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“MAHATMA GANDHI” John Haynes Holmes

As I saw the sensational headlines in last Friday's newspapers announcing the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, I thought of how different it all would have been had this dreadful deed taken place thirty, or twenty, or even ten years ago. An assassination, even of an inconspicuous individual, is always a sensational event But a few inches in an inside page of the newspaper would have sufficed to tell that story. In this case, however, it was the man who was the sensation, and not “the deep damnation of his taking off.” Gandhi’s death in any form today, from old age, or as a consequence of fasting, would have shaken the foundations of the world. So important had he become in the life of our time, and so eternally momentous was his significance for the human race.

A generation ago, just think of it, Gandhi was almost entirely unknown outside the borders of his native land, or known only as a queer sort of person, who was doing extraordinarily queer things with his fellow countrymen. Here was a man who strode the countryside of India, clad only in a loin cloth, bare-footed, and leaning on a beggar’s staff. A man who lived by deliberate choice among the poorest of the poor of the common people of his land! A man who deliberately made the cause of the despised untouchables his own, and in token of his faith and sincerity, adopted into his own family, to live in his home, to eat at his table, to share his life, an orphan girl of the untouchable class! A man who actually taught in all sincerity the crazy doctrine of non-violence, and dared to challenge the mightiest empire of the world, on behalf of the freedom of India, with no weapon available except non-violent non-cooperation. Winston Churchill called him, in scorn and contempt, a “half-naked fakir,” and the world laughed in merriment. And that, my dear friends, was only a few years ago.

Then slowly, as the years went by, this man began to grow, and like a mountain emerging from clouds of mists, to dominate the whole landscape of our world. We came to recognize in him the great nationalist leader who was liberating four hundred millions of his countrymen from the armed tyranny of alien rule; and this, in an unprecedented and unparalleled war which made no resort to force, violence, or bloodshed. Then gradually, and very much I think to our own surprise, we found that we were reverencing Gandhi as a saint of pure and humble life, worthy in every word and deed of the beatitude, bestowed upon him in his own lifetime, of Mahatma, “the Great Soul.” And then strangely, and almost unconsciously, we developed an affection for this man, an affection which left us stricken as though by a deep personal loss when the word came across the seas that he was dying. Jane Addams writes in the pages of her autobiography, entitled Twenty Years at Hull House, in remembrance of the day when she saw her father break down and cry when he heard of the death of Abraham Lincoln. She says this made a great impression upon her, for up to that time she had thought that only children ever cried. There must have been something of that kind of a convulsion in the hearts of many of us when there came the fatal news on Friday morning from New Delhi.