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Oriental Religions and Christianity

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Title: Oriental Religions and Christianity

Author: Frank F. Ellinwood


        
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ORIENTAL RELIGIONS AND CHRISTIANITY

A COURSE OF LECTURES DELIVERED ON THE ELY FOUNDATION
BEFORE THE STUDENTS OF UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY,
NEW YORK, 1891

BY FRANK F. ELLINWOOD, D.D.
SECRETARY OF THE BOARD OF FOREIGN MISSIONS
OF THE
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH U.S.A.;
LECTURER ON COMPARATIVE RELIGION
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1892




PREFACE

The following lectures, prepared amid many cares and duties, have aimed
to deal only with practical questions which are demanding attention in
our time. They do not claim to constitute a treatise with close
connections and a logical order. Each presents a distinct topic, or a
particular phase of the present conflict of Christian truth with the
errors of the non-Christian religions. This independent treatment must
constitute my apology for an occasional repetition of important facts or
opinions which have a common bearing on different discussions. No claim
is made to scholarship in the Oriental languages. The ability to compare
original sources and determine dates and intricate meanings of terms, or
settle points in dispute by a wide research in Sanscrit or Pali
literatures, can only be obtained by those who spend years in study
along these special lines. But so many specialists have now made known
the results of their prolonged linguistic studies in the form of
approved English translations, that, as Professor Max Müller has well
said in his introduction to "The Sacred Books of the East," "there is
no longer any excuse for ignorance of the rich treasures of Oriental
Literature."

Two considerations lend special importance to the topics here discussed.
First, that the false systems in question belong not merely to the past,
but to our own time. And second, that the increased intercommunication
of this age brings us into closer contact with them. They are no longer
afar off and unheard of, nor are they any longer lying in passive
slumber. Having received quickening influences from our Western
civilization, and various degrees of sympathy from certain types of
Western thought, they have become aggressive and are at our doors.

On controverted points I have made frequent quotations, for the reason
that the testimonies or opinions of writers of acknowledged competency
are best given in their own words.

I have labored under a profound conviction that, whatever may be the
merit and success of these modest efforts, the general class of subjects
treated is destined to receive increased attention in the near future;
that the Christian Church will not long be content to miscalculate the
great conquest which she is attempting against the heathen systems of
the East and their many alliances with the infidelity of the West. And I
am cheered with a belief that, in proportion to the intelligent
discrimination which shall be exercised in judging of the non-Christian
religions, and the skill which shall be shown in presenting the
immensely superior truths of the Christian faith, will the success of
the great work of Missions be increased.

It scarcely needs to be said that I have not even attempted to give
anything like a complete view of the various systems of which I have
spoken. Only a few salient points have been touched upon, as some
practical end has required. But if the mere outline here given shall
lead any to a fuller investigation of the subjects discussed, I shall be
content. I am satisfied that the more thoroughly the Gospel of
Redemption is compared with the futile systems of self-righteousness
which man has devised, the more wonderful it will appear.

F.F. ELLINWOOD.

NEW YORK, January 20, 1892.




_THE ELY LECTURES_--1891.


The lectures contained in this volume were delivered to the students of
Union Theological Seminary in the year 1891, as one of the courses
established in the Seminary by Mr. Zebulon Stiles Ely, in the following
terms:

     "The undersigned gives the sum of ten thousand dollars to the Union
     Theological Seminary of the city of New York, to found a
     lectureship in the same, the title of which shall be 'The Elias P.
     Ely Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity.'

     "The course of lectures given on this foundation is to comprise any
     topics that serve to establish the proposition that Christianity is
     a religion from God, or that it is the perfect and final form of
     religion for man.

     "Among the subjects discussed may be:

     "The Nature and Need of a Revelation;

     "The Character and Influence of Christ and his Apostles;

     "The Authenticity and Credibility of the Scriptures, Miracles, and
     Prophecy;

     "The Diffusion and Benefits of Christianity; and

     "The Philosophy of Religion in its Relation to the Christian
     System.

     "Upon one or more of such subjects a course of ten public lectures
     shall be given, at least once in two or three years. The
     appointment of the lecturer is to be by the concurrent action of
     the directors and faculty of said Seminary and the undersigned; and
     it shall ordinarily be made two years in advance."




CONTENTS


LECTURE I.

THE NEED OF UNDERSTANDING THE FALSE RELIGIONS 1

     The New "Science of Religion" to be Viewed with Discrimination--The
     Study of the Oriental Systems too Long a Monopoly of Anti-Christian
     Scholars--The Changed Aspects of the Missionary Work--The
     Significant Experience of Ziegenbalz--Fears Entertained in
     Reference to this Subject by Timid Believers--The Different View
     taken of the Old Heathen Systems of Greece and Rome--The Subject
     Considered from the Standpoint of Missionary Candidates--The
     Testimony of Intelligent and Experienced Missionaries--Reasons for
     Studying Oriental Systems Found in the Increased Intercourse of the
     Nations; in the Intellectual Quickening of Oriental Minds by
     Education; in the Resistance and even Aggressiveness of Heathen
     Systems; in the Diversities of the Buddhist Faith in Different
     Lands--False Systems to be Studied with a Candid Spirit--The
     Distinction to be Drawn between Religion and Ethics--Reasons why a
     Missionary should Pursue these Studies before Arriving on his
     Field--Reasons why the Ministry at Home Should Acquaint Themselves
     with Heathen Systems--Their Active Alliance with Various Forms of
     Western Infidelity--Intellectual Advantages to be Derived from such
     Studies--A Broader and Warmer Sympathy with Universal Humanity to
     be Gained--A Better Understanding of the Unique Supremacy of the
     Gospel as the Only Hope of the World--Pastors at Home are also
     Missionaries to the Heathen--They are Sharers in the Conflict
     through the Press.


LECTURE II.

THE METHODS OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN DEALING
     WITH HEATHENISM 39

     The Coincidences of the Present Struggle with that of the First
     Christian Centuries--The Mediæval Missionary Work of a Simple
     Character--That of India, Japan, China, and the Turkish Empire a
     Severe Intellectual Struggle as well as a Spiritual
     Conquest--Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam, present
     Obstacles and Resistances Similar to those of Ancient Greece and
     Rome--How far Contrasts Appear between the Early and the Present
     Conquests--The Methods of Paul--His Tact in Recognizing Truth
     wherever Found, and Using it for his Purpose--The Attitude of the
     Early Christian Fathers toward the Heathen--Augustine's
     Acknowledgment of the Good which he Received from Cicero and
     Plato--The Important Elements which Platonism Lacked, and which
     were Found Only in the Gospel of Christ--The Great Secret of Power
     in the Early Church Found in its Moral Earnestness, as Shown by
     Simplicity of Life, and especially by Constancy even Unto a
     Martyr's Death--The Contrast between the Frugality of the Early
     Church and the Luxury and Vice of Roman Society--The Great Need of
     this Element of Success at the Present Time--The Observance of a
     Wise Discrimination in the Estimate of Heathen Philosophy by the
     Great Leaders of the Early Church--The Generality with which
     Classical Studies were Pursued by the Sons of the more Enlightened
     Christian Fathers--Method Among the Leaders--The Necessity for a
     thorough Knowledge of the Systems to be Met, as it was then
     Recognized--The thorough Preparation of Augustine, Ambrose,
     Iræneus, and Others for their Work--Origen's Masterly and
     Successful Reply to Celsus--The Use Made by the Early Fathers and
     by the Churches of a Later Day, of the Philosophy of Plato and
     Aristotle--Heathenism thus Conquered with its Own Weapons.


LECTURE III.

THE SUCCESSIVE DEVELOPMENTS OF HINDUISM 73

     The Great Variety in India's Religious Systems--The Early
     Monotheistic Nature Worship and its Gradual Lapse Into
     Polytheism--The Influence of Environment on the Development of
     Systems--The Distinction between Aryanism and Brahmanism, and the
     Abuses of the Latter in its Doctrines of Sacrifice and Caste--The
     Causes which Led to the Overthrow of this System of
     Sacerdotalism--The Upanishads and the Beginnings of Philosophy--The
     Rise of Buddhism and the Six Schools of Philosophy--Points in
     Common between them--The Code of Manu and its Countercheck to
     Rationalism--Its Development and its Scope, its Merits and
     Demerits--The Meaning of the Word Hinduism as here Used and the
     Means by which it Gained Ascendency--The Place and Influence of the
     Two Great Hindu Epics, their Origin, the Compromise which they
     Wrought, and the New and Important Doctrines which They
     Developed--The Trimurti and the Incarnations of Vishnu--The
     Deterioration of the Literature and the Faith of India--The Puranas
     and the Tantras--The Parallels between Hinduism and Christianity.


LECTURE IV.

THE BHAGAVAD GITA AND THE NEW TESTAMENT 111

     The Great Interest Felt in this Poem by a Certain Class of
     Readers--Its Alleged Parallels to the Scriptures--The Plausibility
     of the Recent Translation by Mr. Mohini M. Chatterji--Its
     Patronizing Catholicity--The Same Claim to Broad Charity by Chunder
     Sen and Others--Pantheism Sacrifices nothing to Charity, because
     God is in All Things--All Moral Responsibility Ceases since God
     Acts in Us--Mr. Chatterji's Broad Knowledge of Our Scriptures, and
     his Skill in Selecting Passages for His Purpose--His Pleasing
     Style--The Story of Krishna and Arjuna Told in the Interest of
     Caste and Pantheism--The Growth of the Krishna Cult from Popular
     Legends--The Origin of the Bhagavad Gita and its Place in the
     Mahabharata--Its Use of the Six Philosophies--Krishna's
     Exhortation--The Issue of the Battle in which Arjuna is Urged to
     Engage--The "Resemblances" Explained by their Pantheistic
     Interpretation--Fancied Resemblances which are only in the Sound of
     Words--Coincidences Springing from Similar Causes--The Totally
     Different Meaning which Pantheism gives them--Difference between
     Union with Christ and the Pantheistic Pervasion of the
     Infinite--The Differentials of Christianity.


LECTURE V.

BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY 140

     New Interest in Old Controversies Concerning Buddhism--Max Müller's
     Reply to the Alleged Influence of the System on Christianity--The
     Distinction to be made between the Credible History of Gautama and
     Later Legends--The Legends of the Pre-existent States and the
     Wonders Attending the Earthly Life--The Northern and the Southern
     Buddhism--The Sources of the Principal Legends--The Four Principal
     Doctrines of Buddhism, Skandas, Trishna, Kharma, and
     Nirvana--Difficulties in the Doctrines of Kharma and
     Nirvana--Various Opinions of Scholars in Regard to the Nature of
     Nirvana--Buddha's Final Reticence on the Subject--The Real Goal at
     which the Average Buddhist Aims--The Need of a Careful Estimate of
     the Merits and Demerits of Buddhism, and of the Hold which it is
     likely to have on Western Minds--Its Points of Contact with Western
     Errors--The Fact that Modern Buddhism, like many other False
     Systems, Claims Christ as a Believer in its Principles--The Theory
     that the Life of Christ is Modelled after that of the Buddha--The
     Superior Authenticity of the Life of Christ--The Unreliable
     Character of Buddhist Legends--The Intrinsic Improbability that a
     Religion claiming a Distinct Derivation from Jewish Sources would
     Borrow from a far-off Heathen System--The Contrast of Christ's
     Loving Recognition of the Father in Heaven with the Avowed Atheism
     of Buddhism--The General Spirit of the System Forbids all Thought
     of Borrowing from it--Points of Contrast.


LECTURE VI.

MOHAMMEDANISM PAST AND PRESENT 178

     Posthumous Legends of Mohammed; how they were Produced--Ancient
     Arabia and its Religious Systems--The Vale of Mecca and its Former
     Uses--The Birth of Mohammed, and his Religious Associations--His
     Temperament and Character--The Beginnings of his Prophetic
     Mission--Jews and Christians in Arabia and their Influence on
     Mohammedanism--Their Errors and Shortcomings a Help to the
     Reformer--Strange Doctrines of the Christian Church in Arabia--The
     Lost Opportunity of the Early Christian Sects and the Fatal Neglect
     of the Surrounding Nations--The Nomads of Arabia specially Prepared
     for Conquest by their Manner of Life and their Enlistment as
     Mercenary Soldiers--The Question of Mohammed's Real Character--The
     Growth of his Ambition and his Increasing Sensuality and
     Cruelty--Blasphemous Revelations in Behalf of the Prophet's Own
     Lust--Discriminating Judgment Required on his Career as a
     Whole--Mohammedan Schools--Noble Characters the Exception--General
     Corrupting Influence of the System--Its Conquests in Northern
     Africa and in the Soudan--The Early Races of Northern Africa, and
     the General Deterioration of the Country--The Piracies of the
     Barbary States--Civilization in Modern Egypt Due to Foreigners--The
     Bloody Ravages of El Mahdi in the East and the Fanatic Samadu in
     the West--The Testimony of a Secular Newspaper
     Correspondent--Professor Drummond and Henry M. Stanley on the Slave
     Traffic and Mohammedan Civilization--The Alleged Missionary
     Operations of Mohammedans in West Soudan--The Account Given of Them
     by Bishop Crowther, Schweinfurth, and Others--Canon Taylor and the
     Egyptian Pashas--The Effects of European Education--Palgrave on
     Mohammedan Intolerance of To-day--Mohammedanism and Temperance;
     Exaggerated Accounts of it; Proofs to the Contrary--R. Bosworth
     Smith's Protest against Canon Taylor's Extravagant Glorification of
     Islam--His Plea for Missions.


LECTURE VII.

THE TRACES OF A PRIMITIVE MONOTHEISM 222

     Two Conflicting Theories on the History of Religion--That of the
     Old and New Testaments--That of Modern Evolution--The Importance of
     this Question--Professor Henry B. Smith's Estimate of Ebrard's
     Discussion of it--Ebrard's Summing-up of the Argument--Professor
     Naville's View of the Subject--Conclusions of Rev. W.A.P. Martin,
     D.D., and Max Müller--How far May we Attempt to Establish the Fact
     of an Early Monotheism from Heathen Traditions?--Conceptions
     Differing in Different Nations--Evidences of Monotheism in the
     Vedas--Professor Banergea's Testimony--The Views Held by the Modern
     Somajes--Monotheism in China--Monotheistic Worship in the Days of
     Yao and Shun, 2300 B.C.--The Prayer of an Emperor of the Ming
     Dynasty Quoted by Professor Legge--Remarkable Monument of
     Monotheism in the Temple of Heaven--A Taouist Prayer--Zoroaster a
     Monotheistic Reformer--The Inscription at Behistun--Testimony of
     the Modern Parsee Catechism--No Nation without some Notion of a God
     Supreme over All--Buddhists in Thibet--Egyptian Monotheism--The
     Greek Poets--Old Monotheism in Mexico and Peru--Evidences of
     Ramification and Decline in Polytheism--Egypt and India Give
     Abundant Proofs--Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taouism all Show
     Degeneration--Mohammedan Corruption since the Days of the Early
     Caliphs--The Religions of Greece and Rome Became Effete--Even
     Israel, in Spite of Instruction and Reproof, Lapsed into Idolatry
     again and again--Even the Christian Church has Shown Similar
     Tendencies.


LECTURE VIII.

INDIRECT TRIBUTES OF HEATHEN SYSTEMS TO THE DOCTRINES
     OF THE BIBLE 266

     The Universality and Similarity of Race Traditions--Their General
     Support of the Old Testament History--Traditions of the Creation
     Found in India, China, among the Northern Turanians and some
     African Tribes--The Fall of Man as Traced in Assyria and among the
     Hindus--The Buddhists of Ceylon, Mongolians, Africans and Tahitans
     had Similar Traditions--The Flood--Traditions of the Chinese, the
     Iranians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Peruvians--The
     Prevalence of Piacular Sacrifice and Tokens of a Sense of
     Guilt--Traditions or Traces of Substitution Found in the
     Vedas--Faint Traces in the Religion of the Egyptians--Traditions of
     the Iroquois--Prophecies Looking to Divine Deliverers--The Tenth
     Avatar of Vishnu yet to Come as a Restorer of Righteousness--The
     Influence of the Tradition as Utilized by a Missionary--A Norse
     Deliverer and Millennium--The Prediction of the Cumæan Sibyl Forty
     Years before the Birth of Christ--Prevailing Conceptions of some
     Mediator between God and Man--The Hindu Krishna as an
     Example--Changes in Buddhism from the Old Atheism to Theism, and
     even to a Doctrine of Salvation by Faith--A Trinity and at last a
     Saviour--All the False Systems Claiming the Teachings and the
     Character of Christ.


LECTURE IX.

