ABSTRACT

It is a high privilege to have the opportunity of contributing, even though it be only a few lines, to a volume in honour of one who has given lustre to contemporary history in a way that none other has—the man who, in Romain Rolland’s words, “has raised up three hundred millions of his fellow men, shaken the British Empire and inaugurated in human politics the most powerful movement that the world has seen for nearly two thousand years.” At the time when leaders in other lands were either challenging the existence of any such thing as human justice or of any moral governance of the world, or were seeking to do justice to one class of society by the persecution of another, Gandhi was engaged in a crusade for the deliverance of India from bondage to another nation and of any class in India to other classes, in the name of the unity of mankind and of a kingdom not of this world. Besides all this, and likely to count for even more in centuries to come, not only in India “that timeless land” but throughout the world, he has given living witness to the best that philosophy has had to say upon the Object towards which all religion that is worthy of the name is directed, and upon the echo which Its summons to seek perfection finds in the individual soul.