DUTIES OF THE THEOSOPHIST/PART 3
THE DUTY OF
THE THEOSOPHIST TO HIS NATION AND HUMANITY
Friends :
We are to deal this morning with the third division
of the duty of the Theosophist. You remember that in the first lecture I
defined the duty of the Theosophist to Religion as beginning in that
realisation of the Self which is the foundation of all religion, and its
correlative service of man which is only the other side of the realisation of
the Self. I reminded you then that, as we had been taught in the Bhagavad-Gita,
the right and true service was the service which was of the nature of
sacrifice, that the only actions that do not bind us to the wheel of births and
of deaths, those actions, as the Gita tells us, are the actions of the nature
of sacrifice, and that the true object of liberation is not to change one's
habitat from this to another world, but is a liberation of the immortal Spirit,
who, knowing himself as one with God, devotes himself to the service of the
Divine Will, to carry it out, as far as it is possible to carry it out, and to
live as God's agent in whatever world he is, seeing to the welfare of the
world, devoting himself to that highest form of sacrifice which asks for
nothing, which seeks for nothing for the separated self, but serves the One Life in the world in the carrying
on of humanity to perfection. Then, yesterday, I tried to show you how the duty
of the Theosophist to Society, depending in its details on the special
environment in which he found himself, must be animated by that spirit of
service which grew out of Self-realisation, that then he was to look around him
to see what were the evils in the social system which formed his environment,
and set himself to a redressal of those evils. You may remember that I made
what may be perchance a somewhat artificial distinction between Society and the
Nation, by taking within Society all that rested on custom, on tradition, on
religious beliefs and the accretion of any abuses in those directions, whereas
I defined the Nation as an organism expressing its will by law, where the
elements of compulsion came in—compulsion from the Nation as a whole and not
from the special society which might form a community within the Nation.
To-day, we are to take the last section—the duty of
the Theosophist to his Nation and to Humanity. Now, in dealing with that,
friends, I will ask you to remember the general principle that wherever there
is a human need, which a Theosophist is able to supply, there lies his duty,
and to the supply of that need the voice of the Supreme calls him as the work
of the time. It is clear that under these conditions of duty we cannot, in a
world-wide Society like our own—a Society which exists in all the civilised Nations
of the world—lay down a common duty in detail, because the detail must vary
with the Nation, to which the Theosophist belongs. The duty of the Theosophist
nationally in England, in Russia, in India, will necessarily be conditioned by
the state of his Nation, and the only one thing that we can say as common to
all is that which I just put to you —that wherever there is a need that a
Theosophist can supply, there he must spring forward in order to offer his
services. Naturally, living here in India, talking chiefly to Indians, I now
take the duty of the Theosophist to the Nation in which he is, to the Indian
Nation. That is the particular environment where we must find our duty—and I do
not really distinguish here in one sense between the coloured and the
colourless, for all who live within the limit of a Nation have their duty
imposed upon them to that Nation, no matter whether they come from abroad and
are living among the people, or whether they be born in the Nation and belong
to it by their heredity, by their traditions, by their family. The duty to some
extent must differ, and you know well enough that, in putting forward any
opinion I express, I put it forward not as a dictation to any other, but as the
expression of my own belief, and it is for every one of you to judge how far my
definition of the duty of the Theosophist agrees with your own view of your
duty ; for never forget that, as I quoted to you in my first lecture, where the
Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, liberty of judgment, liberty of
opinion, liberty of speech, so that in speech, in thought, in action, you may
express the determinations of your own intellect, you may follow the promptings
of the Spirit within you. But inasmuch as all human thought has its value for the
study of others, I put to you what I believe to be the duty of the Theosophist
in India, and so far as anyone of you agrees with me, that thought may act
somewhat as a signpost along the road on which you travel. In every Nation, one
great duty lies upon the Theosophist, to help, to improve, to supply the
deficiencies in the education of the Nation to which he belongs. In this
country, as elsewhere, one of your primary duties is the duty of the education
of the people, and I want you to realise that it is an individual duty, that it
is not exhausted by good wishes, that it is not exhausted by a speech on the
platform, that it is not exhausted by writing in the papers. The Theosophist's
duty is a personal duty, and that duty must be discharged according to the
environment in which he lives. Now, this duty of educating people is closely
bound up with the political life of the Nation. I am separating them
artificially, but I will tell you at once why I say that without political
freedom no really National education is possible. My reason is this : how can
you deal effectively with the education of the people unless you are free to
work at it, unless it is in the hands of the Nation itself, and of yours as
part of the Nation ? No one else knows the needs of the people as the people
themselves know them, intimately and conclusively. You know, my friends, how
Indian I am in heart. You know that my love is with the Indian people, and the
one object of my life is to help and serve the Motherland. But I recognise that
wherever education is concerned, my duty, not being Indian born, is to work with the Indian and under Indian
control, and not to force my own ideas. I realise that I may help by my
experience, that I may help by my advice, and this is not a matter of theory
but of practice with me. When we built up the Central Hindu College, which has
now developed into the Hindu University, we had a large majority of
Indians—only three colourless people on the Board, viz Colonel Olcott, Mr.
