Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/64

 tude below. The former is the period of discipleship, the latter the period of kinship to God. But when this order is violated, as it often must be in a country where "faith" is in so many instances divorced from "light," the liberties of the later are anticipated as the licenses of the earlier stage, the- counters of mature wisdom pass as the coin of green ignorance, and the ecstasies of the soul are perverted into the indulgences of the sense. Thus it comes of a huge unsettling of matters spiritual that many a custom or institution has arisen in our midst, whose sole justification is that it is associated with the great name of religion and shall not be questioned. But who can prevent the little infection from doing its work ? The so-called faith of the majority has not only been stereotyped into a "zodiac of feasts and fasts" but also degenerated in not a few instances into pomp and performances far from elevating, if not positively offensive. Occasions there be when inebriated enthusiasm, not content with bathing and feeding, bedding