day as he progresses towards the higher life of wisdom. That moment comes to every man. In that moment a terrible struggle begins within the soul. Doubt and negation take possession of the soul with all their peculiar consequences. What a terrible moment it is indeed! The reason why such a moment is universally visible in the lives of Western peoples is, of course, in the scientific movement. You all know Darwin’s Origin of Species came to England only to enforce scientific precision in connection with things known to philosophers centuries and centuries ago. It did more. It made the idea of evolution popular. People had carelessly accepted the inspired sayings of our Bible, “God is love”; here was nature ‘red in tooth and claw’, and how can the two things be true? So doubt and agnosticism became common property. At the same time, there was growing over the religious life of England a great wave of longing for that old personal, picturesque, and symbolical worship which was known to our forefathers and to yours. That was a great movement which preceded the agnostic one, and they have borne combined fruit in the fact that man today stands longing for catholic reality, yet unable to find his message in dogmas by reason of his passion for, and faculty of judging of, the truth. The scientific movement has done that. It has given us a power of discrimination and tremendous passion for the truth. But in the last ten years or so, a change seems to have been manifested. You all know the names of Professor Huxley and Professor Tyndall as the exponents of agnosticism. Perhaps some of you also remember an essay that appeared in some of the Reviews after the death of Professor Huxley, showing that his latest conviction was that Humanity was unlike the rest of the animal kingdom in being dominated by something higher than mere physical evolution. Long before this, Herbert Spencer had abandoned the position of complete negation and had devoted four chapters of his well-known “First Principles” to the theorem that a first cause existed, and of it we can know nothing intellectually. And so, gentlemen, you see that there has been a turn in the tide. For those who have once left the narrow channels of belief in a personal God who controls the weather, no re-ascent of the river bed is easily possible. They are out in the great ocean of truth, battling with stony waves; yet as in orthodoxy they begin to suspect that their view is but partial after all and not complete and perfect. It may be that some great personal emotion strikes its note of Love and Sacrifice across their lives by means of words like, “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee;” or that great utterance that stayed the giant soul of Martin Luther, “A strong mountain is our God.” At such a juncture the gospel of your great truth, “God is One without a Second,” brings infinite enlightenment to the soul of man.

We in Europe have known for a hundred years that India’s name is bound up for you with the doctrine of the Real and the Apparent. But to realize all that this means, the voice of the living preacher was needed. “God is One without a Second.” If this is so, then misery and sin, evil and fear, are mere illusions. The truth had only to be put clearly and vigorously before us by your great Swami Vivekananda to be grasped at once by some, and sooner or later by many. But the great aim of the Ramakrishna Mission is to preach the true relation of all the religions of the world to each other. And this is a doctrine which no doubt commends itself with peculiar strength to some of those who have come under the influence of your thought. It formulates and harmonizes what we already know of the doctrine of development, and let me, gentlemen, tell you that when a principle finds experience ready, it takes far deeper root than if it had come as a mere theory to be proved. I cannot tell you in detail of the personal energy that has been shown by people, whom I could name, in consequence of their intense realization of the world as the manifestation of God, and of themselves as identical with God; and for whom, therefore, errors, sins, and impossibilities cannot exist.

It is indeed a new light. It is a new light to the mother in dealing with her children. Because, if sin does not exist, if sin is only ignorance, how changed, how different is our position towards wrong and towards weakness and towards fear, instead of the old position of condemnation! The old notion, the old conception of any sort, which has at the bottom hatred, goes away, and instead there is love — all love. But I think there is one thing that we in the West did possess. That was the great passion for service. Twenty years ago, when the doctrine of agnosticism was the burden of all teachings, you find that one reservation was purposely made. There is one thing left for us, and that is “service” and “fellowship.” The more the minds of men were driven back from orthodoxy, the more positively and the more intensely they grasped the thought of mutual Brotherhood. Even here your Eastern wisdom brought the light of non-attachment.

