A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

474 CHRIST, THE MESSENGER.beings see that He is omnipresent. The omnipresentGodof the universe cannot be seen until He is reflected bythese giant lamps of the earththe incarnations, the embodiments of Gods.the prophets, tte man-gods,Just think of this. We all know that God exists rand yet we don t see Him, we don t understand Him. Takeone of these great Messengers of light ; compare theircharacter with the highest ideal of God you ever formedand you find that your God falls low, and <uhat that ^ character rises. You cannot even form of God a higher idealthan what the actually embodied have practicallyrealized rilaid before us as an example. Is itwrong, therefore, toworship these as Gods ? Is it a sin to fall at the feet ofthese man-gods, and worship them as the only divinebeings in the world ? If they are really, actually, higherthan all my~~conception of God, what harm iftheybe worshipped? Not onlyis there no harm, but itis the only possible and positive way of worship. Try,however you may, by struggle, by abstraction, by whatsoever method you may ;but so long as you are a man inthe world of men, your world is human, your religionhuman, and your God human. And that has got to be.And whosoever is not practical enough to take up an actually existing thing, has to give up something which hecannot grasp, which is an abstraction, away distant anddifficult of approach except througha concrete medium.Therefore, these incarnations of God have been worshippedin all ages and everywhere.This afternoon we are to study a bit of the life of theincarnation of the Jews. The Jews were in that statewhich I call a state of fall between two waves : a state ofconservatism, a state where the human mind is, as it were,tired for the time being of moving forward, and is taking