ETHICAL TENDENCIES OF THE EASTERN AND THE WESTERN
     PHILOSOPHIES 294

     The Prevalence of Speculation in all Ages in Regard to the Great
     Questions of Man's Origin and Destiny, and His Relations to
     God--The Various Schemes which have Seemingly Dispensed with the
     Necessity for a Creator in Accounting for the Existence of the
     Visible World--The Ancient Atomic Theories and Modern
     Evolution--Kanada, Lucretius, Herbert Spencer--Darwin's Theory of
     the Development of Species--Similar Theories Ascribed to the
     Chinese--The Ethical Difficulties Attending Many Philosophic
     Speculations, Ancient and Modern--Hindu Pantheism and Moral
     Responsibility--In the Advance from Instinct to Conscience and
     Religion, where does Moral Sentiment Begin?--If It was Right for
     Primeval Man to Maraud, why Might not Robbery again Become His Duty
     in Case of Extreme Deterioration?--Mr. Spencer's Theory of the
     Origin of Moral Intuition--The Nobler Origin which the Scriptures
     Assign to Man's Moral Nature--The Demonstrated Possibility of the
     Most Radical and Sudden Moral Changes Produced by the Christian
     Faith--Tendency of Ancient and Modern Theories to Lower the General
     Estimate of Man--The Dignity with which the New Testament Invests
     Him--The Ethical Tendency of the Doctrine of Evolution--The Opinion
     Expressed on the Subject by Goldwin Smith--Peschel's Frank
     Admission--The Pessimistic Tendency of all Anti-Biblical Theories
     of Man's Origin, Life, and Destiny--Buddha, Schopenhauer, and the
     Agnostics--The more Hopeful Influence of the Bible--The Tendency of
     all Heathen Religions and all Anti-Christian Philosophies toward
     Fatalism--Pantheism and the Philosophy of Spinoza Agreeing in this
     Respect with the Hindu Vedantism--The Late Samuel Johnson's "Piety
     of Pantheism," and His Definition of Fatalism--What Saves the
     Scriptural Doctrine of Fore-ordination from Fatalism--The Province
     of Faith and of Trust.


LECTURE X.

THE DIVINE SUPREMACY OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 338

     The Claim that Christianity is the only True Religion--The Peculiar
     Tendencies of Modern Times to Deny this Supremacy and Monopoly--It
     is not Enough in Such Times to Simply Ignore the Challenge--The
     Unique Claim must be Defended--First: Christianity is
     Differentiated from all Other Religions by the Fact of a Divine
     Sacrifice for Sin--Mohammedanism, though Founded on a Belief in the
     True God and Partly on the Old Testament Teachings, Offers no
     Saviour--No Idea of Fatherhood is Found in any Non-Christian
     Faith--The Gloom of Buddhism and the Terror of Savage
     Tribes--Hinduism a System of Self-Help Merely--The Recognized
     Grandeur of the Principle of Self-Sacrifice as Reflected from
     Christ--Augustine Found a Way of Life only in His Divine
     Sacrifice--Second: No Other Faith than Christianity is Made
     Effectual by the Power of a Divine and Omnipotent Spirit--The
     Well-Attested Fact of Radical Transformations of Character--Other
     Systems have Made Converts only by Warlike Conquest or by Such
     Motives as might Appeal to the Natural Heart--Christianity Rises
     above all Other Systems in the Divine Personality of Christ--The
     Contrast in this Respect between Him and the Authors of the
     Non-Christian Systems--His Attractions and His Power Acknowledged
     by all Classes of Men--The Inferiority of Socrates as Compared with
     Christ--Bushnell's Tribute to the Perfection of this Divine
     Personality--Its Power Attested in the Life of Paul--The Adaptation
     of Christianity to all the Circumstances and Conditions of
     Life--Abraham and the Vedic Patriarchs, Moses and Manu, David's Joy
     and Gratitude, and the Gloom of Hindu or Buddhist Philosophy--Only
     Christianity Brings Man to True Penitence and Humility--The
     Recognized Beauty and the Convincing Lesson of the Prodigal
     Son--The Contrast between Mohammed's Blasphemous Suras, which
     Justify his Lust, and the Deep Contrition of David in the
     Fifty-first Psalm--The Moral Purity of the Old and New Testaments
     as Contrasted with all Other Sacred Books--The Scriptures Pure
     though Written in Ages of Corruption and Surrounded by Immoral
     Influences--Christ Belongs to no Land or Age--The Gospel Alone is
     Adapted to all Races and all Time as the Universal Religion of
     Mankind--Only Christianity Recognizes the True Relation between
     Divine Help and Human Effort--It Encourages by Omnipotent
     Co-operation--The All-Comprehensive Presentation of the Gospel.


APPENDIX 381




ORIENTAL RELIGIONS AND CHRISTIANITY

LECTURE I.

THE NEED OF UNDERSTANDING THE FALSE RELIGIONS


It is said that the very latest among the sciences is the Science of
Religion. Without pausing to inquire how far it admits of scientific
treatment, certain reasons which may be urged for the study of the
existing religions of the world will be considered in this lecture. It
must be admitted in the outset that those who have been the pioneers in
this field of research have not, as a rule, been advocates of the
Christian faith. The anti-Christian theory that all religions may be
traced to common causes, that common wants and aspirations of mankind
have led to the development of various systems according to environment,
has until recently been the chief spur to this class of studies.
Accordingly, the religions of the world have been submitted to some
preconceived philosophy of language, or ethnology, or evolution, with
the emphasis placed upon such facts as seemed to comport with this
theory. Meanwhile there has been an air of broad-minded charity in the
manner in which the apologists of Oriental systems have treated the
subject. They have included Christ in the same category with Plato and
Confucius, and have generally placed Him at the head; and this supposed
breadth of sentiment has given them a degree of influence with dubious
and wavering Christians, as well as with multitudes who are without
faith of any kind.

In this country the study of comparative religion has been almost
entirely in the hands of non-evangelical writers. We have had "The Ten
Great Religions," from the pen of Rev. James Freeman Clarke; "The
Oriental Religions," written with great labor by the late Samuel
Johnson; and Mr. Moncure D. Conway's "Anthology," with its flowers,
gathered from the sacred books of all systems, and so chosen as to carry
the implication that they all are equally inspired. Many other works
designed to show that Christianity was developed from ancient sun myths,
or was only a plagiarism upon the old mythologies of India, have been
current among us. But strangely enough, the Christian Church has seemed
to regard this subject as scarcely worthy of serious consideration. With
the exception of a very able work on Buddhism,[1] and several review
articles on Hinduism, written by Professor S.H. Kellogg, very little has
been published from the Christian standpoint.[2] The term "heathenism"
has been used as an expression of contempt, and has been applied with
too little discrimination.

There is a reason, perhaps, why these systems have been underestimated.
It so happened that the races among whom the modern missionary
enterprise has carried on its earlier work were mostly simple types of
pagans, found in the wilds of America, in Greenland and Labrador, in the
West Indies, on the African coast, or in the islands of the Pacific; and
these worshippers of nature or of spirits gave a very different
impression from that which the Apostles and the Early Church gained from
their intercourse with the conquering Romans or the polished and
philosophic Greeks. Our missionary work has been symbolized, as Sir
William W. Hunter puts it, by a band of half-naked savages listening to
a missionary seated under a palm-tree, and receiving his message with
child-like and unquestioning faith.

But in the opening of free access to the great Asiatic nations, higher
grades of men have been found, and with these we now have chiefly to do.
The pioneer of India's missions, the devoted Ziegenbalg, had not been
long in his field before he learned the mistake which the churches in
Europe had made in regard to the religion and philosophy of the Hindus.
He laid aside all his old notions when he came to encounter the
metaphysical subtleties of Hindu thought, when he learned something of
the immense Hindu literature, the voluminous ethics, the mystical and
weird mythologies, the tremendous power of tradition and social
customs--when, in short, he found his way hedged up by habits of thought
wholly different from his own; and he resolved to know something of the
religion which the people of India already possessed.

For the benefit of others who might follow him he wrote a book on
Hinduism and its relations to Christianity, and sent it to Europe for
publication. But so strong were the preconceived notions which prevailed
among his brethren at home, that his manuscript, instead of being
published, was suppressed. "You were not sent to India to study
Hinduism," wrote Franke, "but to preach the Gospel." But Ziegenbalg
certainly was not wanting in his estimate of the chief end in view, and
his success was undoubtedly far greater for the intelligent plan upon
which he labored. The time came when a change had passed over the
society which had sent him forth. Others, less friendly than he to the
Gospel of Christ, had studied Hinduism, and had paraded it as a rival of
Christianity; and in self-defence against this flank movement, the
long-neglected work of Ziegenbalg was brought forth from obscurity and
published.

It is partly in self-defence against similar influences, that the
Christian Church everywhere is now turning increased attention to the
study of Comparative Religion. In Great Britain a wider interest has
been felt in the subject than in this country. And yet, even there the
Church has been far behind the enemies of evangelical truth in
comparing Christianity with false systems. Dr. James Stalker, of
Glasgow, said a few months since that, whereas it might be expected that
the advocates of the true faith would be the first to compare and
contrast it with the false systems of the world, the work had been left
rather to those who were chiefly interested in disparaging the truth and
exalting error. Yet something has been done. Such men as Sir Monier
Williams, Sir William Muir, Professors Rawlinson, Fairbairn, and Legge,
Bishop Carpenter, Canon Hardwick, Doctors Caird, Dodds, Mitchell, and
others, have given the false systems of the East a thorough and candid
treatment from the Christian standpoint. The Church Missionary Society
holds a lectureship devoted to the study of the non-Christian religions
as a preparation for missionary work. And the representatives of that
Society in the Punjab have instituted a course of study on these lines
for missionaries recently arrived, and have offered prizes for the best
attainments therein. Though we are later in this field of investigation,
yet here also there is springing up a new interest, and it is safe to
predict that within another decade the real character of the false
religions will be more generally understood.

The prejudice which has existed in regard to this subject has taken two
different forms: First, there has been the broad assumption upon which
Franke wrote to Ziegenbalg, that all knowledge of heathenism is worse
than useless. Good men are asking, "Is not such a study a waste of
energy, when we are charged with proclaiming the only saving truth? Is
not downright earnestness better than any possible knowledge of
philosophies and superstitions?" And we answer, "Yes: by all means, if
only the one is possible." Another view of the subject is more serious.
May there not, after all, be danger in the study of false systems? Will
there not be found perplexing parallels which will shake our trust in
the positive and exclusive supremacy of the Christian faith?

Now, even if there were at first some risks to a simple, child-like
confidence, yet a timid attitude involves far greater risks: it amounts
to a half surrender, and it is wholly out of place in this age of
fearless and aggressive discussion, when all truth is challenged, and
every form of error must be met. Moreover, in a thorough study there is
no danger. Sir Monier Williams tells us that at first he was surprised
and a little troubled, but in the end he was more than ever impressed
with the transcendent truths of the Christian faith. Professor S.H.
Kellogg assures us that the result of his careful researches in the
Oriental systems is a profounder conviction of the great truths of the
Gospel as divine. And even Max Müller testifies that, while making every
allowance for whatever is good in the ethnic faiths, he has been the
more fully convinced of the great superiority of Christianity. Really,
those are in danger who receive only the superficial and misleading
representations of heathenism which one is sure to meet in our magazine
literature, or in works like "Robert Elsmere" and "The Light of Asia."

One cannot fail to mark the different light in which we view the
mythologies of the Greeks and Romans. If their religious beliefs and
speculations had remained a secret until our time, if the high ethical
precepts of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius had only now been proclaimed, and
Socrates had just been celebrated in glowing verse as the "Light of
Greece," there would be no little commotion in the religious world, and
thousands with only weak and troubled faith might be disturbed. But
simply because we thoroughly understand the mythology of Greece and
Rome, we have no fear. We welcome all that it can teach us. We cordially
acknowledge the virtues of Socrates and assign him his true place. We
enrich the fancy and awaken the intellectual energies of our youth by
classical studies, and Christianity shines forth with new lustre by
contrast with the heathen systems which it encountered in the Roman
Empire ages ago.

And yet that was no easy conquest. The early church, when brought face
to face with the culture of Greece and the self-assertion of Roman
power, when confronted with profound philosophies like those of Plato
and Aristotle, with the subtleties of the Stoics, and with countless
admixtures of Persian mysticism, had, humanly speaking, quite as
formidable a task as those that are presented in the heathen systems of
to-day. Very few of the champions of modern heathenism can compare with
Celsus, and there are no more subtle philosophies than those of ancient
Greece. Evidently, the one thing needed to disenchant the false systems
of our time is a clear and accurate knowledge of their merits and
demerits, and of their true relation to Christianity.

It will be of advantage, for one thing, if we learn to give credit to
the non-Christian religions for the good which they may fairly claim.
There has existed a feeling that they had no rights which Christian men
were bound to respect. They have been looked upon as systems of unmixed
evil, whose enormities it were impossible to exaggerate. And all such
misconceptions and exaggerations have only led to serious reactions.
Anti-Christian writers have made great capital of the alleged
misrepresentations which zealous friends of missions have put upon
heathenism; and there is always great force in any appeal for fair play,
on whichever side the truth may lie. Where the popular Christian idea
has presented a low view of some system, scarcely rising above the grade
of fetichism, the apologists have triumphantly displayed a profound
philosophy. Where the masses of Christian people have credited whole
nations with no higher notions of worship than a supreme trust in
senseless stocks and stones, some skilful defender has claimed that the
idols were only the outward symbols of an indwelling conception of
deity, and has proceeded with keen relish to point out a similar use of
symbols in the pictures and images of the Christian Church.

From one extreme many people have passed to another, and in the end have
credited heathen systems with greater merit than they possess. A marked
illustration of this fact is found in the influence which was produced
by Sir Edwin Arnold's "Light of Asia." Sentimental readers, passing
from surprise to credulity, were ready to invest the "gentle Indian
Saint" with Christian conceptions which no real Buddhist ever thought
of. Mr. Arnold himself is said to have expressed surprise that people
should have given to his poem so serious an interpretation, or should
have imagined for a moment that he intended to compare Buddhism with the
higher and purer teachings of the New Testament.

In considering some of the reasons which may be urged for the study of
false systems, we will first proceed from the standpoint of the
candidate for the work of missions. And here there is a broad and
general reason which seems too obvious to require much argument. The
skilful general or the civil engineer is supposed, of course, to survey
the field of contemplated operations ere he enters upon his work. The
late Dr. Duff, in urging the importance of a thorough understanding of
the systems which a missionary expects to encounter, illustrated his
point by a reference to the great Akbar, who before entering upon the
conquest of India, twice visited the country in disguise, that he might
gain a complete knowledge of its topography, its strongholds, and its
points of weakness, and the best methods of attack.

While all religious teachers must understand their tasks, the need of
special preparation is particularly urgent in the foreign missionary,
owing to his change of environment. Many ideas and methods to which he
has been trained, and which would serve him well among a people of his
own race, might be wholly out of place in India or China, Ram Chandra
Bose, M.A.--himself a converted Brahman--has treated with great
discrimination the argument frequently used, that the missionary "need
only to proclaim the Glad Tidings." He says: "That the simple story of
Christ and him crucified is, after all, the truth on which the
regeneration of the Christian and the non-Christian lands must hang, no
one will deny. This story, ever fresh, is inherently fitted to touch the
dead heart into life, and to infuse vitality into effete nationalities
and dead civilizations. But a great deal of rubbish has to be removed in
heathen lands, ere its legitimate consequences can be realized. And a
patient, persistent study of the false religions, and the complicated
systems of philosophy associated with them, enables the missionary to
throw out of the way those heaps of prejudices and errors which make it
impossible for the story of the cross to reach and influence the
heart."[3] It has been very wisely said that "any fragment of truth
which lies in a heathen mind unacknowledged is an insuperable barrier
against conviction: recognized and used, it might prove a help;
neglected and ignored, it is insurmountable."[4]

The late Dr. Mullens learned by careful observation, that the
intellectual power of the Hindus had been so warped by false reasoning,
that "they could scarcely understand how, when two principles are
contradictory, one must be given up as false. They are prepared to
receive both sides of a contradiction as true, and they feel at liberty
to adopt that which seems the most comfortable. And nothing but a full
exposure of evil, with a clear statement of the antagonistic truth,
will suffice to awaken so perverted an intellect."[5]

The missionary has often been surprised to find that the idea which he
supposed was clearly understood, was wholly warped by the medium of
Hindu thought, as a rod is apparently warped when plunged into a stream,
or as a beautiful countenance is distorted by the waves and
irregularities of an imperfect mirror. To the preacher, sin, for
example, is an enormity in the sight of God; but to his Hindu listener
it may be only a breach of custom, or a ceremonial uncleanness. The
indwelling of the Holy Spirit, as it is set forth in Paul's Epistles, is
to the missionary a union in which his personality is still maintained
in blest fellowship with God, while to his audience it may be only that
out and out pantheism in which the deity within us supplants all
individual personality, and not only excludes all joy, but all
responsibility.

