Malfuzat – Volume X — Page 213
10 March 1908 213 expression of the original teachings of a religion does survive among its followers by way of a seed. Were there any aspect of monotheistic teaching in the Vedas, its impact would have been evident in its followers at least to some extent. We see tens of millions of forms of idolatry being practiced among them. There are hundreds of thousands of temples that house all kinds of idols. In fact, most of them have vulgar and naked figures providing the world a glimpse into the true nature of their culture and of the Vedic teachings. From the intellectual point of view, the true nature of their teachings is exposed in the books that were written by them in disputation with Islam before the time of Dayanand. Thus, those people would constantly present their argu- ments in favour of idolatry against the Muslim Unitarians from the holy books of theirs; i. e. , the Vedas. All their striving served to vindicate the worship of different idols. Except for the few men produced by Dayanand, all their earlier great scholars and learned people believed in the worship of idols. Now, how can we consider these many hundreds of thousands of pundits and earlier elders of the Hindu faith to be wrong as opposed to these few followers of the Dayanand thinking? ِ وَالْفَضْل ُ لِلْمُتَقَدِّم [Ancestors have preference. ] There can only be two possible explanations. Either this precept of Tauhid [the Oneness of God] is an innovation of Pundit Dayanand conceived by him after observing the cur- rent thinking and enlightenment of this age, but has no basis in the Vedas which propound the old and fundamental doc- trine of idol worship that has been established by the millions upon millions of rishis [sages] and pundits of the Hindus with their practical example over an enormous span of time. Or, if we accept Pundit Dayanand to be true in his claim and we con- cede that all the predecessors who were the original inheritors