We had yet to realize that the love of self, the love of friends and relations, the love of country are nothing at all, if that love did not simply mean love of the whole world. That if it is a matter of the least consequence to us, whom we serve, then, our service is as nothing. But all society is reflexible society; as our friend Swami Vivekananda said, there is a great power of progress and expansion in it. In India it would be a great drawback, indeed, to introduce any such theory of national exhaustion, because in India flexibility and easy expansion are impossible. You have the ingenuity of six thousand years of conservatism. But yours is the conservatism of a people who have through that long period been able to preserve the greatest spiritual treasures for the World, and it is for this that I have come to India to serve here with our burning passion for service. In coming to serve India, one must know the innumerable difficulties, the needs, the failures, and the defects of India. I need not trouble you any more as our chairman will no doubt address you with greater knowledge and greater wisdom than I am in a position to do. Before I sit down allow me to utter those three words which are in your own language —

“Sri Sri Ramakrishna Jayati.”

I am here tonight to sound a note of no doubt, no fear, no weakness, no failure, and no hesitation whatever. I am here tonight to sound a note of infinite joy and victory.

The name of the Inaugural Meeting of the Ramakrishna Mission is wrongly applied to this assembly. That Mission held its true inaugural meeting, I think, one day long years ago, in the shadowy gardens up there at Dakshineswar, when the Master sent His disciples forth to all the world, as the greatest teachers have always done, to preach the gospel to every creature. And perhaps some of you may consider that the inaugural meeting of the Ramakrishna Mission took place on that other day, not long ago, when his friends went to say Godspeed to a wandering Sannyasin, going friendless and ill-provided, to a rich and powerful country in the West. This mission is, to the national life of India, as a great symphony of many movements. One movement is already over, and the first chord of the second is struck. In the passage that is ended, there have been discords, there have been moments of great anxiety and doubt, perhaps even of fear and sadness. But all that is gone, and at this moment, I say with all sincerity, there is no doubt, no fear, and no discord; it is all hope and strength. We know that we will win and shall not fail. I am not afraid of overestimating or exaggerating the importance of this movement to Indian national life; it would be easier, I think, to make too little of it than too much. Great are these doings we are living through, and great is the Ramakrishna Mission, and I say that this Mission is bound to be a success after all.

I am here to tell you something definite about the work done in England about a year-and-a-half ago in spreading your spiritual thoughts among us. I am not here to give you the details that newspapers have given you. I am not here to lavish personal praise upon one who is present with us here on this platform. But I am here to try in a few words to tell you something of the significance to us in England of the message you sent to us through him. You in India have deep and subtle and profound views on destiny. You know that no success like that of Swami Vivekananda is ever achieved unless there are souls waiting whose destiny it is to hear the message and to use it. These waiting souls in the West number thousands and tens of thousands. Some few have heard, but many have not yet heard the message. I may just try for one moment to say some of the reasons why this message of India to the world is so really needed by us. For the last fifty years, in the West of Europe, we have been religiously and spiritually the most intellectual men and women of the day. For some years, however, it has been the position indeed of overwhelming and complete despair. I do not mean to tell you in India how there comes a moment in the life of any man who has been brought up according to the method of mythology, when that man will find his life a life of complete rupture from all the associations of his childhood, when his intellect is growing and expanding day by day as he progresses towards the higher life of wisdom. That moment comes to every man. In that moment a terrible struggle begins within the soul. Doubt and negation take possession of the soul with all their peculiar consequences. What a terrible moment it is indeed! The reason why such a moment is universally visible in the lives of Western peoples is, of course, in the scientific movement. You all know Darwin’s Origin of Species came to England only to enforce scientific precision in connection with things known to philosophers centuries and centuries ago. It did more. It made the idea of evolution popular. People had carelessly accepted the inspired sayings of our Bible, “God is love”; here was nature ‘red in tooth and claw’, and how can the two things be true? So doubt and agnosticism became common property. At the same time, there was growing over the religious life of England a great wave of longing for that old personal, picturesque, and symbolical worship which was known to our forefathers and to yours. That was a great movement which preceded the agnostic one, and they have borne combined fruit in the fact that man today stands longing for catholic reality, yet unable to find his message in dogmas by reason of his passion for, and faculty of judging of, the truth. The scientific movement has done that. It has given us a power of discrimination and tremendous passion for the truth. But in the last ten years or so, a change seems to have been manifested. You all know the names of Professor Huxley and Professor Tyndall as the exponents of agnosticism. Perhaps some of you also remember an essay that appeared in some of the Reviews after the death of Professor Huxley, showing that his latest conviction was that Humanity was unlike the rest of the animal kingdom in being dominated by something higher than mere physical evolution. Long before this, Herbert Spencer had abandoned the position of complete negation and had devoted four chapters of his well-known “First Principles” to the theorem that a first cause existed, and of it we can know nothing intellectually. And so, gentlemen, you see that there has been a turn in the tide. For those who have once left the narrow channels of belief in a personal God who controls the weather, no re-ascent of the river bed is easily possible. They are out in the great ocean of truth, battling with stony waves; yet as in orthodoxy they begin to suspect that their view is but partial after all and not complete and perfect. It may be that some great personal emotion strikes its note of Love and Sacrifice across their lives by means of words like, “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee;” or that great utterance that stayed the giant soul of Martin Luther, “A strong mountain is our God.” At such a juncture the gospel of your great truth, “God is One without a Second,” brings infinite enlightenment to the soul of man.