Professor W.G.T. Shedd has clearly pointed out the fact that the modern
missionary has a harder task in dealing with the perversions of the
heathen mind than that to which the Apostles of the Early Church were
called, owing to the prevalence in India and elsewhere of that pantheism
which destroys the sense of moral responsibility. He says: "The Greek
and Roman theism left the human will free and responsible, and thus the
doctrine of sin could be taught. But the pantheistic systems of the East
destroy free will, by identifying God and man; and hence it is
impossible to construct the doctrine of sin and atonement except by
first refuting the pantheistic ethics. The missionary can get no help
from _conscience_ in his preaching, when this theory of God and the
world has the ground. But St. Paul appealed confidently 'to every man's
conscience in the sight of God,' and called upon the ethics and theology
of the Greek and Roman philosophers for a corroboration. The early
Apologists, Tertullian and others, did the same thing."

The testimonies which have been given within the last few years, by the
most intelligent and observing missionaries in Eastern lands, are of
such peculiar significance and force, that I shall be justified in
quoting a few at some length. Rev. George William Knox, D.D., of Tokio,
Japan, in accepting an election to an honorary membership of the
American Society of Comparative Religion, wrote, December 17, 1890: "I
am deeply in sympathy with the objects of the Society, as indeed every
missionary must be. We have practical demonstrations of the value of
research into the ethnic religions. Even at home the value of such
research has already been great, but in these non-Christian lands it is
indispensable. It is true that non-Christian systems, as found among the
people, rarely exhibit the forms or the doctrines which we learn from
books, but I presume the same would be said by an intelligent Asiatic,
were he to study our sacred books and then compare results with much of
the religion which calls itself Christian in the West. And yet for the
study even of the most debased forms of Christianity in South America or
Mexico, let us say, we must needs begin with our sacred books. And so
it is with debased Buddhism in Japan. The Buddhism of Ceylon and of the
books is unknown to this people, and when it is used as the basis of
argument or exposition we do not hit the mark. Yet, after all, our debt
is immeasurable to the societies and scholars that have made accessible
the sources that have yielded at last such systems as are dominant here.

"The study of non-Christian systems is essential to the missionary, even
though he does not refer to them in his preaching, but contents himself
with delivering the Gospel message. And that is the rule with
missionaries, so far as I know. But a knowledge of the native systems is
imperative, that we may properly present our own. Otherwise we waste
time in teaching over again that which is already fully known, or we so
speak that our truth takes on the form of error, or we so underestimate
the thought of those whom we address, that the preaching of the wisdom
of God sounds in their ears the preaching of foolishness. The adaptation
of preaching to the hearers of Asiatic lands is a task that may well
make us thankful for every help that may be furnished us.... The
missionary is far too apt to come from the West with exalted notions of
his own superiority, and with a feeling of condescending pity for men
who, perhaps, have pondered the deep things of the universe far more
than he. Let him really master a philosophy like the Confucian, and he
will better illustrate the Christian grace of humility, and be so much
the better prepared for his work. His study will show him how
astonishing is the light that has shone upon those men whom he has
thought of as wholly in darkness. It will thus show him the true way of
approach, and enable him to follow the lines of least resistance. It
will also reveal to him what is the essential character of the divine
message which he himself bears. He will separate that peculiar and
spiritual truth which is the Word of Life, and will bring it as glad
tidings of great joy. Surely no man can study these ethnic faiths, no
matter with what appreciation of their measure of truth, and rejoicing
in it, without a constantly growing conviction that the one power that
converts men and establishes God's kingdom on earth is the Word that is
eternal, the Son of God. He gathers in Himself all the truth of all the
religions, and He adds that divine Salvation and Life for which all the
nations have waited, and without which the highest and deepest thought
remains unable to bring men into living communion with the God and
Father of us all."

Rev. Martyn Clark, D.D., Missionary of the Church Missionary Society at
Umritsur, India, has given thorough study to the Sanscrit, and has
thereby been enabled to expose the fallacies and misrepresentations
which the Arya Somaj, in its bitter controversy with the Gospel, has put
forth as to the real character of the Vedic literature. No man is better
able to judge of the importance of a correct understanding of the errors
of the non-Christian systems than he. In a letter accepting an honorary
membership of the above-named Society he says: "The object of the
Society is one in which I am deeply interested, and I shall at all
times do what I can to further its aims. I am convinced that there is
much that is helpful to the cause of Christ to be learned in this field
of research."

Rev. H. Blodgett, D.D., veteran Missionary of the American Board in
Peking, in accepting a similar honor, says: "My interest in these
studies has been deep and growing. It is high time that such a society
as you represent should be formed. The study of Comparative Religion has
long enough been in the hands of those who hold all religions to be the
outcome of the natural powers of the human mind, unaided by a revelation
from God. It is time that those who believe in the revelation from God
in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament founded upon the Old,
should study the great ethnic religions in the light derived from the
Bible."

Rev. James S. Dennis, D.D., long a Missionary of the Presbyterian
Mission in Beyrout, Syria, says in the same connection: "The great
missionary movement of our age has brought us face to face with problems
and conflicts which are far more deep and serious than those which
confront evangelistic efforts in our own land, and it is of the highest
importance that the Church at home should know as fully as possible the
peculiar and profound difficulties of work in foreign fields. These
ancient religions of the East are behind intrenchments, and they are
prepared to make a desperate resistance. Those who have never come into
close contact with their adherents, and discovered by experience the
difficulty of dislodging them and convincing them of the truth of the
Gospel, may very properly misunderstand the work of the foreign
missionary and wonder at his apparent failure, or at least his slow
progress. But I wonder at the success attained in the foreign field, and
consider it far more glorious and remarkable than it is generally
accounted to be. A fuller acquaintance with the strength, and resources,
and local éclat, and worldly advantages of these false religions, will
give the Church at home greater patience and faith in the great work of
evangelizing the nations."[6]

A specific reason for the study of the non-Christian religions is found
in the changes which our intercourse with Eastern nations has already
wrought. With our present means of intercommunication we are brought
face to face with them, and the contact of our higher vitality has
aroused them from the comparative slumber of ages. Even our missionary
efforts have given new vigor to the resistance which must be
encountered. We have trained up a generation of men to a higher
intellectual activity, and to a more earnest spirit of inquiry, and they
are by no means all won over to the Christian faith. And there are
thousands in India whom a Government education has left with no real
faith of any kind, but whose pride of race and venerable customs is
raised to a higher degree than ever. They have learned something of
Christianity; they have also studied their own national systems; they
have become especially familiar with all that our own sceptics have
written against Christianity; still further, they have added to their
intellectual equipment all that Western apologists have said of the
superiority of the Oriental faiths. They are thus armed at every point,
and they are using our own English tongue and all our facilities for
publication. How is the young missionary, who knows nothing of their
systems or the real points of comparison, to deal with such men? It is
very true that not all ranks of Hindus are educated; there are millions
who know nothing of any religion beyond the lowest forms of
superstition, and to these we owe the duty of a simple and plain
presentation of Christ and Him crucified; but in every community where
the missionary is likely to live there are men of the higher class just
named; and besides, professional critics and opposers are now employed
to harass the bazaar preacher with perplexing questions, which are soon
heard from the lips of the common people. A young missionary recently
wrote of the surprise which he felt when a low caste man, almost without
clothing, met him with arguments from Professor Huxley.

Missionary Boards have sometimes sent out a specialist, and in some
sense a champion, who should deal with the more intelligent classes of
the heathen. But such a plan is fraught with disadvantages. What is
needed is a thorough preparation in all missionaries, and that involves
an indispensable knowledge of the forces to be met. The power of the
press is no longer a monopoly of Christian lands. The Arya Somaj, of
India, is now using it, both in the vernacular and in the English, in
its bitter and often scurrilous attacks. One of its tracts recently sent
to me contained an English epitome of the arguments of Thomas Paine. The
secular papers of Japan present in almost every issue some discussion on
the comparative merits of Christianity, Buddhism, Evolution, and
Theosophy, and many of the young native ministry who at first received
the truth unquestioningly as a child receives it from his mother, are
now calling for men whom they can follow as leaders in their struggle
with manifold error.[7]

Even Mohammedans are at last employing the press instead of the sword.
Newspapers in Constantinople are exhorting the faithful to send forth
missionaries to "fortify Africa against the whiskey and gunpowder of
Christian commerce, by proclaiming the higher ethical principles of the
Koran." Great institutions of learning are also maintained as the
special propaganda of the Oriental religions. El Azar, established at
Cairo centuries ago, now numbers ten thousand students, and these when
trained go forth to all Arabic speaking countries.[8] The Sanskrit
colleges and monasteries of Benares number scarcely less than four
thousand students,[9] who are being trained in the Sankhyan or the
Vedanta philosophy, that they may go back to their different provinces
and maintain with new vigor the old faiths against the aggressions of
Christianity. And in Kioto, the great religious centre of Japan, we find
over against the Christian college of the American Board of Missions, a
Buddhist university with a Japanese graduate of Oxford as its president.
In a great school at Tokio, also, Buddhist teachers, aided by New
England Unitarians, are maintaining the superiority of Buddhism over
Western Christianity as a religion for Japan.[10]

Another reason why the missionary should study the false systems is
found in the greatly diversified forms which these systems present in
different lands and different ages. And just here it will be seen that a
partial knowledge will not meet the demand. It might be even misleading.
Buddhism, for example, has assumed an endless variety of forms--now
appearing as a system of the baldest atheism, and now presenting an
approximate theism. Gautama was certainly atheistic, and he virtually
denied the existence of the human soul. But in the northern development
of his system, theistic conceptions sprang up. A sort of trinity had
appeared by the seventh century A.D., and by the tenth century a supreme
and celestial Buddha had been discovered, from whom all other Buddhas
were emanations. To-day there are at least twelve Buddhist sects in
Japan, of which some are mystical, others pantheistic, while two hold a
veritable doctrine of salvation by faith.[11]

China has several types of Buddhism, and Mongolia, Thibet, Nepaul,
Ceylon, Burmah, and Siam present each some special features of the
system. How important that one should understand these differences in
order to avoid blundering, and to wisely adapt his efforts! In India,
under the common generic name of Hinduism, there are also many sects:
worshippers of Vishnu, worshippers of Siva, worshippers of Krishna.
There are Sikhs, and Jains, and devil worshippers; among the Dravidian
and other pre-Aryan tribes there are victims of every conceivable
superstition.

Now, a missionary must know something of these faiths if he would fight
with "weapons of precision." Paul, in becoming all things to all men,
knew at least the differences between them. He preached the gospel with
a studied adaptation. He tells us that he so strove as to win, and "not
as those who beat the air." How alert were the combatants in the arena
from which his simile is borrowed! How closely each athlete scanned his
man, watched his every motion, knew if possible his every thought and
impulse! Much more, in winning the souls of darkened and misguided men,
should we learn the inmost workings of their minds, their habits of
thought, and the nature of the errors which are to be dislodged.

But how shall the false systems of religions be studied? First, there
should be a spirit of entire candor. Truth is to be sought always, and
at any cost; but in this case there is everything to be gained and
nothing to be lost by the Christian teacher, and he can well afford to
be just. Our divine Exemplar never hesitated to acknowledge that which
was good in men of whatever nationality or creed. He could appreciate
the faith of Roman or Syro-Phoenician. He could see merit in a Samaritan
as well as in a Jew, and could raise even a penitent publican to the
place of honor. It was only the Pharisees who hesitated to admit the
truth, until they could calculate the probable effect of their
admissions.

The very best experience of missionaries has been found in the line of
Christ's example. "The surest way to bring a man to acknowledge his
errors," says Bishop Bloomfield, "is to give him full credit for
whatever he had learned of the truth."[12] "What should we think," says
a keen observer of the work of missions--"what should we think of an
engineer who, in attempting to rear a light-house on a sandbar, should
fail to acknowledge as a godsend any chance outcropping of solid rock to
which he might fasten his stays?"[13]

But in urging the duty of candor, I assume that an absolute freedom from
bias is impossible on either side. It is sometimes amusing to witness
the assurance with which professed agnostics assume that they, and they
alone, look upon questions of comparative religion with an unbiased and
judicial mind. They have no belief, they say, in any religion, and are
therefore entirely without prejudice. But are they? Has the man who has
forsaken the faith of his fathers and is deeply sensible of an
antagonism between him and the great majority of those about him--has he
no interest in trying to substantiate his position, and justify his
hostility to the popular faith? Of all men he is generally the most
prejudiced and the most bitter. We freely admit that we set out with a
decided preference for one religious system above all others, but we
insist that candor is possible, though an absolutely indifferent
judgment is out of the question. Paul, who quoted to the Athenians their
own poet, was fair-minded, and yet no man ever arraigned heathenism so
terribly as he, and none was so intensely interested in the faith which
he preached.

Archbishop Trench, in discussing the exaggerations from which a careful
study of the Oriental religions would doubtless save us, says, "There is
one against which we are almost unwilling to say a word. I mean the
exaggeration of those who, in a deep devotion to the truth as it is in
Christ Jesus, count themselves bound, by their allegiance to Him, to
take up a hostile attitude to everything not distinctly and avowedly
Christian, as though any other position were a treachery to his cause,
and a surrender of his exclusive right to the authorship of all the good
which is in the world. In this temper we may dwell only on the guilt and
misery and defilements, the wounds and bruises and putrefying sores of
the heathen world; or if aught better is brought under our eye, we may
look askant and suspiciously upon it, as though all recognition of it
were a disparagement of something better. And so we may come to regard
the fairest deeds of unbaptized men as only more splendid sins. We may
have a short but decisive formula by which to try and by which to
condemn them. These deeds, we may say, were not of faith, and therefore
they could not please God; the men that wrought them knew not Christ,
and therefore their work was worthless--hay, straw, and stubble, to be
utterly burned up in the day of the trial of every man's work.

"Yet there is indeed a certain narrowness of view, out of which alone
the language of so sweeping a condemnation could proceed. Our allegiance
to Christ, as the one fountain of light and life for the world, demands
that we affirm none to be good but Him, allow no goodness save that
which has proceeded from Him; but it does not demand that we deny
goodness, because of the place where we find it, because we meet it, a
garden tree, in the wilderness. It only requires that we claim this for
Him who planted, and was willing that it should grow there; whom it
would itself have gladly owned as its author, if, belonging to a happier
time, it could have known Him by his name, whom in part it knew by his
power.

"We do not make much of a light of nature when we admit a righteousness
in those to whom in the days of their flesh the Gospel had not come. We
only affirm that the Word, though not as yet dwelling among us, yet
being the 'light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,'
had also lighted them. Some glimpses of his beams gilded their
countenances, and gave to these whatever brightness they wore; and in
recognizing this brightness we are ascribing honor to Him, and not to
them; glorifying the grace of God, and not the virtues of man."[14]

In marked contrast with this, and tending to an extreme, is the
following, from the pen of Bishop Beveridge. It is quoted by Max Müller,
in the opening volume of "The Sacred Books of the East," as a model of
candor.

"The general inclinations which are naturally implanted in my soul to
some religion, it is impossible for me to shift off; but there being
such a multiplicity of religions in the world, I desire now seriously to
consider with myself which of them all to restrain these my general
inclinations to. And the reason of this my inquiry is not, that I am in
the least dissatisfied with that religion I have already embraced; but
because 'tis natural for all men to have an overbearing opinion and
esteem for that particular religion they are born and bred-up in. That,
therefore, I may not seem biased by the prejudice of education, I am
resolved to prove and examine them all; that I may see and hold fast to
that which is best.... Indeed, there was never any religion so barbarous
and diabolical, but it was preferred above all other religions
whatsoever by them that did profess it; otherwise they would not have
professed it.... And why, say they, may you not be mistaken as well as
we? Especially when there are, at least, six to one against your
Christian religion; all of which think they serve God aright; and expect
happiness thereby as well as you.... And hence it is that in my looking
out for the truest religion, being conscious to myself how great an
ascendancy Christianity holds over me beyond the rest, as being that
religion whereunto I was born and baptized; that the supreme authority
has enjoined and my parents educated me in; that which everyone I meet
withal highly approves of, and which I myself have, by a long-continued
profession, made almost natural to me; I am resolved to be more jealous
and suspicious of this religion than of the rest, and be sure not to
entertain it any longer without being convinced by solid and substantial
arguments of the truth and certainty of it. That, therefore, I may make
diligent and impartial inquiry into all religions and so be sure to find
out the best, I shall for a time look upon myself as one not at all
interested in any particular religion whatsoever, much less in the
Christian religion; but only as one who desires, in general, to serve
and obey Him that made me in a right manner, and thereby to be made
partaker of that happiness my nature is capable of."[15]

Second, in studying the false systems it is important to distinguish
between religion and ethics. In the sphere of ethics the different
faiths of men may find much common ground, while in their religious
elements they may be entirely true or utterly false. The teachings of
Confucius, though agnostic, presented a moral code which places the
relations of the family and state on a very firm basis. And the very
highest precepts of Buddhism belong to the period in which it was
virtually atheistic. Many great and noble truths have been revealed to
mankind through the conscience and the understanding, and these truths
have found expression in the proverbs or ethical maxims of all races. To
this extent God has nowhere left himself without witness. But all this
is quite apart from a divinely revealed religion which may be cherished
or be wholly lost. The golden rule is found not only in the New
Testament, but negatively at least in the Confucian classics;[16] and
the Shastras of the Hindus present it in both the positive and the
negative form. And the still higher grace of doing good to those who
injure us, was proclaimed by Laotze, five hundred years before Christ
preached the Sermon on the Mount.

