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tion Religion appeals to something higher than logic or the senses, to spiritual experience and the direct knowledge drawn from the secret discipline it has developed in most parts of the world.
Force Universal or Individual.
It is not clear whether our contemporary recognises any personality in its Universal God or only recognises Him in all movements as natural Law. We hold that He manifests Himself in particulars not as Law, which is only a generalisation of the methods by which He cts, but as Shakti working for the Purusha. He puts Himself as force, energy, motive-power into every particular. It is perfectly true that every particular contains Him, but there are differences in the force of His manifestation. This is obvious in individuals. The strength of every particular individual is the strength of God and not his own, because every particular strength is merely a part of the Universal force and it is really the Universal force and not the individual strength that is acting. But in living, beings when consciousness has become separate, the individual is allowed to suppose himself to be strong in his own strength. He is not really so. God gave the strength and He can take it away. He gave it power to act und He can baffle its action of the fruits the individual sought and turn it to quite other results. This is so common an experience that we do not see how any man with the power of introspection can deny it. Only at ordinary times, when things seem to be moving according to our calculations, we forget it, but on certain occasions He manifests Himself with such force either in events or in our own actions that unless we are blinded by egoism or by infatuation we are compelled to perceive the universality of the force that is acting and the insignificance of the individual. So also there are particular movements in particular epochs in which the Divine Force manifests itself with suprome power shattering all human calculations, making a mock of the prudence of the caroful statesman and the scheming politician, falsifying the prognostications of the scientific analyser and advancing with a vehemence and velocity. which is obviously the inanifectation of a higher than human
KARMAYOGIN.
force. The intellectual man afterwards tries to trace the reasons for the movement and lay bare the forces that made it possible, but at the time he is utterly at fault, his wisdom is falsified at every step and his science serves him not. These are the times when we say God is in the movement, He is its lender and it must fulfil itself however impossible it may be for man to see the means by which it will succeed. Faith and Deliberation.
The next point is the question of mature deliberation. The Bengalee here tries to avoid confession of its error by altering the meaning of language. The mature deliberation of which it
were
spoke applies only to particular acts and, even then it was not one man or a dozen but the whole self-conscious part of the country which took part in these mature deliberations. The facts do not square with this modified assertion. The majority even of the particular steps taken in pursuance of the ideas which swept over the country were not taken in pursuance of mature deliberation but the result in some men of a faith which defied deliberation and in others of a yielding to the necessity of the moment. The National Council of Education came into existence because Sj. Subodh Chander Mallik planked down a lakh of rupees and was followed by the zeinindar of Gauripur, an act of faith, because the Rangpur.schoolboys and their guardians refused to go back on their action in leaving the Gevernment school and established a. school of their own, also an act of faith, and because some leading men of the country recognized that something must be done on the spot to prevent the honour of the nation being tarnished by abandonment of this heroic forlorn hope while others thought it a good opportunity to materialize their educational crotchets. Was this mature deliberation or a compound of faith, idealism and risky experiment? The Boycott come into existence because of the wrath of the poople against the Partition and the vehement advocacy of a Calcutta paper which, supported by this general wrath, bore down the hesitations of the thinkers, the politicians and the economista Almost every step towards Swadeshi,
every National school established was an act of faith in the permanetice of the movement, a faith not justi fied by previous experience. These were acts of boldness, often of rashness, not of mature deliberation. Mature deliberation implies that having consulted the lemons of past experience and weighed the probabilities of the future and the possibilities of the present. we take the step which seems most prudent and likely to bring about sure results. The Bombay millowners deliberated maturely when they said, "This movement born of a moment's indignation will pass like the rest; go to, let us raise our prices and make hay while the sun shines." The leaders deliberated maturely when they said, "The rush towards National Education will not last and if encouraged it will mean the destruction of private institutions and the payment of a double tax for education." So they stopped the student's strike, withheld their moral support and by this mature deliberation put, like the Bombay millowners, almost insuperable obstacles in the way of the movement. It was the unconsciously prepared forces in the country that made their way in spite of and not because of the mature deliberation. It was a minority convinced of the principles of self-help and passive resistance, full of faith, careless of obstacles, believing in the force of ideas, and not the whole self-conscious portion of the country, which mainly contributed, by its eloquence, logic, consistency, self-sacrifice and the impact of its energy on the maturely-deliberating majority, to the permanence of the movement. These are the facts. As for the conclusion from them we never made. the absurd statement evolved out of the Bengalee's imagination that God is everywhere except in the conscious and deliberate activities of mon.
What we say and hold to' is that the Divine force manifests itself specially when it effects mighty and irresistible movements which even the ignorance and egoism of man is obliged to recognise as exceeding and baffling his limited wisdom. and his limited strength. Our "Inconsistencies."
A third point is the proposition that out of evil cometh good and that everything that happens or can hap