# World Significance of Mahatma Gandhi

WORLD SIGNIFICANCE
OF
MAHATMA GANDHI
By
Rev. Dr. John Haynes Holmes
Minister of the Community Church
New York City
Reprinted from "UNITY" — April 6,1922
BY
FRIENDS OF FREEDOM FOR INDIA
World Significance of Mahatma Gandhi
As I enter this morning upon the discussion of Mahatma Gandhi, of India, and of the universal significance of the work which he is doing in his native country, I am irresistibly reminded of the day, which was not so long ago, when I first had the pleasure of presenting this man to this congregation, and of declaring my conviction, the same now as it was then, that Gandhi is incomparably the greatest man now living in the world. How the situation has changed in these few months! At that time Gandhi’s name was practically unknown outside the borders of India. I hit upon it by the merest chance; and, although I came to feel upon the instant that here was a creative spiritual genius of the first order, my information was of the meagrest description. Furthermore, all endeavors to get additional information met with failure. Today, however, Gandhi’s name is appearing on the first pages of all the newspapers. Scores of articles have been published in the magazines and reviews of this country, England and the continent. A great journal, the New York World, sends its leading correspondent to India to “spy out the land,” and he returns to write of Gandhi and his policy of non-violence and non-co-operation. From almost utter obscurity, this man mounts in a few months to a fame which is as universal as it promises to be immortal. He holds today the center of the world’s attention. That position of primacy held so proudly by Woodrow Wilson in 1918 and 1919, and by Nicolai Lenin in 1920 and 1921, is now occupied by a little Oriental who has never held any official position, who seeks neither glory nor power, and who languishes this day behind the bars of an English jail.
For such a change as this in the fortunes of a single man, there must be reasons. As it happens, these reasons are not far to seek. I would name this morning four events, as indications of what has been transpiring of late in this far distant portion of the world.
In the first place, there is the amazing growth of the nationalist party in India. A few years ago, the only ​persons who wanted Swaraj, or independence, were a few extremists and fanatics. The great majority of the intellectual leaders cherished no desire or expectation other than that of home rule, or dominion status within the Empire. As for the masses of the common people, they were either ignorant or totally indifferent to the issues involved. Today however, the movement for emancipation from British rule has swept like a prairie fire from one end of India to the other. It is true that the native princes and their retainers, many thousands of civic officials and their servants, and certain well-educated and prosperous groups in the community who naturally oppose any change in the status quo, are hearty supporters of the English government in India; but these people, taken all together, would not number more than a million individuals. All the rest, from the highest to the lowest, from Rabindranath Tagore on the one side to the meanest of the “untouchables” on the other, are all aflame with the desire for independence from the British yoke. Remember now, if you will, that the population of India is well over 300,000,000, one-fifth of the population of the entire globe, and it is not difficult to understand why this nationalist movement is suddenly attracting so much attention. What is going on in India today, if only because of the stupendous numbers involved, is the central phenomenon in the world’s life.
In the second place, as another reason for Gandhi’s rapid rise to fame, there is the fact that he is today definitely recognized as the leader of his people in their revolt against the English crown. A few years ago Gandhi was a friend of England and her rule in India. More than once he had received favors and rewards at the hands of the imperial government. During the Great War he supported the Allied cause, and, in so far as it was possible for a non-resistant so to do, upheld the power and authority of English arms. After the War he advocated no reform more drastic than a reasonable measure of home rule. It was the massacre of Amritsar, when General Dyer turned his machine guns on an innocent crowd of Indians, killed between three and four hundred men, women and children, and wounded I know not how many more, that changed the soul of Gandhi. From that time on he became an open enemy of England, and an ardent champion of freedom. One year ago last December the All-India Congress formally endorsed his program of non-violence and non-cooperation. This last December, less than three months ago, the congress reaffirmed the program by an overwhelming majority, and named Gandhi as the leader of ​the movement for independence. This man holds absolutely in his hands today the destinies of his people. When Gandhi speaks, it is India that speaks. When Gandhi acts, it is India that acts. When Gandhi is arrested, it is India that is outraged and humiliated. More truly, I believe, than any other man who has ever lived, this great Indian is the incarnation of a people’s soul.
