Instead...

Instead, I should like to say a word about the relevance of these supplications to modern readers, irrespective of their race or religion, or of whether they are from the east or from the west. The author, as has been pointed out, was a man of purity and piety, sincerity and trustworthiness, who was committed to God and the cause of a suffering humanity. He had a bond of pain with the men of his time, as also with those who came after him.

So let me start by asking the following question: Do these supplications, composed and taught in the seventh century, have any relevance for those who live in the twentieth century, or indeed those who are yet to be born? To answer this we have to ask a number of other questions. Is man to be regarded only in biological terms as the most cunning of animals? Is he to be seen as an economic beast controlled by the laws of supply and demand and class conflict?

Is he to be regarded as a political animal, with a crude and excessive politicism occupying the centre of his mind, displacing all knowledge, religion, and wisdom? Or does he have a spiritual element which requires him to subordinate the temporal and the merely expedient to the Eternal and the True?

Are human beings to be understood in terms of biology, politics, or economics, or are we to take into account their sublime nature, the spirit of God infused in them, and the ultimate ideal which they should endeavour to realize? The essence of every epoch, age, or civilization, whether ancient, medieval, or modern, lies not in any biological unity of race, material achievement, or political order, but in the values that create and sustain that epoch, age, or civilization.

Our achievements in perfecting the material aspects of life has led us to exploit matter instead of informing, humanizing, and spiritualizing it. Our social life has given us the means, but has denied us the ends. A terrible blindness has afflicted the people of our civilization. The exclusion of the element of spirituality from humanity is the primary cause of the supremacy of matter, which has become so burdensome and oppressive.

The defeat of the human by the material is thus the central weakness of the man of today. Religion is rooted in a sense of wonderment at the eternal mystery of life itself.