is a strange world. Particularly the Indian division of it.
This pupil, Mina Bahadur Rana, is not a commonplace person, but a man of
distinguished capacities and attainments, and, apparently, he had a fine
worldly career in front of him. He was serving the Nepal Government in a
high capacity at the Court of the Viceroy of India, twenty years ago. He
was an able man, educated, a thinker, a man of property. But the longing
to devote himself to a religious life came upon him, and he resigned his
place, turned his back upon the vanities and comforts of the world, and
went away into the solitudes to live in a hut and study the sacred
writings and meditate upon virtue and holiness and seek to attain them.
This sort of religion resembles ours. Christ recommended the rich to
give away all their property and follow Him in poverty, not in worldly
comfort. American and English millionaires do it every day, and thus
verify and confirm to the world the tremendous forces that lie in
religion. Yet many people scoff at them for this loyalty to duty, and
many will scoff at Mina Bahadur Rana and call him a crank. Like many
Christians of great character and intellect, he has made the study of his
Scriptures and the writing of books of commentaries upon them the loving
labor of his life. Like them, he has believed that his was not an idle
and foolish waste of his life, but a most worthy and honorable employment
of it. Yet, there are many people who will see in those others, men
worthy of homage and deep reverence, but in him merely a crank. But I
shall not. He has my reverence. And I don't offer it as a common thing
and poor, but as an unusual thing and of value. The ordinary reverence,
the reverence defined and explained by the dictionary costs nothing.
Reverence for one's own sacred things--parents, religion, flag, laws, and
respect for one's own beliefs--these are feelings which we cannot even
help. They come natural to us; they are involuntary, like breathing.
There is no personal merit in breathing. But the reverence which is
difficult, and which has personal merit in it, is the respect which you
pay, without compulsion, to the political or religious attitude of a man
whose beliefs are not yours. You can't revere his gods or his politics,
and no one expects you to do that, but you could respect his belief in
them if you tried hard enough; and you could respect him, too, if you
tried hard enough. But it is very, very di