Thirdly, as an explanation of Gandhi’s fame and influence at this moment, there is the repressive policy recently adopted by the English government. Why any government should turn to repression in a crisis like this, is explicable only on the supposition that governments are utterly ignorant of history and human psychology, and learn nothing from experience. For repression has never worked. I challenge anybody to point me to a single episode in either ancient or modern history, which proves that repression has even once achieved the end to which it has been directed. This policy has certainly been no success in English hands. It failed in America in 1775, it failed in English domestic affairs in the ’20s and the ’40s of the last century, it failed in South Africa after the Boer War, it failed in Ireland yesterday, and it will fail in India tomorrow. If repression succeeds in anything, it is in advertising the cause of the enemy. “We are advertised by our loving friends,” says Shakespeare; to which I would make the addition that we are advertised as well by our fearful enemies! Nothing that the Indians could have done of themselves would have spread such knowledge of, and won such sympathy for, their movement for independence as the policy of the British authorities in recent months. When the Ali brothers were arrested, for example, news of the event spread to the remotest corners of the Mohammedan world, and made every Moslem a champion of freedom for India. When Lajpat Rai was seized and imprisoned, thousands of Englishmen and Americans were immediately aroused, for they knew this man to be a scholar and a gentleman, and could not understand the nature of a situation which made necessary his confinement. So also, now with Gandhi himself! Millions of people the world around know him today, and will believe in and love him passionately tomorrow, because they see a saint doomed to martyrdom by the tyranny of imperialism.
Lastly, as an indication of what has been going on in recent months, I would remind you of the visit of the Prince of Wales to India. For sheer stupidity I know of nothing to compare with this event. We are told that this trip was planned in order to demonstrate ​the loyalty of the people of India to the British crown. As a matter of fact, had the Indians been loyal, there would have been no necessity for a royal visitation. The very exigencies of the situation made inevitable just the opposite result from what was intended or desired. No sooner was the Prince’s journey announced, than Gandhi organized his boycott—not because he had anything against this innocent young man used by a distracted government for a disreputable purpose, but because he saw in his coming a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate how the Indian people felt about English rule. As soon as the Prince arrived this boycott was put into effect. Everywhere he went the natives met him with averted eyes and turned backs. Finally, at Allahabad, they refused to meet him at all. When the Prince of Wales entered this place, it was as though he were arrived at a city of the dead. Streets were deserted; doors were barred, and shutters drawn at the windows; while the people by the thousands swarmed to a rendezvous outside the town to acclaim Swaraj, and pledge themselves to its support. The visit of the Prince of Wales, now drawing to a close, has been simply one vast demonstration of Indian unrest. More than anything else that has happened, or could have happened, it has taught the world of Gandhi and his great crusade for liberty.
Such are some of the events which have conspired in recent months to draw the attention of mankind to India. In so far as these events have enabled men to know who Gandhi is and what he is doing, they are beneficent, for I can imagine no truer baptism of the soul than knowledge of this eastern saint. To those who understand what it means in terms of inward purity and outward devotion, his name falls on the heart “like the gentle dew from heaven.” From another and more important point of view, however, these events must be regarded as unfortunate, for they are tending to present Gandhi to the world simply as a leader of a nationalistic cause. They are teaching men to classify the Indian Mahatma with such historical figures as William Tell, William Wallace, Robert Emmett, Kosciusko, George Washington, and Garibaldi, as the champion of the liberties of an enslaved people. This, of course, he is! Gandhi stands today at the forefront of his nation’s life, as we have seen, and matches in heroic service of freedom the achievements of any of the great nationalistic leaders of the past. But it is a deplorable mistake to look at Gandhi exclusively or even primarily from this standpoint. He is more than the leader of a movement for national independence— ​his task is nobler even than that of championing the political emancipation of a great people. Dear to his heart as is the deliverance of India from English rule, immediate as is his concern with this great cause at the present moment, it must still be reckoned as a mere incident in his career, a passing episode in a life devoted to higher and further issues. If the movement for independence had never appeared, Gandhi would still be the same transcendent figure that he is today; and if this movement ended tomorrow, in defeat or victory, Gandhi’s real work would still go on to its appointed end. That there must be something wrong with an idea which classifies this man with Wallace, Washington, and Garibaldi, all of whom were soldiers who drew blood on the field of battle, is shown conclusively by the fact that Gandhi is a non-resistant who refuses to take the sword, even to fight for liberty, but appeals to a “higher law” than that of violence, namely “strength of spirit.” What we have here in the case of Gandhi, as always in the case of the non-resistant, is a religious leader, a man not of local, or national, but of universal significance. It is in the realm of the spirit that Gandhi “lives and moves and has his being.” It is not primarily with the kings and premiers, but with God and the soul of man, that he does business. Above and beyond the political liberation of his own or any other people, he seeks the spiritual redemption of mankind. If we would classify him with any of the supreme figures of human history, it must be with such august religious prophets as Confucius and Lao-tse, Buddha, Zoroaster and Mohammed, and, most truly of all, the Nazarene! Out of Asia, at long intervals of time, have arisen these inspired witnesses of God. One by one they have appeared to teach men by precept and example the law of life, and therewith to save the race. Today, in this our time, there comes another of this sacred line, the Mahatma of India. In all reverence and with due regard for historic fact, I match this man with Jesus Christ! If the lives of these two were written side by side, as Plutarch wrote the lives of the great heroes of Greece and Rome, it would be amazing to see to what extent they are identical. With Gandhi, only one experience is lacking—that of the crucifixion; but in the light of what is taking place, it would seem as though we could trust the British Empire today, as the Roman Empire yesterday, to point the road to Calvary!
