Page 10 - All India Magazine Jan-2025

teachers, and the real program for study, starting with the very
small ones — they are so plastic and anything leaves such a deep
stamp on them! If they were given a few drops of truth when they
are very small, they would blossom out quite naturally as their
being grows.
That would be a lovely work to do.
The Mother: Conversation with a disciple, April 5, 1967

Rule of moral training
The first rule of moral training is to suggest and invite, not
command or impose. The best method of suggestion is by per-
sonal example, daily converse and the books read from day to day.
These books should contain, for the younger student, the lofty
examples of the past given, not as moral lessons, but as things
of supreme human interest, and, for the elder student, the great
thoughts of great souls, the passages of literature which set fire
to the highest emotions and prompt the highest ideals and aspira-
tions, the records of history and biography which exemplify the
living of those great thoughts, noble emotions and aspiring ideals.
This is a kind of good company, satsa}ga, which can seldom fail
to have effect, so long as sententious sermonising is avoided, and
becomes of the highest effect if the personal life of the teacher
is itself moulded by the great things he places before his pupils.
It cannot, however, have full force unless the young life is given
an opportunity, within its limited sphere, of embodying in action
the moral impulses which rise within it. The thirst of knowledge,
the self-devotion, the purity, the renunciation of the Brahmin, —
the courage, ardour, honour, nobility, chivalry, patriotism of the
Kshatriya, — the beneficence, skill, industry, generous enterprise
and large open-handedness of the Vaishya, — the self-effacement
and loving service of the Shudra, — these are the qualities of the
Aryan. They constitute the moral temper we desire in our young
men, in the whole nation. But how can we get them if we do not

10 All India Magazine, January 2025