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Every one of us has been placed, by birth and education, within the range of power of one or another of the great human civilisations that have prevailed upon this earth. It has exercised its influence on our bodily and mental training. It has shaped the whole development of our personality. And it has even laid the impress of its specific religious outlook on the majority of men who have fallen within its sphere. It forms a network of influences which are strengthened by the history, tradition, custom and convention of each race. And the individual is knit up so closely with the pattern of these complex infuences, that it holds him in its grip nearly as firmly as do those bonds of natural kinship which connect him with the race of his ancestors.
And yet we know that those bonds of natural kinship do not hinder a person from attaching himself with even
stronger bonds to other distant persons Relative value belonging to an alien community. Such of Religious may be the bonds of love and friendship, Truth bonds of fellowship and mental affinity.
Just so, the bonds of a particular religion need not prevent anybody from glancing around and discovering merits in other diverse religions. For, in this way, the individual is enabled to measure the value of his own conceptions by comparing them with the noblest concepts contained in other religions.
But, then, the question arises : how to judge of the merit of a religion, how to find out what is noble in it!
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com