Chapter (অধ্যায়): XXVI THE PASSING OF THE SWAMI PAGE-327Page: 327 of 336
were paid, and farewells exchanged, that it had needed voyages half round the world to make. Strangely enough, in his first conversation after coming home from Benares, his theme was the necessity of withdrawing himself for a time, in order to leave those that were about him a free hand.
"How often," he said, "does a man ruin his disciples, by remaining always with them! When men are once trained, it is essential that their leader leave them, for without his absence they cannot develop themselves!"
It was as the result of the last of those foreign contacts that had continued without intermission throughout his mature life, that he realised suddenly the value to religion of high ideals of faithfulness in marriage. To the monk, striving above all things to be true to his own vows, not only in word and deed, but still more earnestly and arduously, in thought itself, the ideals of social life are apt to appear as so much waste material. Suddenly the Swami saw that a people to whom chastity was not precious, could never hope to produce a faithful priesthood, or a great monastic order. Only where the inviolability of marriage was fully recognised, could the path that lay outside marriage be truthfully held. By the sacredness of the social ideal, was the holiness of the super-social rendered possible.
This realisation was the crown of his philosophy. It could not but mark the end of "the play of Mother.