Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/185

 its own intrinsic worth. "If God should offer me," said a great man, "the absolute truth in the right hand, and the love and pursuit of truth in the left, I should choose the left." Revelation, in matters spiritual, is essentially subjective. Man is preeminently a thinking and feeling being; he cannot help it, and he likes it. It is the great Rubicon between him and other animals; and truth, above all things, is an object of personal quest and adoption. What has been disclosed to a person of a certain ag6 or country is no revelation to one of another age or country, unless the latter is similarly circumstanced as the former and is equally competent to give an independent, personal recognition to the truth. Food nourishes the body, truth feeds the soul; and neither the one nor the other can be taken vicariously. No more can a telescope supersede the use of the eye, or the most advanced type of machinery dispense with the presence of an initiating and guiding mind than the revelation made to another man and re-