The immense superiority of the ethical standard in Christianity, lies in
its harmony and completeness. Confucius taught the active virtues of
life, Laotze those of a passive kind; Christianity inculcates both. In
heathenism ethical truths exist in fragments--mere half truths, like the
broken and scattered remains of a temple once beautiful but now
destroyed. They hold no relation to any high religious purpose, because
they have no intelligent relation to God. Christian ethics begin with
our relations to God as supreme, and they embrace the present life and
the world to come. The symmetry of the divine precept, "Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself," finds
no counterpart in the false religions of the world. Nowhere else, not
even in Buddhism, is found the perfect law of love. The great secret of
power in Christianity is God's unspeakable love to men in Christ; and
the reflex of that love is the highest and purest ever realized in human
hearts.

Thirdly, the false systems should be studied by the Christian
missionary, not for their own sakes so much as for an ulterior purpose,
and they should be studied in constant comparison with the religion
which it is his business to proclaim. His aim is not that of a savant.
Let us not disguise it: he is mainly endeavoring to gain a more thorough
preparation for his own great work. The professional scholar at Oxford
or Leipsic might condemn this acknowledged bias--this pursuit of truth
as a means and not as an end--but if he would be entirely frank, he
would often find himself working in the interest of a linguistic
theory, or a pet hypothesis of social science. It was in this spirit
that Spencer and Darwin have searched the world for facts to support
their systems.[17]

I repeat, it is enough for the missionary that he shall be thoroughly
candid. He may exercise the burning zeal of Paul for the Gospel which he
proclaims, if he will also exercise his clear discrimination, his
scrupulous fairness, his courtesy, and his tact. Let him not forget that
he is studying religions comparatively; he should proceed with the Bible
in one hand, and should examine the true and the false together.
Contrasts will appear step by step as he advances, and the great truths
of Christianity will stand out in brighter radiance, for the shadows of
the background. If the question be asked, when and where shall the
missionary candidate study the false systems, I answer at once; before
he leaves his native land; and I assign three principal reasons. First:
The study of a new and difficult language should engross his attention
when he reaches his field. This will prove one of the most formidable
tasks of his life, and it will demand resolute, concentrated, and
prolonged effort. Second: In gaining access to the people, studying
their ways and winning their confidence, the missionary will find great
advantage in having gained some previous knowledge of their habits of
thought and the intricacies of their beliefs. Third: The means and
appliances of study are far greater here at home than on the mission
fields. A very serious difficulty with most missionaries is the want of
books on special topics; they have no access to libraries, and if one
has imagined that he can best understand the faiths of the people by
personal contact with them, he will soon learn with surprise how little
he can gain from them, and how little they themselves know of their own
systems. Those who do know have learned for the purpose of baffling the
missionary instead of helping him. The accumulation and the arrangement
of anything like a systematic knowledge of heathen systems has cost the
combined effort of many missionaries and many Oriental scholars; and
now, after three generations have pursued these studies, it is still
felt that very much is to be learned from literatures yet to be
translated. Such as there are, are best found in the home libraries.

Let us for a few moments consider the question how far those who are not
to become missionaries may be profited by a study of false systems. To a
large extent, the considerations already urged will apply to them also,
but there are still others which are specially important to public
teachers here at home. Dean Murray, in an able article published in the
"Homiletic Review" of September, 1890, recommended to active and
careworn pastors a continued study of the Greek classics, as calculated
to refresh and invigorate the mind, and increase its capacity for the
duties of whatever sphere. All that he said of the Greek may also be
said of the Hindu classics, with the added consideration that in the
latter we are dealing with the living issues of the day. Sir Monier
Williams, in comparing the two great Epics of the Hindus with those of
Homer, names many points of superiority in the former.[18] It is safe to
say that no poems of any other land have ever exercised so great a spell
over so many millions of mankind as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, of
India, and no other production is listened to with such delight as the
story of Rama as it is still publicly read at the Hindu festivals.

Of philosophies, no system of India has approached so near to veritable
divine revelation as that of Plato, but in variety and subtlety, and in
their far-reaching influence upon human life, the Indian schools,
especially the Vedanta, are scarcely excelled to this day. And they are
_applied_ philosophies; they constitute the religion of the people. Max
Müller has said truly that no other line of investigation is so
fascinating as that which deals with the long and universal struggle of
mankind to find out God, and to solve the mystery of their relations to
him. Unfortunately, human history has dealt mainly with wars and
intrigues, and the rise and fall of dynasties; but compared with these
coarse and superficial elements, how much more interesting and
instructive to trace in all races of men the common and ceaseless
yearnings after some solution of life's mysteries! One is stirred with
a deeper, broader sympathy for mankind when he witnesses this universal
sense of dependence, this fear and trembling before the powers of an
unseen world, this pitiful procession of unblest millions ever trooping
on toward the goal of death and oblivion. And from this standpoint, as
from no other, may one measure the greatness and glory of the Gospel of
Jesus Christ.

To my mind there is nothing more pathetic than the spectacle of
world-wide fetichism. It is not to be contemplated with derision, but
with profoundest sympathy. We all remember the pathos of Scott's picture
of his Highland heroine, with brain disordered by unspeakable grief,
beguiling her woes with childish ornaments of "gaudy broom" and plumes
from the eagle's wing. But sadder far is the spectacle of millions of
men made for fellowship with God, building their hopes on the divinity
dwelling in an amulet of tiger's teeth or serpent's fangs or curious
shells. And it ought to enlarge our natures with a Christ-like sympathy
when we contemplate those dark and desperate faiths which are but
nightmares of the soul, which see in all the universe only malevolent
spirits to be appeased, which, looking heavenward for a father's face,
see, as Richter expressed it, "only a death's head with bottomless,
empty sockets" instead of a loving smile.[19]

And what a field do the greater but equally false systems present for
the study of the human mind and heart! How was it that the simple nature
worship of the Indo-Aryans grew into the vast deposit of modern
Hinduism, and developed those social customs which have become walls of
adamant? How could Buddhism grow out of such a soil and finally cast its
spell over so many peoples? What were the elements of power which
enabled the great sage of China to rear a social and political fabric
which has survived for so many centuries? How was it that Islam gained
its conquests, and what is the secret of that dominion which it still
holds? These surely are questions worthy of those who are called to deal
with human thought and human destiny. And when by comparison we find the
grand differentials which raise Christianity infinitely above them all,
we shall have gained the power of presenting its truths more clearly and
more convincingly to the minds and hearts of men.

There are some specific advantages flowing from the study of other
religions of which I will give little more than an enumeration.

1. It impresses us with the universality of some more or less distinct
conception of God. I am aware that from time to time explorers imagine
that they have found a race of men who have no notion of God, but in
almost every instance subsequent investigation has found a religious
belief. Such mistakes were made concerning the aborigines of Australia,
the Dyaks of Borneo, the Papuans, the Patagonians, and even the American
Indians. The unity of the race finds a new and striking proof in the
universality of religion.

2. The study of false systems brings to light an almost unanimous
testimony for the existence of a vague primeval monotheism, and thus
affords a strong presumptive corroboration of the Scriptural doctrine of
man's apostasy from the worship of the true God.

3. The clearest vindication of the severities of the Old Testament
Theocracy, in its wars of extermination against the Canaanites and
Phoenicians, is to be found in a careful study of the foul and cruel
types of heathenism which those nations carried with them wherever their
colonies extended. A religion which enjoined universal prostitution, and
led thus to sodomy and the burning of young children in the fires of
Moloch, far exceeded the worst heathenism of Africa or the islands of
the Pacific. The Phoenician settlements on the Mediterranean have not
even yet recovered from the moral blight of that religion; and had such
a cultus been allowed to spread over all Europe and the world, not even
a second Deluge could have cleansed the earth of its defilement. The
extermination of the Canaanites, when considered as a part of one great
scheme for establishing in that same Palestine a purer and nobler faith,
and sending forth thence, not Phoenician corruption, but the Gospel of
Peace to all lands, becomes a work of mercy to the human race.

4. The ethics of the heathen will be found to vindicate the doctrines of
the Bible. This is a point which should be more thoroughly understood.
It has been common to parade the high moral maxims of heathen systems as
proofs against the exclusive claims of Christianity. But when carefully
considered, the lofty ethical truths found in all sacred books and
traditions, corroborate the doctrines of the Scriptures. They condemn
the nations "who hold the truth in unrighteousness." They enforce the
great doctrine that by their own consciences all mankind are convicted
of sin, and are in need of a vicarious righteousness,--a full and free
salvation by a divine power. My own experience has been, and it is
corroborated by that of many others, that very many truths of the
Gospel, when seen from the stand-point of heathenism, stand out with a
clearness never seen before.

Many prudential reasons like those which we have given for the study of
false systems by missionaries, pertain also to those who remain at home.
Both are concerned in the same cause, and both encounter the same
assailments of our common faith. We are all missionaries in an important
sense: we watch the conflict from afar, but we are concerned in all its
issues. The bulletins of its battle-fields are no longer confined to
missionary literature; they are found in the daily secular press, and
they are discussed with favorable or unfavorable comments in the monthly
magazines. The missionary enterprise has come to attract great
attention: it has many friends, and also many foes, here at home; it is
misrepresented by scoffers at our doors. The high merits of heathen
systems, set forth with every degree of exaggeration, pass into the
hands of Christian families, in books and magazines and secular papers.
Apostles of infidelity are sent out to heathen countries to gather
weapons against the truth. Natives of various Oriental lands, once
taught in our mission schools perhaps, but still heathen, are paraded on
our lecture platforms, where they entertain us with English and American
arguments in support of their heathen systems and against Christianity.
Young pastors, in the literary clubs of their various communities, are
surprised by being called to discuss plausible papers on Buddhism, which
some fellow-member has contributed, and they are expected to defend the
truth. Or some young parishioner has been fascinated by a plausible
Theosophist, or has learned from Robert Elsmere that there are other
religions quite as pure and sacred as our own. Or some chance lecturer
has disturbed the community with a discourse on the history of religious
myths. And when some anxious member of a church learns that his
religious instructor has no help for him on such subjects, that they lie
wholly outside of his range, there is apt to be something more than
disappointment: there is a loss of confidence.

It is an unfortunate element in the case that error is more welcome in
some of our professedly neutral papers than the truth: an article
designed to show that Christianity was borrowed from Buddhism or was
developed from fetichism will sometimes be welcomed as new sensation,
while a reply of half the length may be rejected.

There is something ominous in these facts. Whether the secular press
(not all papers are thus unfair) are influenced by partisan hatred of
the truth or simply by a reckless regard for whatever is most popular,
the facts are equally portentous. And if it be true that such
publications are what the people most desire, the outlook for our
country is dark indeed. The saddest consideration is that the power of
the secular press is so vast and far reaching. When Celsus wrote, books
were few. When Voltaire, Hume, and Thomas Paine made their assailments
on the Christian faith, the means of spreading the blight of error were
comparatively few. But now the accumulated arguments of German infidels
for the last half-century may be thrown into a five-cent Sunday paper,
whose issue will reach a quarter of a million of copies, which perhaps a
million of men and women may read. These articles are copied into a
hundred other papers, and they are read in the villages and hamlets;
they are read on the ranches and in the mining camps where no sermon is
ever heard.

It is perfectly evident that in an age like this we cannot propagate
Christianity under glass. It must grow in the open field where the free
winds of heaven shall smite and dissipate every cloud of error that may
pass over it, and where its roots shall only strike the deeper for the
questionings and conflicts that may often befall it. Error cannot be
overcome either by ignoring it or by the cheap but imbecile scolding of
an ignorant pulpit.

I cannot express the truth on this point more forcibly than by quoting
the trenchant words of Professor Ernest Naville, in his lectures on
"Modern Atheism." After having admitted that one, who can keep himself
far from the strifes and struggles of modern thought, will find
solitude, prayer, and calm activity, pursued under the guidance of
conscience, most conducive to unquestioning faith and religious peace,
he says: "But we are not masters of our own ways, and the circumstances
of the present times impose on us special duties. The barriers which
separate the school and the world are everywhere thrown down; everywhere
shreds of philosophy, and very often of very bad philosophy, scattered
fragments of theological science, and very often of a deplorable
theological science, are insinuating themselves into the current
literature. There is not a literary review, there is scarcely a
political journal, which does not speak on occasion, or without
occasion, of the problems relating to our eternal interests. The most
sacred beliefs are attacked every day in the organs of public opinion.
At such a juncture can men, who preserve faith in their own souls,
remain like dumb dogs, or keep themselves shut up in the narrow limits
of the schools? Assuredly not. We must descend to the common ground and
fight with equal weapons the great battles of thought. For this purpose
it is necessary to state questions which run the risk of startling
sincerely religious persons. But there is no help for it if we are to
combat the adversaries on their own ground; and because it is thus only
that we can prove to all that the torrent of negations is but a passing
rush of waters, which, fret as they may in their channels, shall be
found to have left not so much as a trace of their passage upon the Rock
of Ages." The fact that Professor Naville's lectures were delivered in
Geneva and Lausanne, to audiences which together numbered over two
thousand five hundred people, affords abundant proof that the people are
prepared to welcome the relief afforded by a clear and really able
discussion of these burning questions. In the ordinary teaching of the
pulpit they would be out of place, but every public teacher should be
able to deal with them on suitable occasions.

In a single concluding word, the struggle of truth and error has become
world-wide. There are no ethnic religions now. There is Christianity in
Calcutta, and there is Buddhism in Boston. The line of battle is the
parallel that belts the globe. It is not a time for slumber or for mere
pious denunciation. There must be no blundering: the warfare must be
waged with weapons of precision, and then victory is sure. It is well if
our missionary effort of a century has drawn the fire of the enemy; it
is well if the time has come to hold up the truth face to face with
error, and to fight out and over again the conflict of Elijah and the
Priests of Baal.


FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: _The Light of Asia and the Light of the World_. Macmillan &
Co.]

[Footnote 2: The late Professor Moffat, of Princeton Theological
Seminary, published a _Comparative History of Religions_, but its field
was too broad for a thorough treatment.]

[Footnote 3: _Methodist Quarterly_.]

[Footnote 4: Quoted in _Manual of India Missions_.]

[Footnote 5: _Manual of India Missions._]

[Footnote 6: Similar views, though in briefer terms, have been presented
by Rev. William A.P. Martin, D.D., of Peking; Rev. John L. Nevins, D.D.,
of Chefou; Rev. A.P. Happer, D.D., and Rev. B.C. Henry, D.D., of Canton;
Professor John Wortabet, M.D., of Beyrout; Rev. Jacob Chamberlain, D.D.,
Missionary of the Reformed Church in Madras; Rev. Z.J. Jones, D.D.,
Missionary of the American M.E. Church at Bareilly, India; Rev. K.C.
Chattergee and Ram Chandra Bose, both converts from high caste Hinduism
and both eminent ministers of the Gospel in India; and Rev. E.W. Blyden,
D.D., the accomplished African scholar of Liberia.]

[Footnote 7: The _Japan Mail_ of September 30, 1891, in reviewing the
progress of religious and philosophic discussion as carried on by the
native press of the Empire, says: "The Buddhist literature of the season
shows plainly the extent to which the educated members of the (Buddhist)
priesthood are seeking to enlarge their grasp by contact with Western
philosophy and religious thought. We happen to know that a prominent
priest of the Shinsu sect is deeply immersed in Comte's humanitarianism.
In _Kyogaku-roushu_ (a native paper) are published instalments of
Spencer's philosophy. Another paper, the _Hauseikwai_, has an article
urging the desirability of a general union of all the (Buddhist) sects,
such as Colonel Olcott brought about in India between the northern and
the southern Buddhists."]

[Footnote 8: _Leaves from an Egyptian Note-book._]

[Footnote 9: Papers of Rev. Mr. Hewlett in the _Indian Evangelical
Review_.]

[Footnote 10: In an address given in Tokio, by Rev. Mr. Knapp, of
Boston, Buddhists in Japan were advised to build their religion of the
future upon their own foundations, and not upon the teachings of Western
propagandists.]

[Footnote 11: _The Twelve Buddhist Sects of Japan_, by Bunyiu Nanjio,
Oxon.]

[Footnote 12: Quoted in _Manual of India Missions_.]

[Footnote 13: Quoted in _Manual of India Missions_.]

[Footnote 14: _Hulsean Lectures_, 1846.]

[Footnote 15: Private Thoughts on Religion, Part I., Article 2.]

[Footnote 16: Confucius not only taught that men should not do to others
what they would not have done to them, but when one of his disciples
asked him to name one word which should represent the whole duty of man,
he replied "Reciprocity."]