Now it is of this universal significance of Gandhi as a spiritual leader, that I want to speak to you this morning. I find this significance most clearly typified, ​at least for the beginning of our discussion, in the personal character of the man. We can best get at this aspect of the problem by asking how it is that Gandhi has managed to acquire such a marvelous influence over the Indian people. Of the nature of this influence, there can be no question; it is one of the most extraordinary personal phenomena in the world today. As Gandhi moves from place to place, great multitudes of men and women follow him, as similar multitudes followed Jesus in Palestine. When he appears to speak in some town or city, crowds running all the way from twenty-five to seventy-five thousand people gather to hear his words. That he is a wonder-worker is implicitly believed by the ignorant and superstitious, and stories of his miracles are now the legend of the countryside. Everywhere he is called Mahatma, the “saint” or “blessed one,” for already the people reverence him as one who is divine. To find anything to match this influence of Gandhi over his people, we would have to return to ancient times and remote places, and even then the parallel would be incomplete. It is the testimony of a competent and unbiased observer that Gandhi’s personal following is greater in numbers, and more devoted and disciplined in spirit, than any man history has ever known.
If we seek for the explanation of this fact, we cannot find it, I believe, in any of the ordinary aspects of personality. It does not reside, for example, in Gandhi’s physical presence, which has been described as “pitifully insignificant.” Thus he weighs less than one hundred pounds. He shows all the weakness and emaciation of one who has disciplined his body to an asceticism of an extreme type for over thirty years. On occasion he is so feeble that he is unable to stand, and has to address his audiences while seated in a chair. His only impressive physical feature is his eyes, which glow with the flaming passion of a spirit which burns as though it would consume the flesh.—So, also, I cannot find that his personal influence has its origin in any extraordinary degree of intellectuality. Gandhi does not impress me as having exceptional mental powers. Certainly he is not to be compared with such an intellectual giant as Leo Tolstoy. To me, at least, it is inconceivable that the Indian could write such books as “War and Peace,” “Anna Karenina,” or even “My Religion.” Great as he is, Gandhi does not seem to move on this plane of achievement at all!—I feel the same way, also, about his gifts as an orator. I speak with some hesitancy here, for the standards of oratory, as of music, may be very different in the East from what they are in ​the West. What is genuine eloquence in India may not be recognizable as such at all in the United States. But I might as well confess that Gandhi, so far as I can judge from his printed addresses, does not impress me as an orator. I find in his utterances no such magic of words as we are familiar with in the case of men like Edmund Burke and Patrick Henry. I had difficulty, for example, in selecting a passage from Gandhi’s writings which had the lilt and beauty, the soaring grandeur of style, which made it appropriate for reading as scripture in this service. That Gandhi can work a spell over an audience we know from abundant testimony, but it must be for reasons quite apart from eloquence of speech.
