Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/73

 design "than mere pleasure — to succumb. to amorous charms. Inchastity, as Mohammad warns us, is not merely an evil course but a foul thing. Does it not, further, sound as mere mockery that the call to fairness and equity should come from one who did not scruple to despoil a woman of her birth-right or a home of its happiness, or who did not hesitate to snatch a selfish gratification which, in one respect, is blacker than a cold-blooded murder, as invariably implicating the peace or the hope of an accomplice ? Concupiscence, no less than cupidity, is incompatible with greatness — with real integrity and broad catholicity; and to ignore this fact is to drop half our kind out of account. Quite unavailing is the defence which compares the disinterested leader of a nation's hope and activities to an agent that knows no higher motive than money — a lawyer, a doctor or an engineer. It is a sign of diseased enthusiasm, if not a mark of the rather low notion prevailing about apparently