Page:Letters from Abroad.pdf/134

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LETTERS FROM ABROAD

125

it delights me, it makes me feelembarrassed. What have I to give to these people? What have they received from me? But the fact is, they are waiting for the day-break after the orgies of night, and they have their expectation of light from the East.

Do we feel in the soul of India that stir of the morning which is for all the world? Is the one string of her ektura being tuned, which is to give the keynote to the music of a great future of Man— the note which will send a thrill of response from shore to shore? Love of God in the hearts of the medisval saints of India—like Kabir and Nanak— came down in showers of human love, drowning the border-lines of separation between Hindus and Musalmans.

They were giants, not dwarfs, because they had the spiritual vision, whose full range was in the Eternal—crossing all the barriers of the moment. The human world in our day is much larger than in theirs ; conflicts of national self-interest and race-traditions are stronger and more complex; the political dust-storms are blinding ; the whirlwinds of race antipathy are fiercely persistent; the sufferings caused by them are world-wide and deep. The present age is waiting for a divine word, great and simple, which creates and heals. What has moved me profoundly is the fact that suffering man in Europe hae turned his face to the East.

It is not the man of politics, or the man of letters, but the simple man whose faith is living. Let us