Keightley and myself, all vowed to the service of India. The whole of the rest
of the Managing Body, the whole of the rest of the Board of Trustees, were
Indians and not foreigners, because where one who had not the privilege of
having been born here desires to serve, one must remember that India knows what
she wants for her sons and daughters, and one must follow and serve, and must
not dictate and claim the right to command. So I am not speaking by theory but
by my own practice, and I think it was justified in its results.
The object of the Indian Nation must be to educate
its own sons and daughters, so that they may be good citizens of their
Motherland. The education must be based on the needs of the people. I speak
from observation of history when I say that until people can make their voices
heard in the laws of the land, you cannot get full education, and I appeal to
English experience. In England political freedom came before popular education.
Even after the first great Reform Bill of 1832, the masses of the people were
left in the grossest ignorance. The talk about education as necessary to
political freedom is not a talk based on experience, but is directly against
it. It is an excuse and not a reason ; it is a sophistry and not an argument.
It was only after the later Reform Bill of 1867, that household suffrage was
given to the people: only from that does the great advance of education in
England date; before that, no free and compulsory education, before that, a
very limited elementary education. Those who were enfranchised were masses of
ignorant people, and as Robert Lowe said with absolute truth : " We must
educate our masters." What was the result of the enfranchisement of the
householder? Education began to go forward ; only now in England is free and
compulsory education the law of the land, and no parent is allowed for his own
selfish purposes to deprive his child of the benefit of education which is the
birthright of the child. There we have a right to stand. We cannot in India
obtain free and compulsory education, as you know, under present conditions.
How do you know it ? Because Mr. Gokhale brought forward or tried to bring
forward a Bill—a limited Bill, a cautious Bill, a Bill which only took effect
where a certain number over a certain area desired to apply it; yet he was not
able to do anything with that Bill in the Supreme Legislature. With all the
weight of his authority, with all the respect which the Government professed
for his statesmanship, with all his personality and popularity among the
people, he was absolutely helpless when he asked for education for his people.
There is a need that a Theosophist must try to supply. You will not get it—I
admit you will not get it—until the
political system here is changed.
While that is true, we can do something in that
direction. We can try through our Municipalities to encourage them to open
schools which shall be free, though even there the Government often steps in to
prevent. England is a wealthy country. India is the poorest civilised country
in the world. If England can give free education to her sons and daughters so
that there is no burden on the parents, when the children there are taught
their duties to the Nation, cannot we here in India also give that education to
children of parents too poor to pay fees, and whose very bread depends upon the
labour of their children ? Remember what we know of Indian poverty, that half
our agricultural population never knows what it is to have a stomach full of
food. Knowing that, can we ask them to pay for education ? Can we ask them to
pinch the body yet more in order that the minds of the children may be fed ?
Nay, can you take those half-starved children and put on them the extra burden
of education which their brain is too devitalised to accept and profit by ? There
comes up the question of feeding the children of the very poor. Friends, I was
a member of the London School Board for one of the poorest districts in
London—the East End of London. More than ninety thousand children were there
under my care. What did I find in the poor schools ? The children fell from
their benches fainting on the floor, because they came hungry to school, and
could not bear the strain of the school teaching. We find the same thing in our
Panchama Schools ; children cannot learn because they are too hungry. We have
had a medical
inspection, and 78 per cent of the children coming to these schools are
suffering from malnutrition. There are other diseases which grow out of it, but
78 per cent of these poor little children are suffering from want of food. Is
that a human state ? We dare not teach them without first giving them a meal.
If England with a fairly-well-to-do artisan and agricultural population has now
passed an Act for supplying meals to school children who want them, do not our
children here need that food more than they need it in England? And must we not
think of the future of our country, growing up out of these half-starved little
ones ?
