পাতা:অনাথবন্ধু.pdf/৬৫২

-బ్లాగా", sણ ANATHBANDHU. F' who has had any practical experience of education will bear me out in saying that by far the most difficult part of a schoolmaster's work is the effort to influence for good the lives and characters of his pupils. I can only say for myself that during the loung time that I was engaged in the Edication department' I can confidently say the mere teaching was by far the easiest and least anxious part of my work. The work that beyond all comparison was the most difficult, caused the deepest anxiety, and often, I must add, the most bitter disappointment, was the constant effort to my students a high moral tone and make them honest, pure, temperate, truthful and unselfish. And if I had not been able to use to the full the vast moral force, that Sanatan Dharma imbibed in me, I must confess without reserve that I should have given up the task in despair with all the help that the Hindu religion could give me, the effort to fight against the enormous powers that make for evil in lives and characters of the young was difficult and at times discouraging. Without that help, to me it would have been impossible. For that reason, then alone I feel that it is difficult to overestimate the loss to the higher education of India that arises from the simple fact that it is compelled to ignore religion. But there is another reason besides this. why the non-religious character of our higher education in India is greatly to be deplored. After all, religion is a great part of life. Of course if a man does not believe" in God or in the possibility of knowing God: if he holds that, even if God exists, man can come into no personal relations with Him; if he looks upon religion, therefore, as a mere parasite of human life, a noxious weed to be rooted out, or a delusion to be exposed and banished-then 'tvolanie naturally he will take a very different view of the value of religion and the part of it ought to play in education. But if God exists, if He may be known, if He has revealed Himself to man, if He really rules and governs the Universe, if our duty to Him is the highest and most binding of all duties and obligations; if the life we now live on earth is the preparation for a fuller, richer, and more enduring life in the world beyond the grave; if time is but the ante-chamber of the eternity there can surely be no doubt or question but that the knowledge of God is the one form of knowledge which man cannot afford to be without; that man's duty to God is the one form of duty which it is of supreme importance for him to know and fulfil, and that the reverence, feur and love of God, are the highest and noblest qualities of the human character. And if that is so, then education which ignores religion is ignoring the chief part of life. It may prepare young men to be clerks, magistrates, lawyers, doctors, etc., but it does not in the highest and truest sense prepai e them for the responsibilities of life. what perhaps may seem rather And I would venture to maintain, paradokical, that life without religion is a different thing from life with religion. Human life is essenThe higher principles are not added to the lower, like the top storeys of a house to the lower storeys: but they enter tially an organic whole. into them, take them up and transform them into something higher. A man does not differ from one of the lower animals simply from the fact that he has reason and conscience plats the passions, desires, and lower faculties in man are themselves so transformed and transfigured by reason, and conscience that they are raised up to a higher level and become something widely different to what are in the ape or the dog.