Page:Holmes - World Significance of Mahatma Gandhi.djvu/11

 flickering spark of hatred or revenge. He is love incarnate. In every act and even gesture of these last years, when patient suffering has purified his soul, he has been a perpetual witness to the truth of his own great words, “Anger will serve no purpose. We must meet ungodliness by godliness. We must meet untruth by truth. We must meet cunning and craft by openness and simplicity. We must meet terrorism and frightfulness by bravery.”

It is qualities such as these, which have become familiar to all Indians, that give Gandhi such a hold upon the imagination and devotion of his people. It is these same qualities, also, that give to him and his work a universal significance. Gandhi is a man who has mastered the secrets of spiritual living. His soul has been lifted, by virtue of incomparable discipline, to the measure of the stature of those realities which are of God. In humility, in sacrifice, in ardent love for men, he is one of those perfect characters which come along once in a thousand, or perhaps only in two thousand, years. And today he lies in prison. Such men are the judges of our world. A society which cannot suffer a Jesus, or a Gandhi, to be at large, is a society which is not fit to live, and by this token is already doomed to die.

A second evidence of Gandhi’s universal significance is found in his doctrine of non-resistance, which he says, “does not mean meek submission to the will of the evil-doer, but the pitting of one’s whole soul against the will of the tyrant.” I refer more particularly to the fact that Gandhi is the first man who has succeeded in applying the non-resistant idea on a vast scale, and in working out a technique for its successful operation in determining the great issues of social life. Gandhi, in other words, has demonstrated the feasibility of non-resistance as a method of political and economic reform, and therewith, as definitely as Newton or Darwin, opened up a new era in human history.

Hitherto non-resistance has labored under two very serious disabilities. In the first place, its practice has been limited in the past to the life of the single individual, or here and there to the experience of single and isolated groups of individuals. The great non-resistants have been Jesus, St. Francis, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy—men of transcendent personality and influence, who have exemplified nobly the possibilities of non-resistance in their own private lives, but have never attempted, or been able, to apply it on a universal scale to society