Immortality and Joy

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Champat Rai Jain

Page 8

The great English thinker, Thomas Carlyle, tells us:
"I say great mon are still admirable. I say there is at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life............ Hero-worship endures for ever while man enduros. Boswell venerates his Johnson, right truly even in the Eighteenth century. The uubelieving French believe in their Voltire; and burst out round him into very curious Hero-worship in that last act of his life when they stille him under rosos... ............ At Paris his carriage is the nucleus of a connet, wbose train fills whole streets. The ladies pluck a hair or two from his fur, to keep it its a sacred relic. There was nothing highest, beautifullost, noblest in all trauce, that did not feel this man to be higher, beautifuller, nobler ............It will ever be so. We all love great men; love, venerate and bow down submissive before great men: nay can we honestly bow down to any thing else! Ah, does not every true men feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him? No nobler or more blessed feeling dwells in man's heart. And to me it is very cheering to consider that no sceptical logic, or general triviality, insincerity and aridity of any time and its influences can destroy this noble in-born loyalty and worsbip that is in man....... It is an eternal cornerstone, from which they can begin to build themselves up...... That man in some sense or other, worships; heroes that we all of us reverence and must over roverence Great Men this is, to me, the living rock amid all rushings-down whatsoever."