We in Europe have known for a hundred years that India’s name is bound up for you with the doctrine of the Real and the Apparent. But to realize all that this means, the voice of the living preacher was needed. “God is One without a Second.” If this is so, then misery and sin, evil and fear, are mere illusions. The truth had only to be put clearly and vigorously before us by your great Swami Vivekananda to be grasped at once by some, and sooner or later by many. But the great aim of the Ramakrishna Mission is to preach the true relation of all the religions of the world to each other. And this is a doctrine which no doubt commends itself with peculiar strength to some of those who have come under the influence of your thought. It formulates and harmonizes what we already know of the doctrine of development, and let me, gentlemen, tell you that when a principle finds experience ready, it takes far deeper root than if it had come as a mere theory to be proved. I cannot tell you in detail of the personal energy that has been shown by people, whom I could name, in consequence of their intense realization of the world as the manifestation of God, and of themselves as identical with God; and for whom, therefore, errors, sins, and impossibilities cannot exist.

It is indeed a new light. It is a new light to the mother in dealing with her children. Because, if sin does not exist, if sin is only ignorance, how changed, how different is our position towards wrong and towards weakness and towards fear, instead of the old position of condemnation! The old notion, the old conception of any sort, which has at the bottom hatred, goes away, and instead there is love — all love. But I think there is one thing that we in the West did possess. That was the great passion for service. Twenty years ago, when the doctrine of agnosticism was the burden of all teachings, you find that one reservation was purposely made. There is one thing left for us, and that is “service” and “fellowship.” The more the minds of men were driven back from orthodoxy, the more positively and the more intensely they grasped the thought of mutual Brotherhood. Even here your Eastern wisdom brought the light of non-attachment.

We had yet to realize that the love of self, the love of friends and relations, the love of country are nothing at all, if that love did not simply mean love of the whole world. That if it is a matter of the least consequence to us, whom we serve, then, our service is as nothing. But all society is reflexible society; as our friend Swami Vivekananda said, there is a great power of progress and expansion in it. In India it would be a great drawback, indeed, to introduce any such theory of national exhaustion, because in India flexibility and easy expansion are impossible. You have the ingenuity of six thousand years of conservatism. But yours is the conservatism of a people who have through that long period been able to preserve the greatest spiritual treasures for the World, and it is for this that I have come to India to serve here with our burning passion for service. In coming to serve India, one must know the innumerable difficulties, the needs, the failures, and the defects of India. I need not trouble you any more as our chairman will no doubt address you with greater knowledge and greater wisdom than I am in a position to do. Before I sit down allow me to utter those three words which are in your own language —

“Sri Sri Ramakrishna Jayati.”

Source: The Complete Works of Sister Nivedita, Vol. 2, by Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble) (Kolkata: Trio Process, 2016), pp. 396-400.