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THE JAINA GAZETTE from wrong-doing ? One may say that early training and bring. ing up have checked such people from sinning. Let us grant it to be so at this stage.
There are several persons whose crimes are yet undetected and who are yet unpunished and who still commit sins after sins with impunity. These licensed (so to say) sinners also had all the training and good influence of their parents, teachers, relatives, friends and the country's laws.
And there are also these who still commit sins even after they are punished several times by the King's or Country's laws.
But these people who commit sin as a habit meet with some calamity and catastrophe and in their agony of sorrow, pain or fear and dread feel that they have been punished adequately by some unknown power and this punishment is called a retribution ; and remorse and penitence fill the minds of such habitual offenders.
And there are others who had not training and who had no education of any kind and who had no opportunity of being under any good influence, and who had many an occasion to commit wrong still following the path of righteousness. What is that that made such people good and sober ?
An open door tempts a saint. But even closed doors are broken open by lesser saints and false saints. But all saints are not tempted by open doors. The percentage of offenders in any society or country after all form a small minority. The majority do not sin. Then what is that influence which checks people from doing wrong and makes them walk in the straight path of righteousness?
All men and women that have been born before us since creation, have affirmed in unmistakable terms out of their individual experience that a superior, unknown, beneficient power or something there is and that this something is either granted or supposed or understood or known by one's conscience, intelligence or instinct
I leave to the readers to realise what the words conscience, intelligence and instinct denote. But I call, as so many have
called, this something as God and that God always watches, Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
