Jain Gazette 1905 10

Author(s): Jain Student Institute Kolhapur
Publisher: Jain Student Institute Kolhapur

Page 7

Jain Gazette.
(5).
greater souls than we are, because that study is bound to react on our character by developing the potential capacities in us. The very presence of a superior personality among us elevates our own ideals of life and, as it were, gives life to the unfelt ideals that lie in most of us only awaiting an impulse from outside. Such an example of uncommon virtues acts like a current of atmospheric electricity calling forth all at once its sympathetic negative from the society of men. Great men, while they live, live a life of useful work; but the still greater wonder is that they leave behind them a force that is never seen by earthly eyes but, all the same, that works miraclesin other men. The communities who can proudly claim a long series of such ancesters and a present phalanx of high-souled person ages, nood never despair in the dreariest of struggles that has to be carried on in the march of progress. When the struggle is growing fiercer than ever it is a relief to reflect over the fact that our own community has never been wanting in men whose great qualities of both head and heart entitie them to be respected by all who know them. Shet Premachand Roychand who left this world on the 30th August last may be fitly placed in the liş 1. of those great men who have kept on the traditions of the history even to this day. We give below the chief points in our long and chequered life.
HIS EDUCATION.
Born of a poor Shvetambar Jaina family at Surat-the birth-place of another great Jain, Shet Maneckchand-Shet Premachand received some education at the famous Elphinstone Institution. It would be difficult to explain how it is that no other institution in the Bombay Presidency should have produced even a fraction of the large number of talented men that this Institution has sent forth. The great bard of ancient IndiaBhavabhuti-was certainly quite right in singing:
वितरति गुरुमाझे विद्यां यथैव तथा जडे नच तयोोने शक्तिं करोत्यपहंति वा ।