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CERTAIN VITAL PACTS EXAMINED
Ip
theme and purpose of the book. That theme and purpose
is the service of humanity by the service of the truth : to
uphold the cause of Divine truth and to attack and eliminate
the citadels of religious falsehood, error, jobbery and corrup-
tion from the Indian soil and from the world. In doing so he
has spared almost none. Sri Sankara, the great and revered
founder of the Order to which Dayanand himself belonged,
has in the same book come in no small share of his "attacks".
Let us now see what he himself says of his aim in writing
his
Satyartha Prakash.
"My chief aim in writing this book",J he says in his
general Introduction to the whale book,
"is to
(help) unfold
truth as truth and error as error. The exposition of error in
place of truth and of truth in place of error does not help the
unfolding of truth. •
"To speak of, write about, and believe in, a thing as it
is constitutes truth. He that is prejudiced tries to prove
that even his error is truth, while the truth of his religious.
opponent is error. He cannot therefore know what the true
Religion is. Hence this alone is the bounden duty of the
truthful and learned men : to (help) unfold the true nature
of truth and.of error before all men (mankind) by writing
and by lecturing, who, after having aSeertained what pro-
, motes their (human) welfare and what is prejudicial to their
(human) interests, should embrace what is true and reject
what is false, and thereby enjoy (true) happiness. Though
the human soul possesses the capacity for correct appre-
hension of truth, yet through self-interest, obstinacy, wrong-
headedness, ignotoltee and the like, it renounces truth and
(therefore) inclines towards untruths. And we have not done
such a thing in writing this book,
nor
has
it been our object
to hurt anyone's susceptibilities or harm anyone.
On
the
other hand,
our aim has been to further the advancement and
good of mankind
(as a thhtlet), and
to help
all
in the ascertain-
ment of truth,
where they could (own and) embrace the
(Divine, universal) truth and reject (all) falsehoods ; for there
'Translation by
07. 1 .
Rharadutaja. (3rd Edition. 1927).