There then, I put it to you, lies your duty to
education : first to try to get your Municipalities to act, to persuade them
in their schools to make education free, and secondly, to prevent your local
Government from refusing—as they refuse now—to allow the . Municipalities to
open free schools for their children. That is one of the points that from
Madras we have sent up to our Education Member as we call him—Sir Sankaran
Nair. We know he will sympathise, but he is only one man against the rest of
the Council, and what can one man do ? Still, he will speak and you can help
him to speak. Remember that wherever you have the opportunity, you are bound to
press the duty of free education for the children, wherever you can reach them.
The next thing you most do is to take it in hand
yourselves, and make a National System of Education, running side by side for
the present with the Government system. Now, it is true that it is a big task,
but you are a big people. It looks very large if you talk about crores, but
there are only a certain number of
children round every
one of you. You live in
different towns—some of you in different villages. Wherever there
is a Theosophist, a school should
grow up round him voluntarily carried
on by those who are willing to help, and supported by the money of those
who cannot give personal service but
are able to give something from
their purses. If you will take it in
detail, if you will realise it,
you are able to solve a
large part of
the question of free education ; but the schools for our
submerged classes are starving for lack of funds. In the great city of
Madras our own five Panchama schools are
always in financial difficulties, and
we only get help from Theosophists outside. The Depressed Classes Mission
schools there are
in the same grip of poverty, and
that is a scandal to every one of us who
is not trying to improve the
condition ; and I plead to you
that where your boys and girls are attending
schools, there ought to be in the
neighbourhood a free school for the helpless and the ignorant classes of our
population. While I say that
the education of the child is a duty of the State, where the State does
not do it, there the people mast take it into their own hands, for the people
and the State are not synonymous here as
they ought to be, and the Nation is apart from the Government.
What should education be ? I have Spoken on this so
often that I am almost ashamed to speak again, but I repeat that it must be
that fourfold education which we have been trying to popularise in India. It
must be religious, but there must be no proselytisation.
You must not take the warm hearts, the plastic
brains of boys and girls, and either leave them without religious teaching or
impress upon them a form of teaching that is not their own The religion of the
child should follow the religion of the father and the mother, should be his
hereditary faith. The authorities will not give as a conscience clause, they
will not say that a child shall be preserved from the danger of being turned
aside from his ancestral faith ; but a Theosophist must take care that the
child of every religion is treated equally—that the Christian shall teach
Christianity to a Christian child, the Hindu shall teach Hinduism to a Hindu
child, the Musalman shall teach Muhammadanism to a Muhammadan child—every child
should be brought up in the faith of his father and not in an alien religion.
That is a vital Theosophical principle. In our Theosophical schools, every
child is taught his own faith. They join in common worship to that One without
a second before whom we all bow in reverence. They are then taught their own
faith by a member of their own religion, so that it shall be taught at its best
by a man who loves it, and the child's heart shall have that fragrance of
religion which alone can lead to real culture, and to righteousness of life in
the outer affairs of the State. Religion is the foundation of all good. Without
that, you train the intellect, that is, you train the combative side of man,
and you leave the unity untouched. Men quarrel because in their boyhood they
have learnt differences, and have forgotten the underlying unity ; but the
Hindu and the Musalman and the Christian have really more in common in their
religions than they have of differences. The differences are external but the spirit
of religion is the same. Differences are questions for men and women. They are
not questions for boys and girls. Morality has its roots in religion, and
morality is the training of the emotions. Out of emotions grow virtues and
vices. All the emotions—and never forget it, my friends—all the emotions of the
nature of hate lead to vice and not to virtue. All the emotions of the nature
of love lead to virtue and not to vice. The emotions of the family, the bond of
love between husband and wife, between parents and children, between brothers
and sisters, between the family and its dependents —what are these but the law
of love expressing itself in mutual service, recognising mutual obligations,
and needing no compulsion for the happiness, for the peace, for the tenderness
of domestic relations? What should be the relations of the Nation save those of
the same emotions to the elders, to the equals, to the youngers, those same
emotions made universal and made permanent, not a passing emotion expressing itself
spontaneously, but a settled principle of conduct expressing itself wherever
the opportunity occurs ? What else did Manu teach us?—that we were to look on
our elders as parents, on our equals as brothers and sisters, on our youngers
as our children. There is the principle of the Nation built on the principle of
