Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/153

 the sense of the right, is verily the ceaseless current of union between God and man. For, when the sense of the right, not stopping with merely its own imperativeness, addresses itself to, and receives its sanction and warrant from God, then morality is sublimed into piety and right conduct transmuted into love. Thus character becomes only the ethical name for prayerful trust and practised piety.

Self-culture is the earliest as well as the latest of all methods of culture. Every system of culture first means preparation ; it next becomes fostering care ; and then it results in harvesting and storing for future cultivation. In all culture, therefore* are implied these three factors of breaking the glebe, sowing the seed and growing the harvest, and reaping it for future use. All culture, therefore, of the mind and the heart must begin with self-culture— with that rudimentary self-culture to which we give the name of self-recognition— not merely self-consciousness but self-recognition—' self-reverence," as Tennyson