[Footnote 17: Whoever will read the Preface of Mr. Spencer's work on
Sociology will be surprised at the means which have been used in
collecting and verifying supposed facts; a careful perusal of the book
will show that all classes of testimony have been accepted, so far as
they were favorable. Adventurers, reporters, sailors, and that upon the
briefest and most casual observation, have been deemed capable of
interpreting the religious beliefs of men. Even Peschel doubts many of
their conclusions.]

[Footnote 18: See _Indian Wisdom_.]

[Footnote 19: Archbishop Trench, after speaking in his Hulsean lectures
of the advantages which we may gain from an earnest study of the
struggles of thoughtful men, who amid heathen darkness have groped after
a knowledge of the true God, and of the gratitude which we ought to feel
who have received a more sure word of prophecy, adds in words of rare
beauty: "And perhaps it shall seem to us as if that star in the natural
heavens which guided those Eastern sages from their distant home, was
but the symbol of many a star which, in the world's mystical night, such
as, being faithfully followed, availed to lead humble and devout hearts
from far-off regions of superstition and error, till they knelt beside
the cradle of the Babe of Bethlehem, and saw all their weary wanderings
repaid in a moment, and all their desires finding a perfect fulfilment
in Him."]




LECTURE II.

THE METHODS OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN DEALING WITH HEATHENISM


The coincidences of our present conquest of the non-Christian races with
that to which the Apostolic Church was called are numerous and striking.
Not even one hundred years ago was the struggle with heathen error so
similar to that of the early Church.

To a great extent the missionary efforts of the mediæval centuries
encountered only crude systems, which it was comparatively easy to
overcome. The rude tribes of Northern Europe were converted by the
Christianity of the later Roman Empire, even though they were
conquerors. Their gods of war and brute force did not meet all the
demands of life. As a source of hope and comfort, their religion had
little to be compared with the Christian faith, and as to philosophy
they had none. They had inherited the simple nature worship which was
common to all branches of the Aryan race, and they had expanded it into
various ramifications of polytheism; but they had not fortified it with
subtle speculations like those of the Indo-Aryans, nor had their
mythologies become intrenched in inveterate custom, and the national
pride which attends an advanced civilization.

At a later day Christian missionaries in Britain found the Norse
religion of the Saxons, Jutes, and Angles, scarcely holding the
confidence of either rulers or subjects. They had valued their gods
chiefly for the purposes of war, and they had not always proved
reliable. The king of Northumbria, like Clovis of France, had vowed to
exchange his deities for the God of the Christians if victory should be
given him on a certain battle-field; and when he had assembled his
thanes to listen to a discussion between the missionary Paulinus and the
priests of Woden on the comparative merits of their respective faiths,
the high priest frankly admitted his dissatisfaction with a religion
which he had found utterly disappointing and useless; and when other
chief counsellors had given the same testimony, and a unanimous vote had
been taken to adopt the Christian faith, he was the first to commence
the destruction of the idols.[20]

The still earlier missionaries among the Druid Celts of Britain and
France, though they found in Druidism a more elaborate faith than that
of the Norsemen, encountered no such resistance as we find in the great
religious systems of our day. Where can we point to so easy a conquest
as that of Patrick in Ireland, or that of the Monks of Iona among the
Picts and Scots?

The Druids claimed that they already had many things in common with the
Christian doctrines,[21] and what was a still stronger element in the
case, they made common cause with the Christians against the wrongs
inflicted on both by pagan Rome. The Roman emperors were not more
determined to extirpate the hated and, as they thought, dangerous
influences of Christianity, than they were to destroy every vestige of
Druidism as their only hope of conquering the invincible armies of
Boadicea. And thus the mutual experience of common sufferings opened a
wide door for the advancement of Christian truth.

The conquests of Welsh and Irish missionaries in Burgundy, Switzerland,
and _Germany_, encountered no elaborate book religions, and no profound
philosophies. They had to deal with races of men who were formidable
only with weapons of warfare, and who, intent chiefly on conquest and
migration, had few institutions and no written historic records. The
peaceful sceptre of the truth was a new force in their experience, and
the sympathetic and self-denying labors of a few missionaries tamed the
fierce Vikings to whom Britain had become a prey, and whose incursions
even the armies of Charlemagne could not resist.

How different is our struggle with the races now under the sceptre of
Islam, for example--inflated as they are with the pride of wide
conquest, and looking contemptuously upon that Christian faith which it
was their early mission to sweep away as a form of idolatry! How
different is our task in India, which boasts the antiquity of the noble
Sanskrit and its sacred literature, and claims, as the true
representative of the Aryan race, to have given to western nations their
philosophy, their religion, and their civilization! How much more
difficult is our encounter with Confucianism, which claims to have laid
the foundations of the most stable structure of social and political
institutions that the world has ever known, and which to-day, after
twenty-five centuries of trial, appeals to the intellectual pride of all
intelligent classes in a great empire of four hundred millions! And
finally, how different is our task with Buddhism, so mystical and
abstruse, so lofty in many of its precepts, and yet so cold and thin, so
flexible and easily adapted, and therefore so varied and many sided! The
religious systems with which we are now confronted find their
counterparts only in the heathenism with which the early Church had to
deal many centuries ago; and for this reason the history of those early
struggles is full of practical instruction for us now. How did the early
Church succeed in its great conquest? What methods were adopted, and
with what measures of success?

In one respect there is a wide difference in the two cases. The Apostles
were attempting to convert their conquerors. They belonged to the
vanquished race; they were of a despised nationality. The early fathers
also were subjects of Pagan powers. Insomuch as the Roman emperors
claimed divine honors, there was an element of treason in their
propagandism. The terrible persecutions which so long devastated the
early Church found their supposed justification in the plea of
self-defence against a system which threatened to subvert cherished and
time-honored institutions. Candid writers, like Archdeacon Farrar, admit
that Christianity did hasten the overthrow of the Roman Empire.

But we find no conquering powers in our pathway. Christianity and
Christian civilization have become dominant in the earth. The weakness
of the Christian Church in its conquests now is not in being baffled and
crippled by tyranny and persecution, but rather in the temptation to
arrogance and the abuse of superior power, in the overbearing spirit
shown in the diplomacy of Christian nations and the unscrupulous
aggressions of their commerce. There is also a further contrast in the
fact that in the early days the advantages of frugality and simple
habits of life were on the side of the missionaries. Roman society
especially was beginning to suffer that decay which is the inevitable
consequence of long-continued luxury, while the Church observed
temperance in all things and excelled in the virtues which always tend
to moral and social victory.[22]

On the other hand, we who are the ambassadors to the heathen of to-day,
are ourselves exposed to the dangers which result from wealth and
excessive luxury. Our grade of life, our scale of expenditure, even the
style in which our missionaries live, excites the amazement of the
frugal heathen to whom they preach. And as for the Church at home, it is
hardly safe for a Persian or a Chinaman to see it. Everyone who visits
this wonderful eldorado carries back such romantic impressions as excite
in others, not so much the love of the Gospel as the love of mammon.
When the Church went forth in comparative poverty, and with an intense
moral earnestness, to preach righteousness, temperance, and the judgment
to come; when those who were wealthy gave all to the poor--like Anthony
of Egypt, Jerome, Ambrose, and Francis of Assisi--and in simple garments
bore the Gospel to those who were surfeited with luxuries and pleasures,
and were sick of a life of mere indulgence, then the truth of the Gospel
conquered heathenism with all that the world could give. But whether a
Church in the advanced civilization of our land and time, possessed of
enormous wealth, enjoying every luxury, and ever anxious to gain more
and more of this present world, can convert heathen races who deem
themselves more frugal, more temperate, and less worldly than we, is a
problem which remains to be solved. We have rare facilities, but we have
great drawbacks. God's grace can overcome even our defects, and He has
promised success.

But in the proud intellectual character of the systems encountered
respectively by the ancient and by the modern Church, there are
remarkable parallels. The supercilious pride of Brahminism, or the lofty
scorn of Mohammedanism, is quite equal to that self-sufficient Greek
philosophy in whose eyes the Gospel was the merest foolishness. And the
immovable self-righteousness of the Stoics has its counterpart in the
Confucianism of the Chinese literati. A careful comparison of the six
schools of Hindu philosophy with the various systems of Greece and
Rome, will fill the mind with surprise at the numerous
correspondences--one might almost say identities. And that surprise is
the greater from the fact that no proof exists that either has been
borrowed from the other.

The atomic theory of creation advanced by Lucretius is found also in the
Nyaya philosophy of the Hindus. The pessimism of Pliny and Marcus
Aurelius was much more elaborately worked out by Gautama. The Hindus had
their categories and their syllogisms as well as Aristotle. The
conception of a dual principle in deity which the early Church traced in
all the religious systems of Egypt, Phoenicia, and Assyria, and whose
influence poisoned the life of the Phoenician colonies, and was so
corrupting to the morals of Greece and Rome, was also elaborated by the
Sankhya philosophy of Kapila, and it has plunged Hindu society into as
deep a degradation as could be found in Pompeii or Herculaneum.[23] The
Indian philosophy partook far more of the pantheistic element than that
of Greece. Plato and Aristotle had clearer conceptions of the
personality of the deity and of the distinct and responsible character
of the human soul than any school of Hindu philosophers--certainly
clearer than the Vedantists, and their ethics involved a stronger sense
of sin.

German philosophy has borrowed its pantheism from India rather than from
Greece, and in its most shadowy developments it has never transcended
the ancient Vedantism of Vyasa.

As in the early centuries, so in our time, different systems of religion
have been commingled and interwoven into protean forms of error more
difficult to understand and dislodge than any one of the faiths and
philosophies of which they were combined. As the Alexandrian Jews
intertwined the teachings of Judaism and Platonism; as Manichæans and
Gnostics corrupted the truths of the Old and New Testaments with ideas
borrowed from Persian mysticism; as various eclectic systems gathered up
all types of thought which the wide conquests of the Roman Empire
brought together, and mingled them with Christian teachings; so now the
increased intercommunication, and the quickened intellectual activity
of our age have led to the fusion of different systems, ancient and
modern, in a negative and nerveless religion of humanity. We now have in
the East not only Indian, but Anglo-Indian, speculations. The
unbelieving Calcutta graduate has Hegel and Spinoza interwoven with his
Vedantism, and the eclectic leader of the Brahmo Somaj, while placing
Christ at the head of the prophets and recognizing the authority of all
sacred bibles of the races, called on Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and
Mohammedans to unite in one theistic church of the New Dispensation in
India. Not even the old Gnostics could present so striking an admixture
as that of the Arya Somaj. It has appropriated many of those Christian
ethics which have been learned from a century of contact with
missionaries and other Christian residents. It has approved the more
humane customs and reforms of Christendom, denouncing caste, and the
degradation of woman. It has repudiated the corrupt rites and the
degrading superstitions of Hinduism. At the same time its hatred of the
Christian faith is most bitter and intense.

And there are other alliances, not a few, between the East and the West.
In India and Japan the old Buddhism is compounded with American
Spiritualism and with modern Evolution, under a new application of the
ancient name of Theosophy. In Japan representatives of advanced
Unitarianism are exhorting the Japanese Buddhists to build the religion
of the future on their old foundations, and to avoid the propagandists
of western Christianity.

The bland and easy-going catholicity which professes so much in our day,
which embraces all faiths and unfaiths in one sweet emulsion of
meaningless negations, which patronizes the Christ and His doctrines,
and applies the nomenclature of Christianity to doctrines the very
opposite of its teachings, finds a counterpart in the smooth and vapid
compromises of the old Gnostics. "Gnosticism," says Uhlhorn, "combined
Greek philosophies, Jewish theology, and ancient Oriental theosophy,
thus forming great systems of speculative thought, all with the object
of displaying the world's development. From a pantheistic First Cause,
Gnosticism traced the emanation of a series of æons--beings of Light.
The source of evil was supposed to be matter, which in this material
world holds light in captivity. To liberate the light and thus redeem
the world, Christ came, and thus Christianity was added as the crowning
and victorious element in this many-sided system of speculation. But
Christ was regarded not so much as a Saviour of individual souls as an
emancipator of a disordered kosmos, and the system which seemed to
accord great honor to Christianity threatened to destroy its life and
power." So, according to some of our Modern Systems, men are to find
their future salvation in the grander future of the race.[24]

Not only do we encounter mixtures of truth and error, but we witness
similar attempts to prove that whatever is best in Christianity was
borrowed from heathenism. Porphyry and others maintained that Pythagoras
and Theosebius had anticipated many of the attributes and deeds of
Christ, and Philostratus was prompted by the wife of Severus to write a
history of Appolonius of Tyana which should match the life of Christ.
And in precisely the same way it has been variously claimed in our time
that the story of Christ's birth, childhood, and ministry were borrowed
from Buddha and from Krishna, and that the whole conception of his
vicarious suffering for the good of men is a clever imitation of
Prometheus Bound. Now, in the earlier conflict it was important to know
the facts on both sides in order to meet these allegations of Porphyry,
Marinus, and others, and it is equally important to understand the
precise ground on which similar charges are made with equal assurance
now.[25] The very same old battles are to be fought over again, both
with philosophy and with legend.

And it is very evident that, with so many points of similarity between
the early struggle of Christianity with heathenism and that of our own
time, it is quite worth our labor to inquire what were the general
methods then pursued. Then victory crowned the efforts of the Church.
That which humanly speaking seemed impossible, was actually
accomplished. From our finite standpoint, no more preposterous command
was ever given than that which Christ gave to his little company of
disciples gathered in the mountains of Galilee, or that last word before
his ascension on Mt. Olivet, in which He placed under their responsible
stewardship, not only Jerusalem, but all Judea and Samaria, and the
"uttermost parts of the earth." The disciples were without learning or
social influence, or political power. They had no wealth and few
facilities, and so far as they knew there were no open doors. They were
hated by their Jewish countrymen, ridiculed by the ubiquitous and
cultured Greeks, and frowned upon by the conquering powers of Rome. How
then did they succeed? How was it that in three or four centuries they
had virtually emptied the Roman Pantheon of its heathen deities, and
had gained the sceptre of the empire and the world?

It is easy to misapprehend the forces which won the victory. The
disciples first chosen to found the Church were fishermen, but that
affords no warrant for the belief that only untutored men were employed
in the early Church, or for the inference that the Salvation Army are to
gain the conquest now. They were inspired; these are not; and a few only
were chosen, with the very aim of setting at naught the intolerant
wisdom of the Pharisees. But when the Gospel was to be borne to heathen
races, to the great nations whose arrogance was proportionate to their
learning and their power, a very different man was selected. Saul of
Tarsus had almost every needed qualification seen from a human point of
view. Standing, as he must, between the stiff bigotry of Judaism and the
subtleties of Greek philosophy, he was fortunately familiar with both.
He was a man of rare courtesy, and yet of matchless courage. Whether
addressing a Jewish governor or the assembled philosophers and
counsellors of Athens, he evinced an unfailing tact. He knew how to
conciliate even a common mob of heathen idolators and when to defy a
high priest, or plead the immunities of his Roman citizenship before a
Roman proconsul.

In tracing the methods of the early Church in dealing with heathenism,
we begin, therefore, with Paul; for although he was differentiated from
all modern parallels by the fact that he was inspired and endowed with
miraculous power, yet that does not invalidate the force of those
general principles of action which he illustrated. He was the first and
greatest of all missionaries, and through all time it will be safe and
profitable to study his characteristics and his methods. He showed the
value of thorough training in his own faith, and of a full understanding
of all the errors he was to contend with. He could reason with Jews out
of their own Scriptures, or substantiate his position with Greeks by
citing their own poets. He was certainly uncompromising in maintaining
the sovereignty of the one God, Jehovah, but he was not afraid to admit
that in their blind way the heathen were also groping after the same
supreme Father of all. The unknown God at Athens he accepted as an
adumbration of Him whom he proclaimed, and every candid reader must
admit that in quoting the words of Aratus, which represent Zeus as the
supreme creator whose offspring we are, he conveys the impression of a
real resemblance, if not a partial and obscured identity.

The essential principle here is that Paul frankly acknowledged whatever
glimpses of truth he found in heathen systems, and made free use of them
in presenting the fuller and clearer knowledge revealed in the Gospel.
No man ever presented a more terrible arraignment of heathenism than
that which he makes in the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans,
and yet, with marvellous discrimination he proceeds, in the second
chapter, to show how much of truth God has imparted to the
understandings and the consciences of all men. And he seems to imply
the Holy Spirit's regenerative work through Christ's atonement, when he
maintains that whoever shall, "by patient continuance in well doing,
seek glory and immortality," to him shall "eternal life" be given; but
"tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man that doeth evil, to the
Jew first, and also to the Gentile." Peter was not prepared to be a
missionary till he had been divested of his Jewish narrowness by
witnessing the power of grace in the Roman centurion at Cesarea. That
widened out his horizon immensely. He saw that God in his ultimate plan
was no respecter of persons or of races.

