Page:Report on the Memorial Meeting for Mahatma Gandhi.djvu/18

 a sub-continent of 400,000,000 people could rise to such stature that every people in the world listened to what he had to say and were influenced by him.

“Why, out of two billion people in the world, are we met here this afternoon and feel above us the influence, the brooding, of a great spirit? What is the power in this silence?

“Sometimes I think that we get so busy trying to master nature that we don’t take time to listen to nature, to learn the lessons that the universe has to tell us in the innermost places of our spirits. Gandhi took time for that. While the people who were mastering nature were making an atomic bomb, he was discovering something else — that there are forces deep down under the surface that man can tap if he obeys the universe’s laws, that give him a power that even an atomic bomb can’t touch.

“It was that power, expressing itself through it — call it what you will, call it spiritual power, call it obedience to great moral laws, call it what you like — underneath all the seeming tangible material things there is a force, a law, power, that if a man dips deeply enough into himself and into the universe, he can find something that makes him greater than all the weapons that men can learn to employ.

“A fanatic took a weapon and shot him and said, ‘Gandhi is dead,’ but the triumph of the insight that Gandhi had is that Gandhi is not dead, that there is no weapon that can destroy him, that in a real sense he has become a part of us in a new and more vital way.

“All I can say in tribute to him is humbly: I do not understand the fullness of the insight that he had. I believe that that insight is the most Important one that any man can possibly have, and because there is no Gandhi, there is a little more constraint upon me to be a little more like him. That seems to me to be the only tribute that we can bring to the man who made a difference in the world.”