Quakers in this country and Europe and last but not least the Community Church here in America are trying to broaden men's vision and so doing minister unto the needs of the spirit. One is the spiritual message, many are its forms. The selection of one or another form and the adoption of one or another organization—or all-is purely a matter of individual temperament. In the pioneering efforts of establishing the Community Church as a world ideal, you are tearing old masks asunder and stripping bare theology. In the ideal Community Churchand ours is as near an approach to the ideal as is possible in this imperfect world-universal sympathy, love and brotherhood together with a proper appreciation of duty, beauty and truth are not merely preached but also practiced. May the world listen to the message of the Community Church and its ideals. In that fervent hope is the book dedicated to you by June 1, 1922, Yours affectionately, HARIDAS MUZUMDAR. New York City, GANDHI THE APOSTLE Part I PANORAMA OF INDIAN HISTORY "If I were to look over the world to find out the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow-in some facts, a very paradise on earth-I should point to India. If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant-I should point to India. "And if I were to ask myself from what literature we, here in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of the Greeks and the Romans and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more universal: in fact, more truly human, a life not for this life only, but a transfigured and eternal life, again I should point to India."-Max Müller ("India-What Can It Teach Us?") The mountain ranges to the southeast of Afghanistan have a narrow passage known as the Khyber Pass. As you follow its windings, you see the mountain wall drop away to its foundation; and there lies before you a tawny plain, stretching illimitably into a far-off purple haze. No spot on earth is more saturated with the romance of history. For that plain is INDIA; and from here or hereabouts was it first surveyed by the swarms of on-coming Aryans, by Alexander and his Greeks, by Scythian, Tartar and Afghan hordes, by Tamerlane, by Baber, by Nadir Shah and many an invader. Behind that purple haze lie Cashmere, the poets' "earthly paradise;" Lahore, the capital, and Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs; the glorious mosques, palaces and mausoleums of Delhi and Agra, of Fattehpur |