There has been great difference of opinion as to whether the annual
worship of the supreme God of Heaven in the great imperial temple at
Peking is in any degree a relic of the worship of the true God once
revealed to mankind. Such Chinese scholars as Martin and Legge and
Douglass think that it is; others deny it. Some men raise a question
whether the Allah of the Mohammedan faith is identical with the Jehovah
of the Old Testament. Sales, the profoundest expositor of Islam,
considers him the same. Moslems themselves have no doubt of it: the
intent of the Koran is that and nothing else; Old Testament teachings
are interwoven with almost every sura of its pages. I think that Paul
would have conceded this point at once, and would the more successfully
have urged the claims of Jesus, whom the Koran presents as the only
sinless prophet. Of course Mohammedans do not recognize the Triune God
as we now apprehend Him, from the New Testament standpoint; neither did
ancient believers of Israel fully conceive of God as He has since been
more fully revealed in the person and the sacrifice of his Son--Jesus
Christ.

Both the teachings and the example of Paul seem to recognize the fact
that conceptions of God, sometimes clear and sometimes dim, may exist
among heathen nations; and many of the great Christian fathers evidently
took the same view. They admitted that Plato's noble teachings were
calculated to draw the soul toward God, though they revealed no real
access to Him such as is found in Christ. Archbishop Trench, in his
Hulsean lectures on "Christ the Desire of the Nations," dwells
approvingly upon Augustine's well-known statement, that he had been
turned from vice to an inspiring conception of God by reading the
"Hortensius" of Cicero. Augustine's own reference to the fact is found
in the fourth book of his "Confessions," where he says: "In the ordinary
course of study I fell upon a certain book of Cicero whose speech almost
all admire--not so his heart. This book contains an exhortation to
philosophy, and is called 'Hortensius.' But this book altered my
affections and turned my prayers to Thyself, O Lord, and made me have
other purposes and desires. Every vain hope at once became worthless to
me, and I longed with an incredible burning desire for an immortality of
wisdom, and began now to arise that I might return to Thee. For not to
sharpen my tongue did I employ that book: nor did it infuse into me its
style, but its matter."

The "Hortensius" of Cicero has not survived till our time, and we know
not what it contained; but we cannot fail to notice this testimony of a
mature and eminent saint to the spiritual benefit which he had received
at the age of thirty-one, from reading the works of a heathen
philosopher. And a most interesting proof is here furnished for the
freedom with which the Spirit of God works upon the hearts of men, and
the great variety of means and agencies which He employs,--and that
beyond the pale of the Christian Church, and even beyond the actual
knowledge of the historic Christ. It would be interesting to know
whether the regeneration of Augustine occurred just then, when he says
in such strong language, that this book altered his affections and
turned his prayers unto God, and made him "long with an indescribable
burning desire for an immortality of wisdom." All men are saved, if at
all, by the blood of Christ through the renewing of the Holy Ghost; but
what was the position of such men as Augustine and Cornelius of Cesarea
before they fully and clearly saw Jesus as the actual Messiah, and as
the personal representative of that Grace of God in which they had
already reposed a general faith, is at least an interesting question.

Not less positive is the acknowledgment which Augustine makes of the
benefits which he had received from Plato. And he mentions many others,
as Virgininus, Lactantius, Hilary, and Cyprian, who, like himself,
having once been heathen and students of heathen philosophy, had, as he
expresses it, "spoiled the Egyptians, bringing away with them rich
treasures from the land of bondage, that they might adorn therewith the
true tabernacle of the Christian faith." Augustine seems to have been
fond of repeating both this argument and this his favorite illustration.
In his "Doctrine of Christ" he expands it more fully than in his
"Confessions." He says: "Whatever those called philosophers, and
especially the Platonists, may have said conformable to our faith, is
not only not to be dreaded, but is to be claimed from them as unlawful
possessors, to our use. For, as the Egyptians not only had idols and
heavy burdens which the people of Israel were to abhor and avoid, but
also vessels and ornaments of gold and silver and apparel which that
people at its departure from Egypt privily assumed for a better use, not
on its own authority but at the command of God, the very Egyptians
unwittingly furnishing the things which themselves used not well; so all
the teaching of the Gentiles not only hath feigned and superstitious
devices, and heavy burdens of a useless toil, which we severally, as
under the leading of Christ we go forth out of the fellowship of the
Gentiles, ought to abhor and avoid, but it also containeth liberal arts,
fitter for the service of truth, and some most useful moral precepts; as
also there are found among them some truths concerning the worship of
the One God Himself, as it were their gold and silver which they did not
themselves form, but drew from certain veins of Divine Providence
running throughout, and which they perversely and wrongfully abuse to
the service of demons. These, the Christian, when he severs himself from
their wretched fellowship, ought to take from them for the right use of
preaching of the Gospel. For what else have many excellent members of
our faith done? See we not how richly laden with gold and silver and
apparel that most persuasive teacher and most blessed martyr, Cyprian,
departed out of Egypt? Or Lactantius, or Victorinus, Optatus, Hilary,
not to speak of the living, and Greeks innumerable? And this, Moses
himself, that most faithful servant of God, first did, of whom it is
written, that 'he was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.'"

Let us for a moment pause and see of what these treasures of Egypt
consisted, and especially what Plato taught concerning God. Like
Socrates, he ridiculed the absurd but popular notion that the gods could
be full of human imperfections, could make war upon each other, could
engage in intrigues, and be guilty of base passions. And he earnestly
maintained that it was demoralizing to children and youth to hold up
such beings as objects of worship. Such was his condemnation of what he
considered false gods. He was equally opposed to the idea that there is
no God. "All things," he says, "are from God, and not from some
spontaneous and unintelligent cause." "Now, that which is created," he
adds, "must of necessity be created by some cause--but how can we find
out the Father and maker of all this universe? If the world indeed be
fair, and the artificer good, then He must have looked to that which is
external--for the world is the fairest of creatures, as He is the best
of causes."

Plato's representation of the mercy of God, of his providential care, of
his unmixed goodness, of his eternal beauty and holiness--are well-nigh
up to the New Testament standard. So is also his doctrine of the
immortality of the soul. The fatal deficiency is that he does not
_know_. He has received no divine revelation. "We will wait," he said in
another passage, "for one, be it a god or a god-inspired man, to teach
us our religious duties, and as Athene in Homer says to Diomede, to take
away the darkness from our eyes." And in still another place he adds:
"We must lay hold of the best human opinion in order that, borne by it
as on a raft, we may sail over the dangerous sea of life, unless we can
find a stronger boat, _or some word of God which will more surely and
safely carry us_."[26]

There is a deep pathos in the question which I have just quoted, "How
can we find out the Father and maker of all this universe?" And in the
last sentence quoted, Plato seems to have felt his way to the very
threshold of the revelation of Christ.[27]

Augustine shows a discrimination on this subject too important to be
overlooked, when he declares that while the noble philosophy of the
Platonists turned his thoughts away from his low gratifications to the
contemplation of an infinite God, it left him helpless. He was profited
both by what philosophy taught him and by what it could not teach: it
created wants which it could not satisfy. In short, he was prepared by
its very deficiencies to see in stronger contrast the all-satisfying
fulness of the Gospel of Eternal Life. Plato could tell him nothing of
any real plan of redemption, and he confesses with tender pathos that
he found no Revealer, no divine sacrifice for sin, no uplifted Cross, no
gift of the transforming Spirit, no invitation to the weary, no light of
the Resurrection.[28] Now, just here is the exact truth; and Augustine
has conferred a lasting benefit upon the Christian Church by this grand
lesson of just discrimination. He and other Christian fathers knew where
to draw the lines carefully and wisely with respect to heathen errors.

We often have occasion to complain of the sharpness of the controversies
of the early Church, but it could scarcely be otherwise in an age like
that. It was a period of transitions and of rude convulsions. The
foundations of the great deep of human error were being broken up. It
was no time for flabby, jelly-fish convictions. The training which the
great leaders had received in philosophy and rhetoric had made them keen
dialectics. They had something of Paul's abhorrence of heathen
abominations, for they saw them on every hand. They saw also the
specious admixtures of Gnosticism, and they met them squarely.
Tertullian's controversy with Marcion, Augustine's sharp issue with
Pelasgius, Ambrose's bold and uncompromising resistance to Arianism,
Origen's able reply to Celsus, all show that the great leaders of the
Church were not men of weak opinions. The discriminating concessions
which they made, therefore, were not born of an easy-going
indifferentism and the soft and nerveless charity that regards all
religions alike. They found a medium between this pretentious extreme
and the opposite evil of ignorant and narrow prejudgment; and nothing is
more needed in the missionary work of our day than that intelligent and
well-poised wisdom which considers all the facts and then draws just
distinctions; which will not compensate for conscious ignorance with
cheap misrepresentation or wholesale denunciation.

1. Now, first of all, in considering the methods of the early Church and
its secret of power in overcoming the errors of heathenism, it must be
borne in mind that the victory was mainly due to the _moral earnestness_
which characterized that period. In this category we must place the
influence which sprang from the martyrdom of thousands who surrendered
life rather than relinquish their faith. That this martyr spirit did not
always produce a true symmetry of Christian character cannot be denied.
The tide of fanaticism swept in, sometimes, with the current of true
religious zeal, and inconsistencies and blemishes marred even the
saintliest self-sacrifice; but there was no resisting the mighty logic
of the spirit of martyrdom as a whole. The high and the low, the wise
and the unlettered, the rich and the poor, the old and the young, strong
men and delicate women, surrendered themselves to the most cruel
tortures for the love of Christ. This spectacle, while it may have
served only to enrage a Nero and urge him on to even more Satanic
cruelty, could not be wholly lost upon the more thoughtful Marcus
Aurelius and others like him. It was impossible to resist the moral
force of so calm and resolute a surrender unto torture and death.
Moreover, an age which produced such relinquishment of earthly
possessions as was shown by men like Anthony and Ambrose, who were ready
to lay down the emoluments of high political position and distribute
their large fortunes for the relief of the poor; and such women as Paula
and others of high position, who were ready to sacrifice all for Christ
and retire into seclusion and voluntary poverty--an age which could
produce such characters and could show their steady perseverance unto
the end, could not fail to be an age of resistless moral power; and it
would be safe to say that no heathen system could long stand against the
sustained and persistent force of such influences. Were the Christian
Church of to-day moved by even a tithe of that high self-renunciation,
to say nothing of braving the fires of martyrdom, if it possessed in
even partial degree the same sacrifice of luxury and ease, and the same
consecration of effort and of influence, the conquest of benighted
nations would be easy and rapid.

The frugality of the early Christians, the simplicity of life which the
great body of the Church observed, and to which even wealthy converts
more or less conformed, was also, doubtless, a strong factor in the
great problem of winning the heathen to Christ. Probably in no age could
Christian simplicity find stronger contrasts than were presented by the
luxury and extravagance, the unbridled indulgence and profligacy, which
characterized the later periods of the Roman Empire. Universal conquest
of surrounding nations had brought untold wealth. The Government had
hastened the process of decay by lavish distribution to the people of
those resources which obviated the necessity of unremitting toil. It had
devoted large expenditures to popular amusements, and demagogues had
squandered the public funds for the purpose of securing their own
preferment. Over against the moral earnestness of the persecuted
Christian Church, there was in the nation itself and the heathenism
which belonged to it, an utter want of character or conviction. These
conditions of the conquest, as I have already indicated, do not find an
exact counterpart with us now. There is more of refined Christian
culture than existed in the early Church; probably there is also more of
organized Christian effort. In many points the comparison is in our
favor, but earnestness, and the spiritual power which attends it, are on
a lower grade. There is no escape from the conviction that just here
lies the reason why the Christian Church, with all her numbers, her vast
material resources, and her unlimited opportunities, cannot achieve a
greater success.

2. But, on the intellectual side, and as relating to the methods of
direct effort, there are many points in which imitation of the early
example is entirely practicable. And first, the wise discrimination
which was exercised by Augustine and other Christian leaders is entirely
practicable now. There has prevailed in our time an indiscriminate
carelessness in the use of terms in dealing with this subject. The
strong language which the Old Testament employed against the
abominations of Baalism, we have seemed to regard as having equal force
against the ethics of Confucius or Gautama. "Heathenism" is the one
brand which we have put upon all the non-Christian religions. I wish it
were possible to exchange the term for a better.[29] Baalism was
undoubtedly the most besotted, cruel, and diabolical religion that has
ever existed on the earth. When we carefully study it we are not
surprised at the strong language of denunciation which the Old Testament
employs. But as I have already shown, we find in the New Testament a
different spirit exercised toward the types of error which our Saviour
and his disciples were called to meet. There is only gentleness in our
Lord's dealings with those who were without the Jewish Church. His
strongest denunciations were reserved for hypocrites who knew the truth
and obeyed it not. He declared that the men of Nineveh would rise up in
judgment against those who rejected the clear message of God's own Son.
The man who goes forth to the great mission fields with the feeling that
it is his province to assail as strongly as possible the deeply-rooted
convictions of men, instead of winning them to a more excellent way, is
worse than one who beats the air; he is doing positive harm; he is
trifling with precious souls. He does not illustrate the spirit of
Christ.

The wisest of the early Fathers sometimes differed widely from each
other in their methods; some were denunciatory, others were even too
ready to excuse. The great African controversialist, Tertullian, was
unsparing in his anathemas, not only against heathen customs, which were
vile indeed, but against the teachings of the noblest philosophy. He had
witnessed the former; he had not candidly studied the latter. With a
blind zeal, which has too often been witnessed in the history of good
causes, he denounced Plato, Aristotle, and even Socrates with a violence
which marred the character of so great a man. On the other hand, Justin
Martyr and Clement of Alexandria were perhaps excessively broad. Of two
noted Alexandrines, Archdeacon Farrar says: "They were philosophers in
spirit; they could enforce respect by their learning and their large,
rounded sympathy, where rhetorical denunciation and ecclesiastical
anathemas would only have been listened to with a frown of anger, or a
look of disdain. Pagan youths would have listened to Clement when he
spoke of Plato as 'the truly noble and half-inspired,' while they would
have looked on Tertullian as an ignorant railer, who could say nothing
better of Socrates than to call him the 'Attic buffoon,' and of
Aristotle than to characterize him as the 'miserable Aristotle.'"

Tatian and Hermes also looked upon Greek philosophy as an invention of
the devil. Irenæus was more discriminating. He opposed the broad and lax
charity of the Alexandrines, but he read the Greek philosophy, and when
called to the bishopric of Lyons, he set himself to the study of the
Gallic Druidism, believing that a special adaptation would be called for
in that remote mission field.[30] Basil was an earnest advocate of the
Greek philosophy as giving a broader character to Christian education.

There were among the Fathers many different types of men, some
philosophically inclined, others better able to use practical arguments.
Some were more successful in appealing to the signs of the times, the
clear evidences of that corruption and decay to which heathenism had
led. They pointed to the degradation of women, the prevalence of vice,
the inordinate indulgence in pleasures, the love of excitement, the
cruel frenzy of the gladiatorial shows, the unrest and pessimism and
despair of all society. One of the most remarkable appeals of this kind
is found in a letter of Cyprian to his friend Donatus. "He bids him seat
himself in fancy on some mountain top and gaze down upon what he has
abandoned (for he is a Christian), on the roads blocked by brigands, the
sea beset by pirates, the camps desolated by the horrors of many wars,
on the world reeking with bloodshed, and the guilt which, in proportion
to its magnitude, was extolled as a glory. Then, if he would turn his
gaze to the cities, he would behold a sight more gloomy than all
solitudes. In the gladiatorial games men were fattened for mutual
slaughter, and publicly murdered to delight the mob. Even innocent men
were urged to fight in public with wild beasts, while their mothers and
sisters paid large sums to witness the spectacle. In the theatres
parricide and infanticide were dealt with before mixed audiences, and
all pollution and crimes were made to claim reverence because presented
under the guise of religious mythology. In the homes was equal
corruption; in the forum bribery and intrigue ran rife; justice was
subverted, and innocence was condemned to prison, torture, and death.
Luxury destroyed character, and wealth became an idol and a curse."[31]
Arguments of this kind were ready enough to hand whenever Christian
teachers were disposed to use them, and their descriptions found a real
corroboration in society as it actually appeared on every hand. None
could question the counts in the indictment.

