Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/63

 (a) Religion and Social Purity.

The intensest devotional attitude towards God is that sweet ecstasy — that enchanting madhuryam — in which He is "the Spouse Divine of human soul." It is a conception at once direct, attractive and inspiring : not distant awe, indefinite familiarity or dependant trust, but voluntary and cheerful self-dedication. This master-passion of the soul naturally figures itself forth in a thousand suggestive symbols or allegories. But there are two distinct stages in a complete religious career-the detachment of the spirit from matter and the infusion of the spirit into matter; the retirement into the wilderness to perform the self-subduing fast, the return into the world to preside at the self-realising feast; the discipline of rigid abstinence from the world's revelries, the franchise of free participation in the world's charities. In the first, religion is the noviciate under the austere rule of morality; in the second, religion is the vision on the mountain-top receiving a divine decalogue for the multi-