t that stood in her way? Was her mind
paralysed by weak superstitious fears? That was not so; for her great
thinkers, the Rishis, always stood for freedom of intellect and while
Galileo was imprisoned and Bruno burnt for their opinions, they boldly
declared that even the Vedas were to be rejected if they did not conform
to truth. They urged in favour of persistent efforts for the discovery
of physical causes yet unknown, since to them nothing was extra-physical
but merely mysterious because of a hitherto unascertained cause. Were
they afraid that the march of knowledge was dangerous to true faith? Not
so. For their knowledge and religion were one.

These are the hopes that animate us. For there is something in the Hindu
culture which is possessed of extraordinary latent strength by which it
has resisted the ravages of time and the destructive changes which have
swept over the earth. And indeed a capacity to endure through infinite
transformations must be innate in that mighty civilisation which has
seen the intellectual culture of the Nile Valley, of Assyria and of
Babylon war and wane and disappear and which to-day gazes on the future
with the same invincible faith with which it met the past.

--_Modern Review, vol. XIX, pages_ 277, 278.

THE HISTORY OF A FAILURE THAT WAS GREAT

At the invitation of the President and the committee of the Faridpore
Industrial Exhibition, Dr. J. C. Bose gave a lecture on the life of his
father, the late Babu Bhugwan Chunder Bose, who founded the Exhibition
at Faridpore, where he was the sub-divisional officer, 50 years ago. It
was published in the Modern Review for February 1917--volume xxi, p.
221. In course of his address, said Dr. Bose:--

It is the obvious, the insistent, the blatant that often blinds us to
the essential. And in solving the mystery that underlies life, the
enlightenment will come not by the study of the complex man, but through
the simpler plant. It is the unsuspected forces, hidden to the eyes of
men,--the forces imprisoned in the soil and the stimuli of alternating
flash of light and the gloomings of darkness these and many others will
be found to maintain the ceaseless activity which we know as the fulness
of throbbing life.

This is likewise true of the congeries of life which we call a society
or a nation. The energy which moves this great mass in ceaseless effort
to realise some common aspiration, often has its origin in the unknown
solitudes of a