What is it that the Indians see when they look upon this man, and hail him as Mahatma? Not a great physical presence, not a gigantic intellect, not an inspired orator, but a personality or charater of transcendent spiritual beauty. What they see, first of all, is a man who has made his life to be at one with the great masses of the people. Gandhi was well born, of a family with ample means, and was given the best educational advantages both in his own country and in England. When he returned to Bombay, he began his career as a practitioner of the law. Then he did what so few men in any age have ever done! Instead of climbing up, up the ladder of achievement to wealth and fame, and thus away from the common people, he proceeded deliberately to move down—down to the depths of human misery and woe, down to where men toiled desperately and died miserably, down to the dark places of sweat and tears and blood. From the beginning he was resolved that there should be no suffering among men which he did not endure, no outrage which he did not feel, no cross which he did not carry. Even the “untouchables” should not be beneath his comradeship—to them he would descend, and with them share the bitterness of the world’s contempt! The experience of men, in other words, down to its remotest horror, he made his own; and always, in his long struggles for reform, met first himself the hazards to which he invited others. How beautiful, for example, is the story of his leading the Hinlu “coolies” in South Africa out on to the land, in revolt against the inequities of government! Here Gandhi was the first to sleep on the bare ground, beneath the stars; the first to practise the vow of poverty which he enjoined upon his followers; and the first to cultivate the land for sustenance! How impressive also the most recent and much more famous story of the loin-cloth! Talk with any ​enemy of Gandhi, and almost at once he will mention the loin-cloth episode, and offer it as proof of the Mahatma’s insane fanaticism. What is this episode? Some months ago, in the prosecution of his non-cooperation campaign against the government, Gandhi ordered his followers to boycott all cotton goods imported from England, destroy whatever foreign cloth or clothing they had on hand, and spin what they needed on their own domestic spindles. It soon developed that obedience to this command would cause great inconvenience and even suffering, especially among the poor, by stripping them practically naked of the little that they had. At once Gandhi appeared in public, on the country highways and even in the cities, clad in nothing but a loin-cloth, that no man in all the land should be embarrassed by a poverty greater than his own. Such deeds are a commonplace in Gandhi’s life. His whole career reveals a positive passion for community of experience with mankind. When his people look upon him, therefore, they see not a leader merely but a comrade and a brother, one who is in all things like unto themselves; and of course they reverence him as one who is divine.
This deliberate kinship with the masses of his fellow-countrymen leads us to another quality which is fundamental in any estimate of Gandhi’s personality. I refer to his self-abnegation, his sacrifice, his capacity for suffering. Very early in his career Gandhi discovered what he called “the law of conscious suffering”—the truth that the mastery of the world waits upon the man who is willing not to make others suffer, but to suffer himself; and his whole life has been a discipline to its attainment. At the outset he sacrificed his property, his social standing, his profession, everything that could separate him from entire devotion to his fellow-men. In his personal habits he began and still continues to practice an asceticism that might well be the envy of a medieval monk. In his work as a reformer he has evaded no penalty, but has accepted gladly the punishments imposed upon him as only so many weapons to his hand. He has faced an assassin without flinching. Four times, in South Africa and in India, he has been imprisoned. Thrice he has been beaten by mobs, and once left prone in the gutter as one dead. His body bears the stripes of the whips with which he has been lashed, his wrists and ankles the marks of the chains with which he has been bound for hours together to the iron bars of his cell. Read Paul’s catalogue of sufferings, and you find it a less terrible array than Gandhi’s! “I have gone through the most fiery ordeals ​that have fallen to the lot of man” is his testimony. And all because sacrifice has been deliberately chosen as the law of his life and the sword of his fray! It is this which the Indians see when they look upon the scarred and wasted frame of their leader. It is this which they remember when they think of him in some far distant part of the countryside. Imagine the stupidity of a government which hopes to break such a man, or sever him from the worship of his followers, by fresh arrest and imprisonment!
