enjoyment as its goal, must die sooner or later.
If you want to live, go back to Christ. You are not Christians. No, as a nation you are
not. Go back to Christ. Go back to him who had nowhere to lay his head. Yours is a
religion preached in the name of luxury. What an irony of fate! Reverse this if you
want to live; reverse this. You cannot serve God and Mammon at the same time. All
this prosperity — all this from Christ? Christ would have denied all such heresies. If
you can join these two, this wonderful prosperity with the ideal of Christ, it is well; but
if you cannot, better go back to him and give up these vain pursuits. Better be ready to
live in rags with Christ than to live in palaces without him.
On one occasion the Swami was asked to speak in Boston on Ramakrishna, a subject
dear to his heart. When he looked at the audience — the artificial and worldly crowd of
people — and contrasted it with his Master's purity and renunciation, he practically
dropped the subject and mercilessly inveighed against the materialistic culture of the
West. The audience was resentful and many left the meeting in an angry mood. But
Vivekananda, too, had his lesson. On returning home he recalled what he had said, and
wept. His Master had never uttered a word of condemnation against anybody, even the
most wicked person; yet he, while talking about Ramakrishna, had criticized these
good-hearted people who were eager to learn about the Master. He felt that he was too
unworthy of Sri Ramakrishna to discuss him or even to write about him.
Swami Vivekananda's outspoken words aroused the bitter enmity of a large section of
the Christian missionaries and their American patrons, and also of Christian fanatics.
Filled with rancour and hatred, these began to vilify him both openly and in private.
They tried to injure his reputation by writing false stories traducing his character. Some
of the Indian delegates to the Parliament, jealous of the Swami's popularity and fame,
joined in the vilification. Missionaries working in India and some of the Hindu
organizations started an infamous campaign against the Swami's work. The
Theosophists were particularly vindictive. They declared that the Swami was violating
the laws of monastic life in America by eating forbidden food and breaking caste laws.
His friends and disciples in India were frightened and sent him cuttings from Indian
papers containing these malicious reports. One article stated that one of the Swami's
American hostesses had had to dismiss a servant girl on account of the Swami's
presence in the house. But the lady published a vehement denial and said that the
Swami was an honoured guest in her home and would always be treated with affection
and respect. The Swami wrote to his timorous devotees in India concerning a particular
American paper that had criticized him, telling them that it was generally known in
America as the 'blue-nosed Presbyterian paper', that no educated American took it
seriously, and that, following the well-known Yankee trick, it had tried to gain
notoriety by attracting a man lionized by society. He assured them that the American
people as a whole, and many enlightened Christian clergymen, were among his
admiring friends, and he asked them not to send him any more of such newspaper trash
with articles from his vilifiers. He told them, furthermore, that he had never deviated