Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/112

 energies. Ask yourselves every one of you, what you would seek as the end of life as the highest aspiration of your existence. Are you merely to sip some passing pleasure and sink down through surfeit? Is life with you like a boat that is tossed about because it has no definite destination? Or is it that though there is a definite destination, yet it demands, for a successful voyage, that you should sully the heart, stain the mind and pollute the tongue with things you are ashamed to mention before others? Is it that you are a helpless creature, the slave of circumstance, and must take in or take up merely what the passing day presents? Or have you set your eye and fixed your heart on something without which life to you would be a burden and an infliction — some high ideal which you strive to realise strenuously, continuously, sparing neither time nor pains? We are all liable to temptation, to impurity, because something befitting and sufficient unto the cravings of the heart has not yet taken possession of us.