3. While the Christian Fathers and the missionaries differed in their
estimates of heathenism, and in their methods of dealing with it, one
thing was recognized by all whom we designate as the great leaders,
namely, the imperative necessity of a thorough knowledge of it. They
understood both the low superstition of the masses and the loftier
teaching of the philosophers. On the other hand, they had the same
estimate of the incomparable Gospel of Christ that we have; they
realized that it was the wisdom of God and the power of God unto
salvation as clearly as the best of us, but they did not claim that it
was to be preached blindly and without adaptation. The verities of the
New Testament teachings, the transforming power of the Holy Ghost, the
necessity for a new birth and for the preternatural influence of grace,
both in regeneration and in sanctification, were as strongly maintained
as they have ever been in any age of the Church; but the Fathers were
careful to know whether they were casting the good seed upon stony
places, or into good ground where it would spring up and bear fruit. The
liberal education of that day was, in fact, an education along the old
lines of heathen philosophy, poetry, history, and rhetoric; and a broad
training was valued as highly as it has been in any subsequent period.
It was thoroughly understood that disciplined intellect, other things
being equal, may expect a degree of influence which can never fall to
the lot of ignorance, however sanctified its spirit. There has never
been a stronger type of men than the Christian Fathers. They were
learned men, for the age in which they lived, and their learning had
special adaptations to the work assigned them. Many of them, like
Cyprian, Clement, Hilary, Martin of Tours, had been born and educated in
heathenism; while others, like Basil, Gregory, Origen, Athanasius,
Jerome, and Augustine, though born under Gospel influences, studied
heathen philosophy and poetry at the instance of their Christian
parents.

4. Some of the leaders familiarized themselves with the speculations of
the day, not merely for the sake of a wider range of knowledge, but that
they might the more successfully refute the assailants of the faith,
many of whom were men of great power. They were fully aware that it
behooved them to know their ground, for their opponents studied the
points of comparison carefully. The infidel Celsus studied Christianity
and its relation to the Old Testament histories and prophecies, and he
armed himself with equal assiduity with all the choicest weapons drawn
from Greek philosophy. How was such a man to be met? His able attack on
Christianity remained fifty years unanswered. To reply adequately was
not an easy task. Doubtless there were many, then as now, who thought
that the most comfortable way of dealing with such things was to let
them alone. But a wiser policy prevailed. Origen was requested to
prepare an answer, and, although such work was not congenial to him, he
did so because he felt that the cause of the truth demanded it. His
reply outlived the attack which it was designed to meet, and in all
subsequent ages it has been a bulwark of defence.[32]

Origen was not of a pugnacious spirit--it was well that he was not--but
with wide and thorough preparation he summoned all his energies to meet
the foe. Archdeacon Farrar says of him, that he had been trained in the
whole circle of science. He could argue with the pupils of Plato, or
those of Zeno, on equal terms, and he deems it fortunate that one who
was called, as he was, to be a teacher at Alexandria, where men of all
nations and all creeds met, had a cosmopolitan training and a
cosmopolitan spirit.

No less resolute was the effort of Ambrose in resisting the errors of
Arianism, and he also adapted himself to the work in hand. He had not
been afraid of Platonism. On the other hand, we are told that Plato,
next to his Bible, constituted a part of his daily reading, and that,
too, in the period of his ripest Christian experience, and when he
carried his studies and his prayers far into the hours of the night. But
in dealing with Arianism he needed a special understanding of all its
intricacies, and when among its advocates and supporters he encountered
a powerful empress as well as her ablest advocates, he had need of all
the powers within him--that power of moral earnestness which had led him
to give all his property to the poor--that power of strong faith, which
prepared him, if need be, to lay down his life--the power of a
disciplined intellect, and a thorough knowledge of the whole issue.

5. The early Fathers not only studied the heathen philosophies of Plato
and Aristotle, but they learned to employ them, and their successors
continued to employ them, even to the Middle Ages, and the period of the
Reformation. As an intellectual framework, under which truth should be
presented in logical order, it became a strong resource of the early
Christian teachers. Let me refer you on this point to the clear
statements of Professor Shedd.[33] He has well said that "when
Christianity was revealed in its last and beautiful form by the
incarnation of the Eternal World, it found the human mind already
occupied by human philosophy. Educated men were Platonists, or Stoics,
or Epicureans. During the age of Apologetics, which extended from the
end of the apostolic age to the death of Origen, the Church was called
to grapple with these systems, to know as far as possible what they
contained, and to discriminately treat their contents, rejecting some
things, utilizing others." "We shall see," he continues, "that Plato,
Aristotle, and Cicero exerted more influence than all other philosophic
minds united upon the greatest of Christian Fathers, upon the greatest
of the School men, and upon the greatest of the theologians of the
Reformation, Calvin and Melancthon; and if we look at European philosophy,
as it has been unfolded in England, Germany, and France, we can perceive
that all the modern philosophic schools have discussed the principles
of human reason in very much the same manner in which Plato and
Aristotle discussed them twenty-two centuries ago."

I need hardly say, in closing, that it is not necessary to borrow from
the heathen systems of to-day as extensively as the Fathers did from the
systems of Greece and Rome, and it would be discordant with good taste
to illustrate our sermons with quotations from the Hindu poets as
lavishly as good Jeremy Taylor graced his discourses with gems from the
poets of Greece. But I think that we may so far heed the wise examples
furnished by Church history as to face the false systems of our time
with a candid and discriminating spirit, and by a more adequate
knowledge to disenchant the bugbears with which their apologists would
alarm the Church.

We are entering upon the broadest and most momentous struggle with
heathen error that the world has ever witnessed. Again, in this later
age, philosophy and multiform speculation are becoming the handmaids of
Hindu pantheism and Buddhist occultism, as well as of Christian truth.
The resources of the East and the West are combined and subsidized by
the enemy as well as by the Church. As in old Rome and Alexandria, so
now in London and Calcutta all currents of human thought flow together,
and truth is in full grapple with error. It is no time to be idle or to
take refuge in pious ignorance, much less to fear heathen systems as so
many haunted houses which superstitious people dare not enter--as if the
Gospel were not as potent a talisman now as it was ages ago. Let us
fearlessly enter these abodes of darkness, throw open the shutters, and
let in the light of day, and the hobgoblins will flee. Let us explore
every dark recess, winnow out the miasma and the mildew with the pure
air of heaven, and the Sun of Righteousness shall fill the world.


FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 20: _The Norsemen_, Maclear.]

[Footnote 21: The Druid bard Taliesen says: "Christ, the Word from the
beginning, was from the beginning our teacher, and we never lost His
teaching. Christianity was a new thing in Asia, but there never was a
time when the Druids of Britain held not its doctrines."--_St. Paul in
Britain_, p. 86.]

[Footnote 22: Uhlhorn's _Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism_.]

[Footnote 23: The same dualism of the male and the female principle is
found in the Shinto of Japan. See Chamberlain's translation of the
_Kojiki_.]

[Footnote 24: The late George Eliot has given expression to this grim
solace, and Mr. John Fiske, in his _Destiny of Man_, claims that the
goal of all life, from the first development of the primordial cell, is
the perfected future man.]

[Footnote 25: Voltaire found great delight in the so-called _Ezour
Veda_, a work which claimed to be an ancient Veda containing the
essential truths of the Bible. The distinguished French infidel was
humbled, however, when it turned out that the book was the pious fraud
of a Jesuit missionary who has hoped thus to win the Hindus to
Christianity.]

[Footnote 26: Quoted by Uhlhorn in _The Conflict of Christianity with
Heathenism_, p. 70. He also quotes Seneca as saying: "Oh, if one only
might have a guide to truth!"]

[Footnote 27: Plato showed by his writings and his whole life that he
was a true seeker after the knowledge of God, whom he identified with
the highest good. Though he believed in an efficient creatorship, he
held that matter is eternal. Ideas are also eternal, but the world is
generated. He was not a Pantheist, as he clearly placed God outside of,
or above, the universe. He regarded the soul of man as possessed of
reason, moral sensibility, and appetite.

On the doctrine of future immortality Plato was most emphatic.

He also believed that the soul in a previous state had been pure and
sinless, but had fallen. He taught that recovery from this fallen
condition is to be accomplished by the pursuit of philosophy and the
practice of virtue (not as merit but as discipline), by contemplating
the highest ideal which is the character of God, and by thinking of
eternity. Plato regarded suffering as disciplinary when properly
improved. True philosophy may raise the soul above the fear of death.
This was proved by Socrates. Both Socrates and Plato seemed to believe
in a good demon (spirit) whose voice was a salutary and beneficent
guide. As to eschatology, Plato looked forward to a heaven where the
virtuous soul shall dwell in the presence of God, and in the enjoyment
of pure delights.

Aristotle's idea of God was scarcely less exalted than that of Plato. He
expressed it thus: "The principle of life is in God; for energy of mind
constitutes life, and God is this energy. He, the first mover, imparts
motion and pursues the work of creation as something that is loved. His
course of life must be similar to what is most excellent in our own
short career. But he exists forever in this excellence, whereas this is
impossible for us. His pleasure consists in the exercise of his
essential energy, and on this account vigilance, wakefulness, and
perception are most agreeable to him. Again, the more we examine God's
nature the more wonderful does it appear to us. He is an eternal and
most excellent being. He is indivisible, devoid of parts, and having no
magnitude, for God imparts motion through infinite time, and nothing
finite, as magnitude is, can have an infinite capacity. He is a being
devoid of passions and unalterable."--Quoted in _Indian Wisdom_, p.
125.]

[Footnote 28: "Those pages present not the image of this piety, the
tears of confession, Thy sacrifice, a troubled spirit, a broken and a
contrite heart, the salvation of the people, the Bridal city, the
earnest of the Holy Ghost, the cup of our redemption. No man sings
there, 'Shall not my soul be submitted unto God? for of Him cometh my
salvation, for He is my God and my salvation, my guardian, I shall no
more be grieved.' No one there hears Him call 'Come unto me all ye that
labor.'"--_Confessions_, Bk. vii., xxi. "But having then read those
books of the Platonists, and thence being taught to search for
incorporeal truth, I saw Thy invisible things, understood by the things
which are made; and though cast back, I perceived what that was which,
through the darkness of my mind, I was hindered from contemplating,
being assured 'that Thou wert and wert infinite, and yet not diffused in
space, finite or infinite, and that Thou truly art who art the same
ever, in no part nor motion varying; and that all other things are from
Thee.... Of these things I was assured, yet too insecure to enjoy Thee.
I prated as one skilled, but I had not sought Thy way in Christ our
Saviour; I had proved to be not skilled but killed."--_Confessions_, Bk.
vii., xx.]

[Footnote 29: We may judge of the bearing of the common term heathen as
applied to non-Christian nations, when we consider that the Greeks and
Romans characterized all foreigners as "barbarians," that Mohammedans
call all Christians "infidels," and the Chinese greet them as "foreign
devils." The missionary enterprise as a work of conciliation should
illustrate a broader spirit.]

[Footnote 30: _The Celts_, Maclear.]

[Footnote 31: _Lives of the Fathers_, Farrar.]

[Footnote 32: "Christianity," says Max Müller, "enjoyed no privileges
and claimed no immunities when it boldly confronted and confounded the
most ancient and the most powerful religions of the world. Even at
present it craves no mercy and it receives no mercy from those whom our
missionaries have to meet face to face in every part of the world; and
unless our religion has ceased to be what it was, its defenders should
not shrink from this new trial of its strength, but should encourage
rather than depreciate the study of comparative theology."--_Science of
Religion_, p. 22.]

[Footnote 33: _History of Christian Theology_, Vol. I., p. 52.]




LECTURE III.

THE SUCCESSIVE DEVELOPMENTS OP HINDUISM


The religious systems of India, like its flora, display luxuriant
variety and confusion. Hinduism is only another banyan-tree whose
branches have become trunks, and whose trunks have produced new
branches, until the whole has become an intellectual and moral jungle of
vast extent. The original stock was a monotheistic nature worship, which
the Hindu ancestors held in common with other branches of the Aryan
family when dwelling together on the high table-lands of Central Asia,
or, as some are now claiming, in Eastern Russia. Wherever may have been
that historic "cradle" in which the infancy of our race was passed, it
seems certain from similarities of language, that this Aryan family once
dwelt together, and had a common worship, and called the supreme deity
by a common name. It was a worship of the sky, and at length of various
powers of nature, _Surya_, the sun: _Agni_, fire: _Indra_, rain, etc. It
is maintained by many authors, in India as well as in Europe, that these
designations were only applied as names of one and the same potential
deity. This is the ground held by the various branches of the modern
Somaj of India. Yet we must not suppose that the monotheism of the
early Aryans was all that we understand by that term; it is enough that
the power addressed was _one_ and personal. Even henotheism, the last
name which Professor Max Müller applies to the early Aryan faith,
denotes oneness in this sense. The process of differentiation and
corruption advanced more rapidly among the Indo-Aryans than in the
Iranian branch of the same race, and in all lands changes were wrought
to some extent by differences of climate and by environment.[34] The
Norsemen, for example, struggling with the wilder and sterner forces of
storm and wintry tempest, would naturally differ in custom, and finally
in faith, from the gentle Hindu under his Indian sky; yet there were
common elements traceable in the earliest traditions of these races, and
the fact that religions are not wholly dependent upon local conditions
is shown by both Christianity and Buddhism, which have flourished most
conspicuously and permanently in lands where they were not indigenous.

"In the Vedas," says Sir Monier Williams, "unity in the conception of
deity soon diverged into various ramifications. Only a few of the hymns
appear to contain the simple conception of one divine, self-existent,
omnipresent Being, and even in these, the idea of one God, present in
all nature, is somewhat nebulous and undefined." One of the earliest
deifications that we can trace was that of _Varuna_, who represented the
overhanging sky. The hymns addressed to Varuna are not only the
earliest, but they are the loftiest and most spiritual in their
aspirations. They find in him an element of holiness before which sin is
an offence; and in some vague sense he is the father of all things, like
the Zeus whom Paul recognized in the poetry of Greece.

But, as already stated, this vague conception of God as one, was already
in a transition toward separate impressions of the different powers of
nature. If the idea of God was without any very clear personality and
more or less obscure, it is not strange that it should come to be thus
specialized as men thought of objects having a manifestly benign
influence--as the life-quickening sun or the reviving rain. It is not
strange that, without a knowledge of the true God, they should have been
filled with awe when gazing upon the dark vault of night, and should
have rendered adoration to the moon and her countless retinue of stars.
If there must be idolatry, let it be that sublime nature worship of the
early Aryans, though even that was sure to degenerate into baser forms.
One might suppose that the worship of the heavenly bodies would remain
the purest and noblest; and yet the sun-worship of the Assyrians and the
Phoenicians became unspeakably vile in its sensuousness, and finally the
most wicked and abominable of all heathen systems. India in her darkest
days never sank so low, and when her degradation came it was through
other conceptions than those of nature worship.

In the early Vedic hymns are to be found many sublime passages which
seem to suggest traces of those common traditions concerning the
creation--the Fall of man and the Deluge, which we believe to have been
the earliest religious heritage of mankind. They contrast strongly with
the later and degrading cosmogonies of degenerate heathen systems, and
especially with the grotesque fancies of the subsequent Hindu mythology.
In the Xth Mandala of the Rig Veda we find the following account of
primeval chaos, which reminds one of the Mosaic Genesis:

   "In the beginning there was neither aught nor naught,
    There was neither sky nor atmosphere above.
    What then enshrouded all the teeming universe?
    In the receptacle of what was it contained?
    Was it enveloped in the gulph profound of water?
    There was then neither death nor immortality.
    There was then neither day nor night, nor light nor darkness.
    Only the _Existing One_ breathed calmly self-contained,
    Naught else but him there was, naught else above, beyond;
    Then first came darkness hid in darkness, gloom in gloom,
    Next all was water, chaos indiscreet
    In which the _One_ lay void, shrouded in nothingness,
    Then turning inward by self-developed force
    Of inner fervor and intense abstraction grew."


In the early Vedic period many of the corruptions of later times were
unknown. There was no distinct doctrine of caste, no transmigration, no
mist of pantheism, no idol-worship, no widow-burning, and no authorized
infanticide. The abominable tyranny which was subsequently imposed upon
woman was unknown; the low superstitions of the aboriginal tribes had
not been adopted; nor, on the other hand, had philosophy and
speculation taken possession of the Hindu mind. The doctrine of the
Trimurti and the incarnations had not appeared.[35]

The faith of the Hindus in that early period may be called _Aryanism_,
or _Vedism_. It bore sway from the Aryan migration, somewhere about one
thousand five hundred, or two thousand, years before Christ, to about
eight hundred years before Christ.[36] By that time the priestly class
had gained great power over all other ranks. They had begun to work over
the Vedas to suit their own purposes, selecting from them such portions
as could be framed into an elaborate ritual--known as the Brahmanas. The
period during which they continued this ritualistic development is known
as the Brahmana period. This extended from about eight hundred to five
hundred B.C.[37] These, however, are only the approximate estimates of
modern scholarship: such a thing as ancient history is unknown to the
Hindu race. This Brahmana period was marked by the intense and
overbearing sacerdotalism of the Brahmans, and by an extreme development
of the doctrine of caste. Never was priestly tyranny carried to greater
length than by these lordly Brahmans of India. One of the chief abuses
of their system was their depravation of sacrifice.

