Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/192

 from all the sources now available to us, indigenous as well as foreign. Let us learn from the Vedic hymns that the temple in which we should find God and worship Him is the universe and the heart of man, from the sacrificial religion which once prevailed that we should beware lest the forms and ceremonies we use should overgrow and destroy the tender plant of spiritual worship, from the rise of Buddhism that religion is not the privilege of a favoured class and that without high moral feeling and action it is an empty nothing, and from its failure that mere morality will not exalt the spirit and satisfy the religious craving of the heart, from the Upanishads that purity of heart is the way of arriving at God and contemplation brings us face to face with Him and elevates the soul; and from the Gita and the Bhakti school that man by his own efforts cannot effect his salvation, that God alone is our Father, Friend and Saviour and that we should lay our souls at His feet, live in Him and for Him and not