Karma Yoga Bhakti Yoga

Author(s): Swami Vivekanand
Publisher: Ramkrishna Vivekananda Center of New York INC

Page 37

EACH IS GREAT IN HIS OWN PLACE 27
immoral, because upon him depend hundreds. If he gets riches, hundreds of others will be thereby supported.
If there were not in this city hundreds who had striven to become rich, and who had acquired wealth, where would all this civilisation, and these alms houses and great houses be?
Going after wealth in such a case is not bad, because that wealth is for distribution. The householder is the centre of life and society. It is a worship for him to acquire and spend wealth nobly, for the householder who struggles to become rich by good means and for good purposes is doing practically the same thing for the attainment of salvation as the anchorite does in his cell when he is praying, for in them we see only the different aspects of the same virtue of self-surrender and self-sacrifice prompted by the feeling of devotion to God and to all that is His.
He must struggle to acquire a good name by all means; he must not gamble; he must not move in the company of the wicked; he must not tell lies, and must not be the cause of trouble to others.
Often people enter into things they have not the means to accomplish, with the result that they cheat others to attain their own ends. Then there is in all things the time factor to be taken into consideration; what at one time might be a failure, would perhaps at another time be a very great success.