When something of the initial shock and horror of this assassination had passed away, there remained, at least in my mind, a burning sense of the supreme irony of it all, an irony as tragic as any that I have ever found in the pages of Greek drama. That Mahatma Gandhi, of all men living in the world, should have to die this way! The irony, for example, that Gandhi, who never cherished an unkind thought, and never did an unkind deed, who fought England for forty years with never a feeling of bitterness toward any Englishman anywhere, who forgave Moslems and Hindus alike for the injury they were doing to one another, and asked them only to love one another as he loved them both—that this man should die beneath the stroke of hate and vengeance! The irony that Mahatma Gandhi, the supreme preacher and practitioner, not only in our time but in all the ages gone by, of the great principle of nonviolence, should himself be called upon to fall as the victim of outrageous violence. The irony again, that with his life purpose accomplished, with India free and India’s people, after an initial ordeal of wild bloodshed, entering under his guidance upon the sure pathways of reconciliation and peace, he should he struck down on the very threshold of his sublime triumph. History, as you know, seems to delight in ironies of this kind. Socrates, the servant of truth, made to drink the hemlock; Jesus of Nazareth, the prophet of God’s kingdom upon the earth, the victim of crucifixion; Abraham Lincoln, the sweetest and gentlest of men, struck down by a murderer’s bullet. And now, as the crown and climax of all this historic irony, Mahatma Gandhi dead at the hand of a wild assassin. I wonder, O, I wonder, have we always needed the purging of these woes, and do we need it still, to teach us of our own sins of violence and hate, and show us, however bitterly, the better way of life!
How clearly do I remember the first time I ever heard of Gandhi. I have told the story more than once, but I must tell it again on this occasion. How in 1921 I came across his name, up to that moment unknown to me, in the pages of a magazine, and in the space of a few paragraphs of the article, read the epic story of Gandhi’s experience in South Africa. That was in many ways the turning point of my life. Here I had been told, in a sort of a vague way through many years, that the ideals of the spirit which I had cherished within my soul—to love our enemies, resist not evil, to forgive men not seven times but seventy times seven—that these ideals were impracticable. That Jesus did not really mean what he seemed to mean when he said these things! That these principles were laws laid down for an ideal kingdom of God, and not for an existing society upon the earth! And here, lo and behold, I discovered that there was a man now, far away in South Africa, who took these ideals seriously, and made them the rule and precept of his life, and was actually proving them to be practicable and effective. I felt at that moment as Christopher Columbus must have felt when he looked upon the shores of San Salvador shining in the noon-day sun. I felt, I think, as Madame Curie must have felt when she saw that little spark of radium all aglow with an incredible brilliance in the dark shadows of her laboratory. I felt like the astronomer, described by John Keats, in his immortal sonnet, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” who was gazing through a telescope at the midnight sky and suddenly, without warning, “saw a new planet swim into his ken.” From that moment on, the conviction dwelt within my soul that our world had no parallel to Gandhi. And as the
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