You must know that red tape can never be a common human bond; that
official sealing-wax can never provide means of mutual attachment;
that it is a painful ordeal for human beings to have to receive
favours from animated pigeonholes, and condescensions from printed
circulars that give notice but never speak. The presence of the
Western people in the East is a human fact. If we are to gain anything
from them, it must not be a mere sum-total of legal codes and systems
of civil and military services. Man is a great deal more to man than
that. We have our human birthright to claim direct help from the man
of the West, if he has anything great to give us. It must come to us,
not through mere facts in a juxtaposition, but through the
spontaneous sacrifice made by those who have the gift, and therefore
the responsibility.
Earnestly I ask the poet of the Western world to realise and sing to
you with all the great power of music which he has, that the East and
the West are ever in search of each other, and that they must meet not
merely in the fulness of physical strength, but in fulness of truth;
that the right hand, which wields the sword, has the need of the left,
which holds the shield of safety.
The East has its seat in the vast plains watched over by the
snow-peaked mountains and fertilised by rivers carrying mighty volumes
of water to the sea. There, under the blaze of a tropical sun, the
physical life has bedimmed the light of its vigour and lessened its
claims. There man has had the repose of mind which has ever tried to
set itself in harmony with the inner notes of existence. In the
silence of sunrise and sunset, and on star-crowded nights, he has sat
face to face with the Infinite, waiting for the revelation that opens
up the heart of all that there is. He has said, in a rapture of
realisation:
"Hearken to me, ye children of the Immortal, who dwell in the Kingdom
of Heaven. I have known, from beyond darkness, the Supreme Person,
shining with the radiance of the sun."
The man from the East, with his faith in the eternal, who in his soul
had met the touch of the Supreme Person—did he never come to you in
the West and speak to you of the Kingdom of Heaven? Did he not unite
the East and the West in truth, in the unity of one spiritual bond
between all children of the Immortal, in the realisation of one great
Personality in all human persons?
Yes, the East did once meet the West profoundly in the growth of her
life. Such union became possible, because the East came to the West
with the ideal that is creative, and not with the passion that
destroys moral bonds. The mystic consciousness of the Infinite, which
she brought with her, was greatly needed by the man of the West to
give him his balance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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