Lord! We will succeed. Hundreds will fall in the struggle — hundreds will be ready to
take it up. Faith — sympathy, fiery faith and fiery sympathy! Life is nothing, death is
nothing — hunger nothing, cold nothing. Glory unto the Lord! March on, the Lord is
our General. Do not look back to see who falls — forward — onward!
Swami Vivekananda was thoroughly convinced by his intimate knowledge of the
Indian people that the life-current of the nation, far from being extinct, was only
submerged under the dead weight of ignorance and poverty. India still produced great
saints whose message of the Spirit was sorely needed by the Western world. But the
precious jewels of spirituality discovered by them were hidden, in the absence of a
jewel-box, in a heap of filth. The West had created the jewel-box, in the form of a
healthy society, but it did not have the jewels. Further, it took him no long time to
understand that a materialistic culture contained within it the seeds of its own
destruction. Again and again he warned the West of its impending danger. The bright
glow on the Western horizon might not be the harbinger of a new dawn; it might very
well be the red flames of a huge funeral pyre. The Western world was caught in the
maze of its incessant activity — interminable movement without any goal. The
hankering for material comforts, without a higher spiritual goal and a feeling of
universal sympathy, might flare up among the nations of the West into jealousy and
hatred, which in the end would bring about their own destruction.
Swami Vivekananda was a lover of humanity. Man is the highest manifestation of
God, and this God was being crucified in different ways in the East and the West. Thus
he had a double mission to perform in America. He wanted to obtain from the
Americans money, scientific knowledge, and technical help for the regeneration of the
Indian masses, and, in turn, to give to the Americans the knowledge of the Eternal
Spirit to endow their material progress with significance. No false pride could prevent
him from learning from America the many features of her social superiority; he also
exhorted the Americans not to allow racial arrogance to prevent them from accepting
the gift of spirituality from India. Through this policy of acceptance and mutual respect
he dreamt of creating a healthy human society for the ultimate welfare of man's body
and soul.
The year following the Parliament of Religions the Swami devoted to addressing
meetings in the vast area spreading from the Mississippi to the Atlantic. In Detroit he
spent six weeks, first as a guest of Mrs. John Bagley, widow of the former Governor of
Michigan, and then of Thomas W. Palmer, President of the World's Fair Commission,
formerly a United States Senator and American Minister to Spain. Mrs. Bagley spoke
of the Swami's presence at her house as a 'continual benediction.' It was in Detroit that
Miss Greenstidel first heard him speak. She later became, under the name of Sister
Christine, one of the most devoted disciples of the Swami and a collaborator of Sister
Nivedita in her work in Calcutta for the educational advancement of Indian women.
After Detroit, he divided his time between Chicago, New York, and Boston, and during
the summer of 1894 addressed, by invitation, several meetings of the 'Humane
Conference' held at Greenacre, Massachusetts. Christian Scientists, spiritualists, faith-