Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/28

 spiritual atmosphere, even when stirred by the recurring note of personal contrition, wafts the soul close unto the 'mercy-seat' in a 'present Paradise'. Here surely, in no narrow sense of ethical culture, is a new a friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit" — such as to call forth a snatch of the classic acclaim of "some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken"! If there is little of noisy polemic, there is nothing, too, of mere antiquarian interest in religion or of sheer ascetic abstraction from the world. Far from this, the outlook ranges conterminous with the whole area of life in the vast variety of all its bearings. All the same, not the prevailing predominance alone but the regulative regnancy as well is claimed by 'the better part', aye, 'the one thing needful' from the strict Monotheistic — if you will, the purer Theo-monistic, the 'higher Pantheistic' — stand-point at once sublimely transcendental and intensely practical. And that, as will be manifest throughout, is, in relation to the All-in-