Greater than all that we have yet mentioned in the character of Gandhi, is the love with which his entire being is saturated. No man of our time, few men of any time, have risen to such heights of tenderness and compassion for mankind as this Mahatma of India. Anger, malice, resentment, hatred, have altogether disappeared from his heart, and nothing is now left but the pure essence of love for his fellow-men. And his fellow-men include all men who live upon the earth! Like God himself, Gandhi is “no respector of persons.” He holds white men and black side by side within the embrace of his affection. He ends the long feud between Moslem and Hindu, and makes them brethren one of another. While recognizing certain social utilities of the caste system, he wipes out the barriers of separation in his personal relations, and seats Brahmin and “untouchable” at a common board and leads them in breaking bread together. Even the English are not excluded from his goodwill, for “love your enemies” is as stern a command for Gandhi as for Jesus. “Tell the British people that I love them, and want their association” is the word that he has spoken a thousand times. Think of his conduct at the time of the attempt upon his life in South Africa! Asked in the hospital, where he was hovering on the verge of death, to take action against his assassin, he refused. Why should I seek to injure or punish him, he said. The man did what he thought was right, risked his life for what he thought was right! I believe in that man; I shall love him, and win him to myself. And he did! In a few months the assassin was conquered by the might of Gandhi’s forgiveness, and became straightway one of his most ardent followers.—Equally beautiful is Gandhi’s attitude toward General Dyer, the officer responsible for the massacre at Amritsar. I cannot co-operate with him, says Gandhi; I cannot recognize his authority, or obey his orders. But if he fell sick of a fever, I would hasten to his bedside and nurse him back to health.—There is no bitterness in this man, no last ​flickering spark of hatred or revenge. He is love incarnate. In every act and even gesture of these last years, when patient suffering has purified his soul, he has been a perpetual witness to the truth of his own great words, “Anger will serve no purpose. We must meet ungodliness by godliness. We must meet untruth by truth. We must meet cunning and craft by openness and simplicity. We must meet terrorism and frightfulness by bravery.”
It is qualities such as these, which have become familiar to all Indians, that give Gandhi such a hold upon the imagination and devotion of his people. It is these same qualities, also, that give to him and his work a universal significance. Gandhi is a man who has mastered the secrets of spiritual living. His soul has been lifted, by virtue of incomparable discipline, to the measure of the stature of those realities which are of God. In humility, in sacrifice, in ardent love for men, he is one of those perfect characters which come along once in a thousand, or perhaps only in two thousand, years. And today he lies in prison. Such men are the judges of our world. A society which cannot suffer a Jesus, or a Gandhi, to be at large, is a society which is not fit to live, and by this token is already doomed to die.
A second evidence of Gandhi’s universal significance is found in his doctrine of non-resistance, which he says, “does not mean meek submission to the will of the evil-doer, but the pitting of one’s whole soul against the will of the tyrant.” I refer more particularly to the fact that Gandhi is the first man who has succeeded in applying the non-resistant idea on a vast scale, and in working out a technique for its successful operation in determining the great issues of social life. Gandhi, in other words, has demonstrated the feasibility of non-resistance as a method of political and economic reform, and therewith, as definitely as Newton or Darwin, opened up a new era in human history.
Hitherto non-resistance has labored under two very serious disabilities. In the first place, its practice has been limited in the past to the life of the single individual, or here and there to the experience of single and isolated groups of individuals. The great non-resistants have been Jesus, St. Francis, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy—men of transcendent personality and influence, who have exemplified nobly the possibilities of non-resistance in their own private lives, but have never attempted, or been able, to apply it on a universal scale to society ​at large. Occasionally, to be sure, there have appeared larger or smaller groups of men and women who have organized movements, and even whole communities, on non-resistant principles. Thus there were the Christians of the first two centuries of our era, various heretical sects of the Middle Ages, such as the Cathari, the Waldenses and the Albigenses, and such modern religious groups as the Quakers, the Mennonites, and the Doukhobors of Russia and western Canada. But these groups, like separate individuals of the Tolstoyan type, have been independent and self-contained. They have lived very largely in and for themselves, and thus are important as an example rather than as an influence. They show what non-resistance can do on a small scale, but teach nothing about its practicability as a general social principle.
The second difficulty, under which the non-resistant gospel has suffered in the past, has been its identification with a remote or other-worldly type of life. The non-resistant of the Middle Ages was the monk of the St. Francis type, who abandoned the world and went off to live alone by himself or with his group of disciples. The supreme non-resistant of modern times was Tolstoy, who characteristically cut himself off from his family, his country, his church, and lived like a kind of hermit on the land; and at the end fled away, like a wounded animal in the brush, to die alone. These men were sublime in their personal lives. The non-resistant in all ages has marked the highest attainment of inward purity and outward sacrifice. But with few exceptions—Garrison, for example!—they have achieved virtue at the expense of contact with the world of men. From the practical point of view, the non-resistant has again and again been an ineffective man. He has solved the problems of life by running away from them. Tolstoy is one of the sublimest characters in history, but he contributed nothing to the solution of those questions that vex most terribly the society of modern times.
