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Patriots do not love their country only
when she is rich, powerful, great and has much to give them; love for
country has been most ardent, passionate, absolute when the country
was poor, degraded, miserable, having nothing to give but loss,
wounds, torture, imprisonment, death as the wages of her service; yet
even knowing that they would never see her free, men have lived,
served and died for her – for her own sake, not for what she could
give.
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Revolutions are incalculable in their goings and absolutely uncontrollable. The sea flows and who shall tell it how it is to flow? The wind blows and what human wisdom can regulate its motions? The will of Divine Wisdom is the sole law of revolutions and we have no right to consider ourselves as anything but mere agents chosen by that Wisdom. When our work is done, we should realise it and feel glad that we have been permitted to do so much. Is it not enough reward for the greatest services that we can do, if our names are recorded in History among those who helped by their work or their speech or better, by the mute service of their sufferings to prepare the great and free India that will be? Nay, is it not enough if unnamed and unrecorded except in the Books of God, we go down to the grave with the consciousness that our finger too was laid on the great Car and may have helped, however imperceptibly, to push it forward? This talk of services is a poor thing after all. Do we serve the Mother for a reward or do God's work for hire? The patriot lives for his country because he must; he dies for her because she demands it. That is all. Page 670, Bande Mataram , volume 1, SABCL |
Heaven awaits the patriot who dies for his country, the saint who passes from this life with the thought of God in his heart, the soldier who flings his life away at the bidding of his nation, all who can put the thought of self away from them. Page 712, Bande Mataram , volume 1, SABCL |