the family—affections turned into virtues, and reproducing themselves in the
National life. The children must be trained in this virtue. Love of country must be taught in every
one of oar schools. " The Mother and the Motherland are the dearest things
on earth." That is a lack in our education to-day. In England they say
that you must teach boys patriotism, but in England it comes naturally. The
books they read, the stories they hear, are all based on heroes of their own
history and race, a pride of race and a sense of love of their Motherland. But
here our boys are not taught to reverence the heroes of their own country, but
heroes of a foreign land ; they are taught the life of Nelson and not the lives
of Akbar and Shivaji. How shall they be proud of India when they know nothing
about her, except a list of stupid dates of battles, and nothing about the life
of the people ? How much have any of you learnt of old India, and what do you
know of the great systems of law and of policy which ruled India when all
Europe was in a state of barbarism ? What do you know of the administration of
men like Chanakya— Kautilya ? What do you know of the old great irrigation
works ? I was listening the other day to a lecture which pointed out that in
Tanjore all the great channels of irrigation to-day are those that were built
in the ninth and tenth centuries after Christ. How can you have patriotism when
the boys and girls are taught nothing of their country ? The duty of the
Theosophist in India is to teach patriotism here as the Englishman teaches
it—and rightly teaches it—in England. Boys and girls must be proud of their
Motherland, and their warmest emotions must flow out to the Mother country, and
their patriotism must be love of their
own land and only secondarily of the Empire at large. You must next train their
intellect, but you must train their intellect to Service. You must model your own intellectual education as you have
never yet been able to do it, and it is part of our duty to
draw the thoughtful educationists of India together, and let them plan out the education that we
want. We do not want students to learn
English in the way in which they teach
it now, so that boys who can find out some roots in Chaucer cannot write a
common letter in English. You want to teach in your vernaculars, and not in a
foreign language. What right have you
to put on the
brains of your boys and girls an extra difficulty of understanding the
words, when they
ought to be grasping the facts ? There
is not a country in the world, except countries like Poland, trodden under the hoof
of despotism, where the
language of the country is not the language of the school boys and
girls. Right up to the
matriculation, you should make
the vernaculars the medium of instruction. Certainly teach English, but teach it sensibly as a second language,
teach it conversationally, teach it so that
you can communicate
freely. Do not teach
"Gothic," do not teach old English texts; let them learn those if
they want them, after taking a degree; but your boys and girls are not going to
be philologists. When I was in my early days educationally, I learnt French so
as to read modern French, so as to talk it and so as to
write it, and if I wanted to read old
French works, I should have had
to take a special course of
study in them; it did not come into the ordinary English education. But here
you break our boys' brains over those old forms of English which they struggle
over within the examination room, and then throw away as useless lumber for the
rest of their lives. So I ask you to consider that you want to teach facts, and
if a boy's attention is fixed on a language which is not familiar to him, he
cannot grasp facts which are made difficult by being presented in a foreign
garb. Vernacular education then, with English as second language. Then, not
early specialisation. You want an all-round culture for the boys and girls ;
later, when the brain is growing stronger, then comes the time for
specialisation. In your colleges and Schools you want to add a modern side, as
they call it, to the ancient. You must have arts, because you cannot leave the
learned professions empty. You must also have commerce, you must have applied
science, you must have industry taught. You must make your chemists, like the
German chemists, the servants of your manufacturers. Only in that way will you
revive your dying industries and train your boys for the many vocations that
the country needs, and not overcrowd the Government service and the learned
professions, while you starve the industrial side, and so lose the sinews of
wealth that you need for your Nation. Roughly along these lines your National
Education should go, to be worked out in detail by the Indians. My advice to
the boys here is to avoid Government service as much as you can. You want
doctors, but you want people reared in your own country, equal with those who
have gained their degrees in a foreign
land, and trained in your own systems. You want lawyers—-sometimes you
have too many ? Well, I must give you my twenty-three years' experience in
India, and it is that wherever I have wanted men to work, wherever I have
needed people ready to sacrifice, I have found them in the Vakil class. Why do
the English sneer at them ? Because they are afraid of them. I know that they
scoff at politics: "Oh! yes, Vakils." But that is because they see in
them their most dangerous opponents, because Vakils are clever, resourceful,
law-abiding and constitutional agitators. While I am in favour of sending many
of our boys into trade, industry and commerce, I also would not see the learned
professions starved, for we need them for the carrying on of our work.
