Eternal Destroyer as Eternal Love. Siva the destroyer, he protests, is co-equal and co-eternal with Brahma the Creator and Vishnu the Preserver; and yet they are not three Eternals but One Eternal; not conflicting mysteries but one Ineffable palpitation; not rival powers but One Loving Lord.
There is always about the true Prophet more or less of the feeling expressed by the daughter of the Asa-race in Tegner's immortal poem: " The King's daughter will not condescend to snatch at joy; for she can fling away her whole life's happiness, even as a Queen can cast away her mantle, and still remain just what she was,—a Queen." The masses are jealous of a man to whom personal happiness is but a non-essential, and whose very indifference to his own fate confers on him the power of ruling those hampered with personal desires, by simply waiting till they have exhausted themselves in fruitless struggles after the fleeting joys of earth or the unattainable bliss of an imaginary Millennium. Their instinct tells them that his very existence is a danger to their prosperity. They crucify or burn him; or they lock him up, at one time in a gaol, at another time in a mad-house, under the pretence that he "lacks the normal instincts," and on the assumption that they can know which instincts are "normal" and which are not so.
The Prophet's great danger is the tendency to fall into a mystic acceptance of evil. His faith and patience become exhausted in the struggle against other men's impatience to realize good; he forgets that the true Good is not suffering, nor even the knowledge which suffering brings; but the revelation of orderly Pulsation; and that suffering where there should be joy
