Men of great faith have always called us to wake up to great
expectations, and the prudent have always laughed at them and said
that these did not belong to reality. But the poet in man knows that
reality is a creation, and human reality has to be called forth from
its obscure depth by man's faith which is creative. There was a day
when the human reality was the brutal reality. That was the only
capital we had with which to begin our career. But age after age
there has come to us the call of faith, which said against all the
evidence of fact: "You are more than you appear to be, more than your
circumstances seem to warrant. You are to attain the impossible, you
are immortal." The unbelievers had laughed and tried to kill the
faith. But faith grew stronger with the strength of martyrdom and at
her bidding higher realities have been created over the strata of the
lower. Has not a new age come to-day, borne by thunder-clouds, ushered
in by a universal agony of suffering? Are we not waiting to-day for a
great call of faith, which will say to us: "Come out of your present
limitations. You are to attain the impossible, you are immortal"? The
nations who are not prepared to accept it, who have all their trust in
their present machines of system, and have no thought or space to
spare to welcome the sudden guest who comes as the messenger of
emancipation, are bound to court defeat whatever may be their present
wealth and power.
This great world, where it is a creation, an expression of the
infinite--where its morning sings of joy to the newly awakened life,
and its evening stars sing to the traveller, weary and worn, of the
triumph of life in a new birth across death,--has its call for us.
The call has ever roused the creator in man, and urged him to reveal
the truth, to reveal the Infinite in himself. It is ever claiming from
us, in our own creations, co-operation with God, reminding us of our
divine nature, which finds itself in freedom of spirit. Our society
exists to remind us, through its various voices, that the ultimate
truth in man is not in his intellect or his possessions; it is in his
illumination of mind, in his extension of sympathy across all barriers
of caste and colour; in his recognition of the world, not merely as a
storehouse of power, but as a habitation of man's spirit, with its
eternal music of beauty and its inner light of the divine
presence.