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Dr. Bhandarkar at Work
discipline of life; and readers, if life is to you, as it ought to be to everyone of us, a living up steadily to the best light we can have, you and I cannot do better than strive for life’s prize—Truth, Love and the Divine harmony of being—with the help of utterances contained in this volume.” This volume contains sermons which were the outcome of a heart which had unflinching faith in the goodness of God, which had experienced His marvellous Love and which yearned to see that the Creator of the Universe— the Universal Mother—was loved and worshipped in the right way—in spirit and truth—by every son and daughter of India.
And yet what did Sir Ramkrishna think of these priceless, gemlike utterances of himself? Such was the man’s humility that he styled them as the “Prattle of a believer in God”! No man we know of was so very conscious of his personal limitations as Sir Ramkrishna was. Every sermon of his bears ample testimony to this. Like Newton, he considered his knowledge and vast erudition as nothing. Although he had fully realised the love of God throughout his life and experienced His goodness at every step, he considered himself as a mere novice in religious experiences. It was his marvellous faith in the goodness of God that enabled him to endure the many family sorrows to which he was subjected and the acute suffering which his old age brought to him with it. By his passing away we have lost one who loved and practised truth, whose watchword was courage, whose precept and practice were never at variance with each other, whose faith in God nothing could shake and who, to speak in the words of Ramdas, was blessed because he in his lifetime conquered prapancha and obtained paramartha.
It has been India’s misfortune to lose her really great sons when they were comparatively young. Gokhale, Agarkar and a host of others died before they were even fifty. Asutosh Mukerjee and Das died before they were sixty. Ranade and Tilak had just passed that age when they were called away. Chandavarkar and Pherozshah were well advanced in years at the time of their death; but it was given to Surendranath, Dadabhai and Bhandarkar to die at what may be considered old age. What was the secret of the long lives of these men? Surendranath in his “A Nation in Making” has told us what it was. A life well-disciplined from every point of view enabled him to live to a good old age. If Dadabhai and Bhandarkar were asked to give out the secret of their really glorious long lives, we have little doubt that they would have attributed it to the same cause as Surendranath. Early in life Bhandarkar realised
