John Haynes Holmes

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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”! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”