ADDRESS AT THE FINAL SESSION

ADDRESS AT THE FINAL SESSION
27th September, 1893

The World's Parliament of Religions has become an accomplished fact, and the
merciful Father has helped those who laboured to bring it into existence, and
crowned with success their most unselfish labour.
My thanks to those noble souls whose large hearts and love of truth first
dreamed this wonderful dream and then realised it. My thanks to the shower of
liberal sentiments that has overflowed this platform. My thanks to his
enlightened audience for their uniform kindness to me and for their
appreciation of every thought that tends to smooth the friction of religions. A
few jarring notes were heard from time to time in this harmony. My special
thanks to them, for they have, by their striking contrast, made general harmony
the sweeter.
Much has been said of the common ground of religious unity. I am not going
just now to venture my own theory. But if any one here hopes that this unity
will come by the triumph of any one of the religions and the destruction of the
others, to him I say, “Brother, yours is an impossible hope.” Do I wish that the
Christian would become Hindu? God forbid. Do I wish that the Hindu or
Buddhist would become Christian? God forbid.
The seed is put in the ground, and earth and air and water are placed around it.
Does the seed become the earth; or the air, or the water? No. It becomes a
plant, it develops after the law of its own growth, assimilates the air, the earth,
and the water, converts them into plant substance, and grows into a plant.
Similar is the case with religion. The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a
Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must
assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow
according to his own law of growth.
If the Parliament of Religions has shown anything to the world it is this: It has
proved to the world that holiness, purity and charity are not the exclusive
possessions of any church in the world, and that every system has produced
men and women of the most exalted character. In the face of this evidence, if
anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the
destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and point out
to him that upon the banner of every religion will soon be written, in spite of
resistance: "Help and not Fight," "Assimilation and not Destruction,"
"Harmony and Peace and not Dissension."