It is these two disabilities which have left the advocate of non-resistance helpless to commend his doctrine as an adequate method for meeting the contingencies of the modern industrial struggle, for example, or of international war. Non-resistance may be all right, he has been told, as a personal idiosyncrasy or as a means of escape from social responsibility, but it has nothing to offer the man who has to meet things as they are! And now, behold, comes Gandhi, a new type of non-resistant, a man who leads his people in the ​greatest movement of revolt our age has known, and does it on the basis of a program of “resist not evil”! It is this program, or technique, of non-resistance as a method of social change, as the plan of campaign in what is literally a war for national independence, that constitutes Gandhi’s unique and immortal contribution to experience. Beginning with the elementary precept of “non-violence,” which pledges all Indians to abstain from use of force under all circumstances, Gandhi passes on to his second and basic principle of “non-co-operation.” This is only superficially a negative principle—a refusal to co-operate in any way with the English government, to accept favors or rewards, to use the courts, to send children to the schools, to buy English goods, to pay taxes, to recognize the laws. At bottom, it is a magnificently positive assertion of Indian self-sufficiency—the definite organization of a society which is politically and economically self-sustaining and therefore independent. What Gandhi is doing is teaching his people to do their own work, to manage their own affairs, to build and maintain their own institutions—and to endure in patience, not only without hatred or desire for revenge but with actual goodwill toward the enemy, whatever sufferings this policy may bring upon them from their alien rulers. He is organizing a vast program of social revolt on the basis of love—love one for another expressed in terms of mutual service, and love for the enemy expressed in terms of forgiveness and compassion. He is showing that no people needs to be helpless in the face of physical force, or to resist force with force to their own misery and destruction. All they have to do is to act together in ignoring it—to rise above it by discipline, to conquer it by suffering. “We must meet organization by greater organizing ability. We must meet discipline by great discipline, and we must meet sacrifices by infinitely greater sacrifices.”
It is in this program of non-resistance, applied on a vast scale to social issues, that I find evidence of a significance in Gandhi’s work which far transcends the borders alike of country and of race. If the Mahatma succeeds in his great venture, non-resistance will be made for the first time in history a universal principle of life. The reproach that it is nothing more than an eccentric rule of individual or sectarian life, will be removed. The charge that its feasibility is limited to the single life, or the unworldly habit of experience, will be answered. If Gandhi succeeds, we shall see that non-resistance is a sound method of social action, ​that resort to violence for any cause is no longer necessary, that for defence against aggression and in endeavors after liberty, there is “the better way” than force. If Gandhi succeeds, do I say? Gandhi has already succeeded; he has demonstrated this truth! His arrest was the final evidence of his triumph. More terrible to England than any sword, is the steadfast patience of this one little man, who in the true spirit of love, “beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” In Gandhi, if men be wise, the era of force at last comes to its end, and the era of peace and brotherhood begins!
There is one final aspect of Gandhi’s universal significance of which I would speak before I end this address. I can best convey to you what I mean by referring to the charge most often brought against Gandhi by his enemies, that he is a fanatic who would destroy everything that civilization has achieved in the last three hundred years. Thus it is said that he would close the hospitals in India, rip up the railroads, smash the printing presses and cotton factories, scrap the whole intricate mechanism of modern life, in a vain endeavor to restore at one stroke the simpler ways of an earlier and more primitive day. Now, that Gandhi is thus a mad wrecker of the machinery of society as we know it today, is obviously disproved by the fact that he himself makes constant use of the various devices which are the commonplace of our time. Thus when he was so desperately wounded by the assassin in South Africa, he went to a hospital and was there nursed back to health by an Englishwoman who had come to know the kind of man he was. In India he travels constantly from place to place on the railroads. The other day, when extraordinary speed was necessary, he made the journey in a high-powered automobile. His use of the printing-press is constant and most effective.
