Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/197

 exempt from pain; but from what diametrically opposite causes! Identical is the difference between a strong and a seared conscience. Is the malefactor's fate happy and enviable, then? He who is blind to the divine law and deaf to the prophetic voice in his very heart and soul will not be cured, by the external authority of any Sastras.— To reject the claims of conscience on the ground of its apparent absence in children is, we venture to think, as unphilosophic as the learned verdict of our "free-thinking" brethren that religion is a priestly imposition from which primeval savages are happily exempt. Both ignore the latent possibilities of a child and a savage, and both forget the universal law of progress. The child may be 'father of the man', and the savage the hoary sire of the civilised; but to measure the full proportions of an adult from the swaddling-clothes of an infant or to estimate the aspirations of a cultured person from the narrow notions of a barbarian, is to taunt the stately oak that it was once a tiny