“... Fear,” Gandhi was saying, “fear of death makes us devoid both of valor and religion. There is no place for fear in the Satyagrahi’s heart.”
“What is a Satyagrahi?” Cobden asked.
“One who is devoted and pledged to truth, to Satyagraha. I coined the word, to express our purpose in South Africa. Satyagraha is the use of Love-force or Soul-force.”
Curiously, Dicky felt the cleanness of the house, the peace of it, the humming of a charka in the next room, a symbol of that peace. He felt Gandhi’s face growing upon him out of the shadow, a face that had been dried cleanly by many suns, the features fashioned by a life of direct, unpredatory thinking—the face of a man incapable, even in thought, of hitting below the belt. And now, there was to go with the hum of the charka, the faint fragrance of dried fruit in the air, or that sweetness one breathes in the altitudes where the sun is shining upon the great conifers.
“The world has talked much of the omnipotence of God,” Mahatma-ji went on. “India, at last, is preparing to put her faith to test. Passive resistance has been called the weapon of the weak; if this is so, the Soul is weaker than the flesh. Passive resistance calls upon its devotees to endure great suffering, even martyrdom and death. Those who believe it is too difficult to carry out do not trust the Soul. They are not moved by true courage.”
There was no pose nor show, no straining for force, rarely an adjective or simile, no shadings of sense—a direct approach, inevitably direct. Dicky felt suddenly hopeless of ever understanding such directness. For the first time in his life, he realized that all his training to live and to write was less than straight. He had been taught half-tones, shadows to accentuate lights. Here was directness.
Gandhi resumed: “It is the sacred principle of love which moves mountains. To us is the responsibility of living out this sacred law; we are not concerned with results.”
“No such thing then as righteous anger?” Dicky asked.
“There is not for us. Anger is the misuse of force. Anger in thought is an enemy to clear thinking, to understanding. To understand is to love. Anger in action tends to become violence, and violence is the negation of spiritual force. In fact, only those who eschew violence can avail themselves of their real powers. Only those who realize that there is something in man which is superior to the brute nature in him, and that the latter always yields to it, can effectively apply this force, which is to violence, and therefore to all tyranny, all injustice, what light is to darkness. For the exercise of the purest Soul-force, prolonged training of the individual Soul is an absolute necessity.”