With all my love for India,and with all my patriotism and venerations for the ancients,I cannot but think that we have to learn many things from other nations. ? We cannot do without the world outside India; it was our foolishness that we thought we could,and we have paid the penalty by about a thousand years of slavery. That we did not go out to compare things with other nations, did not mark the workings that have been all around us, has been the one great cause of this degradation of the Indian mind. We have paid the penalty; let us do it no more.
Some Of these old temples of Southern India,and those like Somnath of Gujarat will teach you volumes of wisdom., will give you a keener insight into the history of the race than any amouflt of books. Mark now these temples bear the marks of a hundred attacks and a hundred regenerations, continually destroyed and continually springing up out of the ruins, rejuvenated and strong as ever! That is the national mind, that is the national life-current.
For the next fifty years this alone shall be our keynote ?this, our great Mother India.Let all other vain gods disappear for the time from our minds.This is the only god that is awake, our own race ? ?everywhere His hands, everywhere His feet, everywhere His ears; He covets everything.? All other gods are sleeping. What vain gods shall we go after and yet cannot worship the god that we see all round us, the Virat? when we have worshiped this, we shall be able to worship all other gods.