There is truth, however, in the statement that Gandhi is fighting the machine of western civilization in India, and seeking to restore the native and therefore primitive culture of his people. It is just this which marks, to my mind, the culminating evidence of his genius as a spiritual leader. For Gandhi, as he looks upon his country today, sees it subjected to a two-fold yoke. On the one hand, there is the yoke of English government—the bondage of an alien political system, against which the nationalist movement is now being directed. On the other hand, there is the yoke of capitalism—that economic system which uses the vast machinery of modern invention for the ​exploitation of the many to the profit of the few. To Gandhi, release from this economic system of western capitalism is as important for India as release from the political system of British imperialism. If English rule is overthrown, only to leave behind it English railroads, English factories, English promoting companies, and so on, the Indian people will have gained only the substance and not the shadow of independence. They will still be enslaved, and enslaved to a system which is fatal to the best interests of humanity. At the heart of this western civilization of ours, Gandhi believes, is death and not life. We have created a vast machine which proves to be a Frankenstein which is devouring us. This monster has bound us to the wheel of labor, deceived us with the lure of wealth, degraded us to the base uses of materialism, leveled to the ground our standards of moral and spiritual idealism. Even in a physical sense it is a failure, for in the end it brings only such calamity as the Great War. It is this system of economic ruin which Gandhi sees coming into Asia, after having conquered and ravaged our western world. He sees it victorious in Japan, he sees it invading China, he sees it planted at the heart of India—and he declares war against it! He fights the opium trade, he battles against the liquor traffic, he substitutes the domestic spindle for the factory loom, he denounces the railroad, the automobile, and the machine in general. What Gandhi is attempting to do is to save India from the blight of western materialism by restoring her own native civilization and culture before it is too late. He is trying to preserve his land from the curse of commercialism, the horror of machine exploitation and production, the slavery of wage labor, the whole black system of capitalistic life. And he would do this not for its own sake, but for the sake of India’s soul. He would save the spirit of his people—their simplicity, their art, their religion, their mystic comradeship with one another and with God.
It is here, in this great service, that Gandhi becomes in very truth the great religious leader of whom I spoke in the beginning. It is in this work of spiritual redemption that he takes on a universal significance, for the West as well as for the East. For in saving India, Gandhi is saving the world. In staying the ravages of capitalism in his own land, he is starting a movement which, by process of reaction, will flow back into our world and restore to us those things of the spirit which we have lost. Our western civilization is in exactly the situation of Rome in the days of ​the great Caesar. It has mastered the world by the power of its arms, and is exploiting its resources and peoples to its own advantage. As its outward glory increases, however, its inward disintegration proceeds. At the critical moment in Roman history, there appeared Jesus and the Christians, who brought to the perishing world a new source of life which preserved its vitality for a period of two thousand years. At the critical moment in our not dissimilar age, there appears Gandhi! Does he not also bring with him a new life of the spirit, and may he not therefore be truly hailed as the savior of the world?
It is thus that I would speak of the universal significance of Mahatma Gandhi and his work in India. The parallel with Jesus constantly presents itself. The Nazarene was a divine personality; he taught the law of love, and laid down a program of non-resistance for its fulfillment; he sought to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth by dethroning Mammon in favor of God. So also with Gandhi! This Indian is a saint in his personal life; he teaches the law of love, and non-resistance as its practice; and he seeks the establishment of a new social order which shall be a kingdom of the spirit. If I believed in “the second coming,” as I do not, I should dare to assert that Gandhi was Jesus come back to earth. But if “the second coming” has no historical validity, it has at least poetical significance; and in this sense, can we not speak of Gandhi as indeed the Christ? In a little book called “The Scourge of Christ,” sent me by the author, Paul Richard, from the foot of the Himalaya mountains, where he lives, I find two remarkable sentences:
“If Christ came again, would he not choose again to be a son of an enslaved people, rather than a citizen of the empire?”
“The Christ, if he comes, will not be of the white race; the colored peoples could not put their faith in him.”
Is not this the prophecy of Gandhi? Does not this prove him to be the Christ of our age? Today, as in the olden time, it is no longer a question as to whether Christ is here or not. It is a question only of who will recognize and follow him!
Friends of Freedom for India
(To help the establishment of a Federal Republic in India. To maintain the right of asylum for political refugees from India)
* ↑ Copies of this article in pamphlet form may be secured of the Community Church, New York, at 10 cents each. Apply Secretary, 61 E. 34 Street.
* ↑ This sermon was preached on March 12, 1922, the day following the arrest of Gandhi for sedition.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1964, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 59 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse