From the Editor’s Desk

We often hear of salvage operations, but perhaps have never had an opportunity to undertake them ourselves. Salvage is an act of saving – saving a person or a thing from utter destruction or loss. It is an art that requires patience, skill and intrepidity in its execution. Those alone are fitted for this work who are endowed with pathos or feelings with hearts bubbling over with affection and love. On the contrary, persons who lack these intrinsic qualities are either hard-hearted or self-centred and too indifferent to regard the distress of others as their own.

As human affairs are varied so are varied the salvage operations. The vagaries of nature and of man are often responsible for large-scale destructions. Earth-quakes and famines, sea-storms and floods, volcanic eruptions and avalanches are all due to vis major. But wars, civil commotions, arson and bloodshed are things for which human mad-caps are responsible. Whatever the cause, it is for the salvagers to minimise the horrors that result therefrom.

Again, the salvagers have varied kinds of operations. They may be diving under the deep seas, salvaging treasures-troves or prescious cargoes from sunken ships; digging deep in snows on mountain tops to salvage memorable records of mountain climbers and explorers; or extricating the wounded and the dying from under the debris of earth-quakes.

At times. they have to plunge into sky-high flames to save exquisite works of art and historical documents. Similarly, the archaeologists are ever busy in salvaging relics from the ruined past from sites of ancient civilisation so as to build up historical records and supply the missing links in the chain of events.

The work of destruction and re-building is going on side by side due to the innate nature of man. While wanton waste is brought about on one hand; on the other, there is an attempt to remedy the loss and to rescue whatever is possible.

As in individuals, so in nations, this process goes on endlessly. At the bottom of this lies the Truth of Truths – the Fathterhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. If this Truth were once realised, there would come on earth the Kingdom of the Most High above. But this world is too much with us late and soon and we are ever engaged in getting and spending. What after all would profit a man if he were to gain the riches of the whole world but to lose his own soul? How grand would human life be and what crowning proof would it bear if one could salvage one’s own living soul buried under the debris of the mind and matter, lying heap upon heap from age to age. The world and the worldly possessions are now over-shadowing the Self to the utmost. But every cloud, however thick and threatening, has a silver lining and if one could apprehend the lost strands of life providing the silver lining, one can yet be saved and saved truly from the murky darkness enveloping the Sun of the Spirit or Soul behind it. This, in fact, is the Salvage of all salvages.

The sages and seers come down to help us in salvaging our souls. The Godpower working in theocentric Saints can certainly help us to save our soul and to regain the Kingdom of God now a lost province to us. Hence the need for a Perfect Master of the age.