Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 1.djvu/429

 for the time being. Yet, he is like the centre of the earth. While the earth revolves, the axis remains the same unmoved. Thus serenity predominates. How many virtues spring from that serenity! Where the world is disposed to find fault, it pauses and judges. Where the world is intolerant, it is sympathetic. Cut of it comes, above all, that cherishing hope which says, ‘The tempest passing over us will pass away, and the peace of the Divine will come sooner or later—the peace with the prosperity ordained by an eternal God. It is wide awake; yet at its bottom calm and composed. It is like a pendulum that moves but yet does not shift. At a certain point it is fixed. The man of serene faith is fixed in the basis of divinity. By its spiritual pendulum the world marks its time.

His second characteristic, patent to his friends and relations, was the many-sidedness of his sympathies. There was no direction in which human destinies could be improved and human union and unanimity could be fostered but called forth Bapaiya’s sympathies. The two contradictory features in his