To conquer India required great courage, it required ability of the
highest, it needed self-denial, self-sacrifice of the individual for
the nation. What will the freedom of India need in us? It will need
qualities higher even than these are. It will need courage, as great
as or greater even than that which we have shown before--the courage to
leave alone; it will require self-abnegation and self-sacrifice, not
for our own nation, but for India, for Humanity; it will require a
sympathy and understanding such as no nation has ever yet felt for a
foreign people.
Can we do this?
I do not know. Can we with whom representation except of the
wire-pullers of the party has ceased to exist, in whose schools of all
kinds and in whose universities there is no education, whose legal
system is bad beyond all expression, who have under free forms less
real freedom than most other countries, can we give to India what we
have not? I think that we shall have to take the beam out of our own
eye first. Are we prepared to do that?
What will it need in India? It will need courage too, it will need
self-restraint not less than that which we shall have to show, the
courage to go slowly, to restrain the rising tide within the banks of
safety, to so direct it that the flood will fertilise, not destroy.
It will need more than this. What ruined India twice, and what ruins
her now? Division. Race, caste and creed are curses when they make
one man despise or hate another. There is one God. Brahma and Allah
and Jehovah are but names for One if truly seen. His kingdom is in
neither Church nor creed nor Prophet, neither in temple nor in holy
place, but in the hearts of men--all men. If you read truly you will
see that in the beginning all religions were ideas, great streams of
hope and truth driving to one ideal. All truth which is a living truth
is One. But formulæ and castes and creeds and ceremonies and forms,
rites of all kinds, are priest-made things that kill and petrify. All
souls come here from God; not Brahmin souls nor Pongyis' souls nor
Christian souls alone, but every soul in every man that lives, they
come from God and so return. They are part with us of the eternal "I"
in which are lost all "yous" or "theys." Can the Brahmins forget their
legendary pride and prove their vaunted worth by leading India to an
equal freedom and not keeping her back by the slavery they have thrown
upon her? Can the Moslem, casting off the mould of dead tradition,
remember the Omniades, their tolerance, their wisdom, their
civilisation; what they did and, above all, what they did not do?
Can the Buddhist believe that life is good--not evil; to be made the
most of, not feared nor shunned? to be loved and lived?
I do not know. These things are all upon the knees of God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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