Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 3.djvu/50

 of successive bands of well-educated and carefully-trained members, whom precept and example would inspire to a life of industry and integrity, fidelity and sympathy. Services of this high order and large magnitude justly entitled him to be designated, in one of the previous Convocation Addresses, “the doyen of the Madras University and Madras education”. But immeasurably richer than the work is the gift to humanity of the model life exemplified by this prince among men. It is a life which, in the phrase dear to our hearts in this land, may be named Dhanya jeevana : the blessed life, a life abundant in the blessings of grace. It is a life illustrative of the sage words of one of the broadest-minded* and finest-souled thinkers of our day : ”the good, the absolutely good, is eternally working itself out in the world”; and it is man’s prerogative “to feel himself infinite in his finitude, to learn to accept his closely bounded life and task as the process in which the side of him idiat is touched by infinity becomes real, to be aware of the immanence of the Divine in the humblest and saddest oonsciousness.” Dedi-