But there is one other point in education you must
remember—the body. It is all very well to be clever, to be educated ; it is all
very well to be moral ; and it is best of all to be religious ; but religion
and morality and intellect depend for their exercise in this world on a strong
physical body, and if the body fails, all the intellectual and religious
treasures practically are killed out for want of their physical habitation ;
your men die too early. Run over the men whom you have lost in the last few
years in the prime of life, when they should be at their best ; at the very
time when their brain should be keenest, they get fossilised, because you do
not train your bodies in your youth. You must remember that during the first
years of life up to the age of fifteen and sixteen, the training of the body is
the most important part of education. You can study later, but you cannot
build up a healthy physical body when once you have passed the youthful
period of adolescence. Make your boys play, make them exercise, make them train
their bodies, feed them well—not with too many sweets and spices, because that
means poor health—but remember that the duty to the body is as pressing as the
duty to any other part of a boy's nature. Remember one other point, viz., that
while you have child-mothers and schoolboy fathers you will never have a
healthy and long-lived Nation.
Friends, I must leave that, to come on to the last
part of my subject—the Theosophist's duty to the Nation in its political life.
Some people say: "What has Theosophy to do with politics? " Everything.
I told you my reason the first day. Religion is either everything or nothing.
If it is a matter of ceremonies, or of going to the temple, to the mosque, to
the church, if it is a matter of days, like Sundays, while all the six days are
given to the world and one to God, it is no true religion : it is a hypocrisy
and a sham. Such religion is of no service in the National life. But the
religion that permeates every thought of man, that permeates every act, that
permeates every word, that is the religion we want, and that is the Ancient
Wisdom which came down from the older days. I reminded you in the first lecture
that the Hindu Rishis took part in politics, went round the country visiting
the kings, asking whether the artisans had materials, whether the
agriculturists had seeds, whether they looked after the widows and orphans of
those who had died in the fields of battle. Was that politics
or not ? It depends on how
you use the word. Party politics is the business of individuals, but
the life of a Nation—true politics— that is the business of every citizen in
the Nation, whatever his religion may be. Now, our people are Hindus,
Musalmans, Parsis, and Christians, and they do not change their faith when they
add to it the broad and loving spirit of Theosophy ; and therefore their duty
to the Nation becomes greater and not less, because they have drunk at the
fountain of the Ancient Wisdom. So, if you say to me : " What has
Theosophy to do with politics ? " I say that it has everything to do with them.
It has to build up a State of which Brotherhood shall be the foundation ; in
which the rule should be accepted that every child born into a civilised Nation
has a right to be surrounded by the conditions that enable him to develop to
the utmost every faculty that he brings with him into the world. Until that is
the rule of a State, there is no true civilisation.
There lies, then, the duty of a Theosophist : he
has to deal with politics in order that a Nation may flourish. The question of
the liberty of a people— do you call that politics or not ? I call it politics,
because to me " politics " means the organised life of a Nation. It
is not party politics, it is not a question of this man up and the other man
down ; it is not a question of quarrelling between different detailed views and
methods ; but the liberty of a Nation is a point that no one, who feels the
duty of a religious man to his Nation, can ever possibly put aside on any
pretext. On the liberty of a Nation depends its self-respect, its dignity, its life.
I know that many lesser things depend upon it, but
to my mind, the great reason why a Nation should be Free and Self-Governing is
that because without these a man is not a man : he is only a half-man, and not
a complete man, in reality.
You know that every civilised Nation—except the
Indian—feels this. You heard how Mr. Asquith spoke of the possibility of German
domination in England. "What would it be," he said, " if all the
highest offices were filled by Germans ? What would it be if our taxes were
levied by Germans? "He said to his English audience, and it was endorsed
by their ringing cheers: "It would be inconceivable and intolerable."
Do you feel that about yourselves ? If not, the National feeling is not yet
awakened in you. You cannot, I admit, say that it is inconceivable, because we
conceive nothing else in this country. Intolerable? Yes. Is it not an
intolerable thing that when your sons want to rise to high posts in their own
land, they must travel across land and sea, in order to go through certain
tests in another country, that they may come back to their own, and hold their
own among their own people? Is it not an intolerable thing that in your
Educational Service, you have two Services—one when the man comes from abroad
and is a colourless man, an Englishman, and begins with Rs. 500 a month and
goes up to Rs. 1,000, while in the other—the really Indian Educational Service,
miscalled Provincial Educational Service—which is yours, the coloured man has
lower salary, lower position, lower retiring pension, a lower everything in his
own country ? I am not one of those who desire that the bond between England
and India should be broken. I desire that the bond should continue, for
England as much as I desire it for India, because I believe that it is best,
for both Nations to go forward hand in hand. While I say that, I say that they
must go forward as equals and not as rulers and ruled. I say that an Indian in
India must have everything that an Englishman has in England, that he must have
pride of race, pride of country, love of country; patriotism must not be
labelled sedition, and desire for liberty must not be branded as rebellion.
