290 EARLI ER INDIAN SPEECHES
that has left house or brethren or sisters, or father or mother, or wife or children or lanJs for my sake and Gospel's but he shall receive one hundredfold, now in this time houses and brethren and sisters and mothers and children and land, and in the world to come, eternal life. But many that are first shall be last and the Jast, first.' You have here the result or reward, if you prefer the term, of following the law. I have not taken the trouble of copying similar passages .from the other non-Hindu scriptures and I will not insult you by quoting, in support of the law stated by Jesus, passages from the writings and sayings of our own sages, passages even stronger, if possible, than the Biblical extracts I have drawn your attention to. Perhaps the strongest of all the testimonies in favour of the affirmative answer to the question before us are the lives of the greatest teachers of the world. Jesus, Mahomed, Buddha, Nanak, Kabir, Chaitanya, Shankara, Dayanand, Ramkrishna were men who exercised an immense influence over, and moulded fhe character of, thousands of man. The work! is the richer for their having lived in it. And they were all men who deliberately embraced poverty as their lot.
I should not have laboured my point as I have done, if I did not believe that, in so far as we have made the modern materialistic craze our goal, so far are we going down hill in the path of progress, I hold that eco- nomic progress in the sense I have put it is antagonisict to real progress. Hence the ancient ideal has been the limitation of activities promoting wealth. This does not put an end to all material ambition. We should still have, a^ we have always bad, in our midst people who make the pursuit of wealth their aim in life. But
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