Page:One Hundred Poems Kabir (1915).djvu/29

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INTRODUCTION
xxix

inhabitation; that essentially dualistic relation which all mystical religion expresses, not a self-mergence which leaves no place for personality. This eternal distinction, the mysterious union-in-separateness of God and the soul, is a necessary doctrine of all sane mysticism; for no scheme which fails to find a place for it can represent more than a fragment of that soul’s intercourse with the spiritual world. Its affirmation was one of the distinguishing features of the Vaishnavite reformation preached by Rāmānuja; the principle of which had descended through Rāmānanda to Kabīr.

Last, the warmly human and direct apprehension of God as the supreme Object of love, the soul’s comrade, teacher, and bridegroom, which is so passionately and frequently expressed in Kabīr’s poems, balances and controls those abstract tendencies which