6_Glorious_Epochs_of_Indian_History

6TH GLORIOUS EPOCH 169
wrecked their vengeance upon those wicked Muslims, even
when they had golden opportunities to do so, nor did they
ever take out a single brick from the walls of Masjids,
because their religious teachers and priests preached the
virtue of not inflicting pain on the offender :
'Never pay the tormentor in his own coin
but bear the torments meekly and be patient
that God will punish him'
428. The vilest of vices recorded in the catalogues of
the religious texts could never have been more detrimental
to the welfare of mankind, more harmful to the national
interests, and so more detestable than such virtues as give
rise to horrible atrocities and the greatest of sins. Naturally
whoever cultivates, and lives upto, such virtues thoughtlessly
^nd foolishly and with slavish adherence to the religious
texts, and also with fanatic obstinacy, is bound to perish
individally and bring about disaster of the nation in which
he lives. These qualities are not virtues; they are virtues
•distorted in the extreme. Whichever virtue is adopted
thoughtlessly and without regard to the time, place and
person is corrupted and rotten, and, like putrefied food,
iDecomes poisonous.
429-430. Every Hindu seems to have been made to
suck, along with his mother's milk, this Nectar-like advice
that religious tolerance is a virtue'. But nobody ever
•explains to him the essence of that precept. If that alien
religion is also tolerant of our own religion, our tolerance
towards it can be a virtue. But the Muslim and the Christian
religions, which boldly proclaim it to be their religious duty
to destroy most cruelly the Hindu religion and to eradicate
from the face of this earth the kafirs and the heathens, can
never be described as tolerant of other religions. In respect
-of these intolerant foreign religions the very extremely
enraged intolerance, which seeks to retaliate their abtrocities
•with super-atrocious reprisals, itself becomes a virtue^ !