Page:Heroes of the hour- Mahatma Gandhi, Tilak Maharaj, Sir Subramanya Iyer.djvu/16

Rh that standard. God has not produced his "noblest work" as yet, for verily such a man cannot live in this conditioned world any more than a fish can live out of water. There may be other worlds in which honest men may live but this world is for many striving to be honest, successful in one effort, unsuccessful in another, and for many others to whom the idea of honesty is no issue at all in a vast number of concerns. A world of evolution, every man has to evolve a higher out of a lower nature by conscious efforts of self-surrender. Through limitations and imperfections, falling and rising alternately, chastened by experience mellowed by repentance, fortified by introspection man leaves behind him one stage for a higher stage—and so long as there is a higher stage, no man, no woman is perfect. Such men who seek to tread this path of renunciation of worldly goods and worldly prospects overcoming the frailties, passions and cravings of inherited congenital possession, such men are few indeed. No man can be perfect; but one who is on the road which can never take him from imperfections is he who clings to self-gratification, as though that is the reality of existence. On what