We cannot judge the past from the standards of the present. Everyone will willingly admit this. But every one will not admit the equally absurd habit of judging the present by the standards of the past. The various religions have especially helped in petrifying old beliefs and faiths and customs, which may have had some use in the age and country of their birth, but which are singularly unsuitable in our present age.
The past brings us many gifts; indeed, all that we have today of culture, civilization, science, or knowledge of some aspects of the truth, is a gift of the distant or recent past to us. It is right that we acknowledge our obligation to the past. But the past does not exhaust our duty or obligation. We owe a duty to the future also, and perhaps that obligation is even greater than the one we owe to the past. For the past is the past and done with, we cannot change it; the future is yet to come, and perhaps we may be able to shape it a little. If the past has given us some part of the truth, the future also hides many aspects of the truth, and invites us to search for them, and not to simply judge and reiterate the past. But often the past is jealous of the future and holds us in a terrible grip, and we have to struggle with it to get free to face and advance towards the future.
The old days were days of faith, blind, unquestioning faith. The wonderful temples and mosques and cathedrals of past centuries could never have been built but for the overpowering faith of the architects and builders and people generally. The very stones that they reverently put one on top of the other, or carved into beautiful designs, tell us of this faith. The old temple spire the mosque with its slender minarets, the Gothic cathedral - all of them pointing upward with an amazing intensity of devotion, as if offering a prayer in stone or marble to the sky above - thrill us even now, though we may be lacking in the faith of old of which they are the embodiments. But the days of that faith are gone, and gone with them is that magic touch in stone. Thousands of temples and mosques and cathedrals continue to be built, but they lack the spirit that made them live during the middle ages. There is little difference between them and the commercial offices, which are so representative of our age.
Our age is a different one; it is an age of disillusion, of doubt, distrust and uncertainty and questioning. We can no longer accept many of the ancient beliefs and customs; we have no more faith in them, in Asia or in Europe or America. So we search for new ways new aspects of the truth more in harmony with our environment. And we question each other and debate and quarrel and evolve any number of "isms" and philosophies. As in the days of Socrates, we live in an age of questioning, but that questioning is not confined to the city of Athens; it is worldwide.
I feel so lost and disillusioned. Sometimes the injustice, the unhappiness, the brutality of the world can oppress us and darken our minds, and we see no way out. With Matthew Arnold, we feel that there is no hope in the world, no channel to cross the lexicon of pain and that all we can do is to be true to one another. "For the world which seems to lie before us, like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; and we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night."
And yet if we take such dismal view we have not learnt aright the lesson of life or history. For history teaches us of growth and progress and of the possibility of an infinite advance for man. And life is rich an varied, and though it has many swamps and marshes and muddy places, it has also great sea, and the mountains and the snow, and glaciers, and wonderful starlit nights, and the love of family and friends, and the comradeship of humans in a common cause, and music, and books and the empire of ideas. So that each one of us may well say: - "lord, though I lived on earth, the child of earth, yet was I fathered by the starry sky."
It is easy to admire the beauties of the universe and to live in a world of thought and imagination But to try to escape I this from the unhappiness of others, caring little what happens to them, is no sign of courage or fellow feeling. Thought, in order to justify itself, must lead to action. "Action is the end of thought", says our friend Romain Rolland. "All thought that does not look towards action is an abortion and treachery. If then we are the servants of thought we must be the servants of action".
People often avoid action often because they are afraid of the consequences, for action means risk and danger. Danger seems terrible from a distance; it is not so bad if you have a close look at it. And often it is a pleasant companion, adding to the zest and delight of life. The ordinary course of life becomes dull and mundane at times, and we take too many things for granted and have no joy in them. Many people go up high mountains and risk life and limb for the joy of the climb and the exhilaration that comes from a difficulty surmounted, a danger overcome; and because of the danger that hovers all around them, their perceptions get keener, their joy of the life which hangs by a thread, the more intense.
All of us have our choice of living in the valley below, with their unhealthy mist and fogs, but giving a measure of bodily security; or of climbing the high mountains, with risk and danger for companions, to breathe the pure air above, and take joy in the distant views, and welcome the rising sun. I shall finish up with one more poem. It is by Rabindra Nath Tagore:-
"where the mind is without fear and the head is held up high;
where knowledge flows;
where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls;
where words come out from the dept of truth;
where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary
desert sand of dead habit;
where the mind is lead forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action-
into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake"