That is an intolerable condition of things, and it is a duty of every man to
try to change that condition. So, the duty of a Theosophist here is to help in
the liberation of India—not of the Theosoph-ical Society, because our Society
is international, everywhere, and you cannot ask a Russian Theosophist to help
in the liberation of India. I speak only of the Indian Theosophists and
Theosophists who are residents here. The duty is not imposed upon them by the
Society, but by the principles of Theosophy. There lies the duty of the true
Theosophist—a human duty, a National duty, a duty which comes from service to
the Motherland, which none has a right to forbid. Your individual influence on
the lesser political movements will be valuable, because it should be guided
by the wisdom you have gained amongst us, and by the application of those great
laws of Karma, Reincarnation and Brotherhood—the only sure foundation for the
continued life of any Nation.
Friends, I have left myself little time to speak of
your duty to Humanity. I need only add a few words about that. We who believe
in evolution, we who realise that the world is marching onwards, guided by the
Divine Will, and by hands mightier than our own, we realise that every Nation
is like an organ in the common body of Humanity, and that we want the perfect
development of Nationality—the life of the organ—in order to be ready for the
higher life—the life of Humanity as a whole. There is nothing contrary,
antagonistic, between Nationality and Humanity, if Nationality is based on love
and not on hatred, if the love of the country serves the country, but does not
hate other lands, if the devotion to the country tries to rouse feeling, but
for greater service, not to dominate, to rule nor to exploit. A Theosophist
must be a citizen of the world at the same time that he is a citizen of his own
country ; he must love all other Nations, he must try to draw them together, he
must treat them with respect, he must try to cultivate that feeling of
friendship which alone can cover the differences between one race and another ;
he must be a peacemaker outside his Nation and also within it—within the
Nation, drawing the communities together into one, outside the Nation, trying
to draw Nations into a Brotherhood, so that there may be no more war, none of
the misery through which the world is passing to-day. Therefore, in your life
outside your Nation, do nothing to increase the spirit of hate, even towards
those who are our enemies in the physical world to-day; remember that they also are our human
brothers, separated now by a gulf of blood and of misery ; but love can build
bridges across the gulf and look forward to a future where the Nations shall be
once more at one.
I pray you that no Theosophist shall cast fresh
fuel into the fire of hate, and so make here the characteristic in which we see
the evil of the Germans. I sometimes fear that in this great struggle, the
spirit, the noble spirit, in which the Allies began, may pass into the spirit
of the Germans, where they desire dominance, where they had their hymn of
hatred—a hatred which is now preached in some of our Anglo-Indian journals in
India, and which no Indian should take part in, because it perpetuates the
strife of race. I know full well that horrors have been committed. I know the
history of the Germans as they grew up to their present position, that they have
largely brutalised themselves. I know that things are taking place in their
hospitals which those Germans learnt in the practice of vivisection, where they
vivisected animals and made experiments on sick men, publishing their shameful
experiments in their own medical journals. I heard the other day from a friend
that a relative of that friend had one arm so injured that amputation was
necessary, and that the other arm, perfectly sound, was barbarously cut off by
the German doctor. (Cries of " shame ".) Aye, cry shame. But you have
the beginning of that same spirit here, where you follow the vivisection
principle, and where you torture animals for the sake of saving men. It is
against all your teaching, against all your past, but you are beginning to go
along that road which Europe has trodden, and which made the German vivisectors
of the past, with the Austrians and Italians, callous to human pain, and ready
to experiment in human agony. Do not hate them but pity them ; do not detest
them, but avoid that line which has degraded them as a Nation, and
remember —for I come back at the end to
that with which I began—that true Religion, Self-realisation, expresses itself
in the unity of Humanity, and in the love of men for men. You cannot go wrong
in love ; you are sure to go wrong in hate ; hating dulls the intellect and
hardens the heart. Take due care that, in this terrible strife, in your
struggle also in your own Nation for constitutional liberty, you remember also
your duty to Humanity, that you work by love and not by hatred, that you try to
raise all and not to degrade any. Let us draw our bonds together, let us
approach each other, and not repel each other ; for only thus will the Will of
God be done, and the Brotherhood of Humanity be realised in our world.
END OF THIS
BOOK
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