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<P ALIGN=center style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><b>
<font size="4">A
Modernist Mentality</font></b></P>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>ANDRE
Gide, a very well-known name in French letter for the last half a
century, is quoted, very appreciatively, in the editorial of the
<I>World Review </I>(July 1950), as saying:</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>&quot;The world can only be saved, if it can be, by the
rebels. Without them there would be an end to our civilisation, our
culture, all that we love and that gave to our presence on earth a
secret justification. They are, these rebels, the salt of the earth
and the men sent from God. For I am convinced that God does not
exist, and that we have to create him.&quot;</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The truth expressed in these well-chiselled lines
(&quot;purple patches&quot;, I was going to say perhaps somewhat
uncharitably) is, as always happens when we are for a rounded phrase
and a neat thought, only half-truth or even quarter-truth. It all
depends on the meaning we attach to the words, the shade trailing
behind the thought. For, first of all, it is true, it is even a
truism that the rebel is a necessary agent in the economy of human
evolution; but if by rebel we mean the sheer iconoclast, the mere or
in the main destroyer – and the word, especially since it is given
preference, does carry that connotation – then the sentence loses
most of its truth or value and becomes only a shibboleth or slogan.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The old, fossilised or rotten past has to be destroyed
and ruthlessly eradicated, no doubt: -but, how is it to be done and
who will do it? By a simple process of sledge-hammering – breaking,
burning? By anybody who cares to do it? It does not require much
sense or intelligence to see that that is not the ideal nor even the
most effective way of doing the thing. The best way to destroy, the
wise say, is to construct. Look at Nature, how she is going about the
thing. Something is crumbling, precisely because something is growing
within or behind. </FONT>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 353</FONT><BR>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>It
is the drive of a living growth in secret that pushes a limb no
longer necessary or useful to decay and death. Man too in his work of
reformation or regeneration should learn that lesson, whether in
respect of his individual or of his 'collective growth and evolution.
Discover the truth that is to replace the 'old, live it intensely and
wholly – the old past will automatically slip down like old clothes
or drop like yellow sapless leaves.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Further Monsieur Gide says, God is nowhere, he has to be
created. If he means that God is not anywhere in the manifest
physical world, especially, the physical world of today, it is true,
though here too partially true. God is never truly absent; even in
and through this dismal and distressed age of ours he is ever
present, a living power of abounding Grace – even if behind the
veil, even if not patent to the sense-bound observer. Still God has
to be made patent, established concretely in the physical world also,
in the everyday normal human affairs. But, again, how to do it? And
who is to do it? You or I in our complete, at best half-lit hazy
ignorance? By running blindly full tilt against any and all atheism
and denial and egoism and arrogance, shouting at them, pointing the
finger of scorn at them or being physically violent upon them? It
were best if we moved with as much vigour against our own selves,
against the ungodly within us. If one begins seriously at home, in
dealing with oneself one will be best equipped to deal with the
others and the world, in the process of new-creating in oneself one
will be in a position to find out exactly what lies in the way of a
new creation outside.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>A deeper sense of truth and rectitude says: you have no
right to break unless you have the power to make. Even an illusion
you cannot and should not break if you do not know how and what to
replace; you will only replace it by a greater and more disastrous
illusion, you must yourself have the full vision of the truth, you
must yourself realise and establish it in yourself, in your inner
being as well as your outer personality. Then only you will have
secured full authority (Ramakrishna's chaprash<I>, </I>badge) to make
and unmake. If you have not the needed authority, then you must obey
implicitly one who possesses the authority.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>This is a counsel of perfection, one might say, and
human</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 354</FONT><BR>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>things
are not usually done in this way. But precisely because things are
not done in this way that human affairs are always in a muddle and
continue to be more or less the same eternal merry-go-round. It is
only when things are done in the ideal way that the ideal can be
established fully, the perfect remedy obtained.</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 355</FONT></P>
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