The earliest conception of sacrifice represented in the Vedas is that of
a vicarious offering of Parusha, a Divine being. Very obscure
references to this are found in the oldest of the four Vedas, dating
probably not later than 1200 B.C. It is brought out still more clearly
in a Brahmana which was probably composed in the seventh century B.C. It
is there said that the "Lord of creatures offered himself a sacrifice
for the Gods." Principal Fairbairn finds Vedic authority for the idea
that the creation of the world was accomplished by the self-sacrifice of
deity; and Manu ascribes the creation of mankind to the austerities of
the gods. Sir Monier Williams, the late Professor Banergea, and many
others, have regarded these references to a Divine sacrifice for the
benefit of gods and men as dim traces of a revelation once made to
mankind of a promised atonement for the sins of the world.[38]

But so far as the actual observances of the early Hindus were concerned,
they seem to have made their offerings rather in the spirit of Cain than
in the faith of Abel. They simply fed the gods with their gifts, and
regaled them with soma juice, poured forth in libations; the savor of
melted butter also was supposed to be specially grateful. Still there is
reason to believe that the piacular idea of sacrifice was never wholly
lost, but that the Hindus, in common with all other races, found
occasion--especially when great calamities befell them--to appease the
gods with the blood of sacrifice. In the early days human sacrifices
were offered, and occasionally at least down to a late period.[39] It
was a convenient policy of the priesthood, however, to hypothecate the
claim for a human victim by accepting the substitution of a goodly
number of horses or cows. A famous tradition is given, in the Aitareya
Brahmana, of a prince[40] who had been doomed to sacrifice by a vow of
his father, but who bought as a substitute the son of a holy
Brahman--paying the price of a hundred cows. When none could be found to
bind the lad on the altar, the pious father offered to perform the task
for another hundred cows. Then there was no one found to slay the
victim, and the father offered for still another hundred to do even
that. As the victim was of high caste the gods interposed, and the
Brahman was still the possessor of a son plus the cattle. The incident
will illustrate the greed of the priesthood and the depravation of
sacrifice. It had become a system of bargaining and extortion. The
sacrifices fed the priesthood more substantially than the gods. There
was great advantage in starting with the human victim as the unit of
value, and it is easy to see how substitution of animals became
immensely profitable. The people were taught that it was possible, if
one were rich enough in victims, even to bankrupt heaven. Even demons by
the value of their offerings might demand the sceptre of Indra.[41]

Hand in hand with this growth of the sacrificial system was the
development of caste; the former was done away by the subsequent
protest of Buddhism and the philosophic schools; but the latter has
remained through all the stages of Hindu history.[42] Such was
_Brahmanism_. Its thraldom has never been equalled. The land was deluged
with the blood of slain beasts. All industries were paralyzed with
discouragement. Social aspiration was blighted, patriotism and national
spirit were weakened, and India was prepared for those disastrous
invasions which made her the prey of all northern races.

It was in protest against these evils that Gautama and many able
philosophers arose about 500 B.C. Already the intellectual classes had
matched the Brahmans by drawing upon Vedic authority for their
philosophy. As the Brahmans had produced a ritual from the Vedas, so
the philosophers framed a sort of philosophic Veda in the _Upanishads_.
Men had begun to ask themselves the great questions of human life and
destiny, "Whence am I? What is this mysterious being of which I am
conscious?" They had begun to reason about nature, the origin of matter,
the relation of mortals to the Infinite. The school of the Upanishads
regarded themselves as an aristocracy of intellect, and held philosophy
as their esoteric and peculiar prerogative. It was maintained that two
distinct kinds of revelation had been made to men. First, that simple
kind which was designed for priests and the common masses, for all those
who regarded only effects and were satisfied with sacerdotal assumption
and merit-making. But, secondly, there was a higher knowledge which
concerned itself with the origin of the world and the hidden causes of
things. Even to this day the Upanishads are the Vedas of the thinking
classes of India.[43]

As the Brahmanas gave first expression to the doctrine of caste, so in
the Upanishads we find the first development of pantheism and the
doctrine of transmigration. The conclusion had already been reached that
"There is only one Being who exists: He is within this universe and yet
outside this universe: whoe'er beholds all living creatures as in Him,
and Him the universal spirit, as in all, thenceforth regards no creature
with contempt."

The language of Hindu speculation exhausts its resources in similes by
which to represent personal annihilation. Man's origin and relations
are accounted for very tersely by such illustrations as these: "As the
web issues from the spider, as little sparks proceed from fire, so from
the One Soul proceed all breathing animals, all worlds, all the gods,
all beings." Then as to destiny: "These rivers proceed from the east
toward the west, thence from the ocean they rise in the form of vapor,
and dropping again, they flow toward the south and merge into the ocean.
And as the flowing rivers are merged into the sea, losing their names
and forms, so the wise, freed from name and form, pass into the Divine
spirit, which is greater than the great."[44] Another favorite
illustration is that of the moon's reflection in the water-jar, which
disappears the moment the moon itself is hidden. "If the image in the
water has no existence separate from that of the moon," says the Hindu,
"how can it be shown that the human soul exists apart from God?"

The Mundaka Upanishad, based upon the Atharva Veda (one of the
latest,--the Upanishad being later still), contains this account of the
universe: "As the spider spins and gathers back (its thread); as plants
sprout on the earth; as hairs grow on a living person; so is this
universe here produced from the imperishable nature. By contemplation
the vast one germinates; from him food (or body) is produced; and thence
successively, breath, mind, real (elements) worlds, and immortality
resulting from (good) deeds.

"The Omniscient is profound contemplation consisting in the knowledge
of him who knows all; and from that, the (manifested) vast one, as well
as names, forms, and food proceed; and this is truth."[45]

It is a great blemish upon the Upanishads, that while there are subtle,
and in some respects sublime, utterances to be found here and there, the
great mass is fanciful and often puerile, and in many instances too low
and prurient to bear translation into the English language. This is
clearly alleged by Mr. Bose, and frankly admitted by Max Müller.[46]

In the common protest which finally broke down the system of Brahmanical
sacrifice, and for a time relaxed the rigors of caste tyranny, Buddhism
then just appearing (say 500 B.C.), joined hand in hand with the
philosophies. Men were tired of priestcraft, and by a natural reaction
they went to an opposite extreme; they were tired of religion itself.
Buddha became an undoubted atheist or agnostic, and six distinct schools
of philosophy arose on the basis of the Upanishads--some of which were
purely rationalistic, some were conservative, others radical. Some
resembled the Greek "Atomists" in their theory,[47] and others fought
for the authority, and even the supreme divinity, of the Vedas.[48] All
believed in the eternity of matter, and the past eternity of the soul;
all accepted the doctrine of transmigration, and maintained that the
spiritual nature can only act through a material body. All were
pessimistic, and looked for relief only in absorption.

But the progress of Hindu thought was marked by checks and
counter-checks. As the tyranny of the priesthood had led to the protest
of philosophy, so the extreme and conflicting speculations of
philosophic rationalism probably gave rise to the conservatism of the
Code of Manu. No adequate idea of the drift of Hindu thought can be
gained without assigning due influence to this all-important body of
laws. They accomplished more in holding fast the power of the Brahmans,
and enabling them to stem the tide of intellectual rebellion, and
finally to regain the sceptre from the hand of Buddhism, than all other
literatures combined. Their date cannot be definitely known. They were
composed by different men and at different times. They probably followed
the Upanishads, but antedated the full development of the philosophic
schools.

Many of the principles of Manu's Code had probably been uttered as early
as the seventh century B.C.[49] The ferment of rationalistic thought was
even then active, and demanded restraint. The one phrase which expresses
the whole spirit of the laws of Manu is intense conservatism. They stand
for the definite authority of dogma; they re-assert in strong terms the
authority of the Vedas; they establish and fortify by all possible
influences, the institution of caste. They enclose as in an iron
framework, all domestic, social, civil, and religious institutions.
They embrace not only the destiny of men upon the earth, but also the
rewards and punishments of the future life. Whatever they touched was
petrified. Abuses which had crept in through the natural development of
human depravity--for example, the oppression of woman--the laws of Manu
stamped with inflexible and irreversible authority. The evils which grow
up in savage tribes are bad enough, the tyranny of mere brute force is
to be deplored, but worst of all is that which is sanctioned by statute,
and made the very corner-stone of a great civilization. Probably no
other system of laws ever did so much to rivet the chains of domestic
tyranny.[50]

The Code of Manu has been classified as, 1st, sacred knowledge and
religion; 2d, philosophy; 3d, social rules and caste organization; 4th,
criminal and civil laws; 5th, systems of penance; 6th, eschatology, or
the doctrine of future rewards. No uninspired or non-Vedic production
has equal authority in India. We can only judge of its date by its
relative place among other books. It applies Vedic names to the gods,
though it mentions Brahma and Vishnu, but it makes no reference to the
Trimurti. Pantheism was evidently in existence and was made prominent in
the code. The influence of Manu over the jurisprudence of India was a
matter of growth. At first the code appears to have been a guide in
customs and observances, but as it gained currency it acquired the force
of law, and extended its sway over all the tribes of India. It was not,
however, maintained as a uniform code throughout the land, but its
principles were found underlying the laws of all the provinces. Its very
merits were finally fruitful of evil. Human weal was sacrificed to the
over-shadowing power of a system of customs cunningly wrought and
established by Brahmanical influence. The author was evidently a
Brahman, and the whole work was prepared and promulgated in the
interests of Brahmanism as against all freedom of thought. Its support
of the Vedas was fanatical. Thus: "A Brahman by retaining the Rig Veda
in his memory incurs no guilt, though he should destroy the three
worlds." Again: "When there is contradiction of two precepts in the
Veda, both are declared to be law; both have been justly promulgated by
known sages as valid law."

The laws of Manu make no mention of the doctrine of _Bakti_ or faith,
and there is no reference to the worship of the _Sakti_; both of these
were of later date. The doctrine of transmigration, however, is fully
stated, and as a consequence of this the hells described in the code,
though places of torture, resolve themselves into merely temporary
purgatories, while the heavens become only the steps on the road to a
union with deity. There is reason to believe that the practice of
employing idols to represent deity was unknown at the time the code was
compiled. There is no allusion to public services or to teaching in the
temples, the chief rites of religion were of a domestic kind, and the
priests of that age were nothing more than domestic chaplains.

Manu's theory of creation was this: "The Self-Existent, having willed to
produce various beings from his own substance, first with a thought
created the waters and placed on them a productive seed or egg. Then he
himself was born in that egg in the form of Brahma. Next he caused the
egg to divide itself, and out of its two divisions there came the heaven
above and the earth beneath. Afterward, having divided his own substance
he became half male, half female. From that female was produced Viraj,
from whom was created the secondary progenitor of all beings. Then from
the Supreme Soul he drew forth Manu's intellect." This mixed cosmogony
is supposed to indicate a diversity of authorship.

It will be seen that this is much less philosophical than the theory of
creation quoted above from the Mundaka Upanishad.[51] If we compare
Manu's account with the description of the "Beginning" found in one of
the hymns of the Rig Veda,[52] we shall see that there has been a
downward trend of Hinduism from the simple and sublime conceptions of
the early poets to that which is grotesque, and which has probably been
worked over to suit the purposes of the Brahmans. No mythological legend
was too absurd if it promoted the notion of the divine origin of the
Manus (sages) and the Brahmans.

Manu makes much of the Vedic passage which refers to the origin of
caste.[53] He maintained that this distinction of caste was as much a
law of nature and divine appointment as the separation of different
classes of animals. The prominence accorded to the Brahmans was nothing
short of divine. "Even when Brahmans employ themselves in all sorts of
inferior occupations (as poverty often compels them to do) they must
under all circumstances be honored, for they are to be regarded as
supreme divinities." "A Brahman's own power is stronger than the power
of the king, therefore by his own might he may chastise his foes." "He
who merely assails a Brahman with intent to kill him, will continue in
hell for a hundred years, and he who actually strikes him must endure a
thousand years."

It is always the truth that is mingled with the errors of any system
which constitutes its life and gives it perpetuity, and there is much in
the Code of Manu to be admired. Like the Confucian ethics, it laid its
foundations in the respect due from childhood to parents, and in
guarding the sanctities of the home. It aimed at fairness between ruler
and subject, in an age when over most of the Asiatic continent the
wildest caprice of rulers was the law of their respective realms. Manu
taught the duty of kings toward their subjects in most emphatic terms.
They were to regard themselves as servants, or rather as fathers, of the
people; and rules were prescribed for their entire conduct. They were
the representatives of deity in administering the affairs of mortals,
and must realize their solemn responsibility.[54] It must ever be
acknowledged that the Hindu laws respecting property were characterized
by wisdom and equity. Taxation was not subject to caprice or injustice;
where discriminations occurred they were in favor of the poor, and the
heaviest burdens were laid where they should be laid, upon the rich.
There were wise adaptations, calculated to develop the industry and
self-help of the weakest classes, and care was taken that they never
should become oppressive. No political or civic tyranny could be
allowed; but that of the priesthood in its relations to all ranks, and
that of the householder toward his wife and toward all women, were quite
sufficient. In this last regard we scarcely know which was the
greater--the heartless wickedness of the Code, or its blind and bigoted
folly. How it was that laws could be framed which indicated such rare
sagacity, which in many other respects were calculated to build up the
very highest civilization, and which, at the same time, failed to
foresee that this oppression of woman must result in the inevitable
degeneracy of succeeding generations of men, must ever remain a
mystery.[55]

We have glanced at the purer and simpler Aryanism of the early period,
at the bigoted, tyrannical Brahmanism, with its ritual, its sacrifices,
its caste. We have merely alluded to the rationalistic reaction of the
philosophers and the Buddhists. We shall now see that the Brahman power
is not broken, but that it will regain all and more than it has lost,
that it will prove elastic enough to embrace all that has gone before;
that while Buddhism will be banished, many of its elements will be
retained, and the whole woven into one marvellous texture which we will
call _Hinduism_.[56] Even during the period of Buddhism's greatest
triumphs, say, two or three centuries before Christ, changes of great
moment were going on in the Brahmanical faith. The old sacrificial
system had lost its power, but the flexible and inexhaustible resources
of Brahmanical cunning were by no means dormant. In the border wars of
the Aryans, with rival invaders on the one hand, and with the conquered
but ever restless aborigines on the other, great and popular heroes had
sprung up. The exploits of these heroes had been celebrated in two great
epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the popularity of these
poems was immense. The heroes were of the soldier caste, and gave to
that caste a prestige which seemed to the Brahmans formidable and
dangerous.[57] The divine prerogatives of their order were all in
jeopardy.

The remedy chosen by the Brahmans was a bold and desperate one. These
heroes must be raised out of the soldier caste by making them divine. As
such they would hold a nearer relation to the divine Brahmans than to
the soldiers. The legends were therefore worked over--Brahmanized--so to
speak.[58] Rama, who had overcome certain chieftains of Ceylon, and
Krishna, who had won great battles in Rajputana, were raised to the rank
of gods and demi-gods. By an equal exaggeration the hostile chiefs of
rival invaders were transformed to demons, and the black, repulsive hill
tribes, who were involved as allies in these conflicts, were represented
as apes. As a part of this same Brahmanizing process, the doctrine of
the Trimurti was developed, and also the doctrine of incarnation. Most
conspicuous were the incarnations of Vishnu; Rama and Krishna were
finally placed among the ten incarnations of that deity. This was a
skilful stroke of policy, for it was now no longer the heroes of the
soldier caste who had won victory for the Aryans; it was Vishnu, the
preserver, the care-taker, and sympathizer with all the interests of
mankind. The development of the doctrines of the Trimurti and of
incarnation undoubtedly followed both the rise of Buddhism and the
promulgation of the Laws of Manu.

Meanwhile the Brahmans were shrewd enough to adapt themselves to certain
other necessities. The influence of Buddhism was still a force which
was not to be disregarded. It had demonstrated one thing which had never
been recognized before, and that was the need of a more human and
sympathetic element in the divine objects of worship. Men were weary of
worshipping gods who had no kindly interest in humanity. They were weary
of a religion which had no other element than that of fear or of
bargaining with costly sacrifices. They longed for something which had
the quality of mercy. Buddha had demonstrated the value of this element,
and by an adroit stroke of policy the Brahmans adopted Gautama as the
ninth avatar of Vishnu. Meanwhile they adopted the heroic Krishna as the
god of sympathy--the favorite of the lower masses who were not too
critical toward his vices.

We have now reached the fully developed form of _Hinduism_.[59] The
Brahmans had embraced every element that could give strength to their
broad, eclectic, and all-embracing system.[60] The doctrine of the
Trimurti had become a strong factor, as it furnished a sort of
framework, and gave stability. As compared with the early Aryanism, it
removed the idea of deity from merely natural forces to that of abstract
thoughts, principles, and emotions, as active and potent in the world.
At the same time it retained the old Vedic deities under new names and
with new functions, and it did not abate its professed regard for Vedic
authority. The Brahmans had rendered their system popular in a sense
with the intellectual classes by adopting all the philosophies. They had
stopped the mouth of Buddhist protest by embracing the Buddha among
their incarnations. They had shown an advance in the succession of
incarnations from the early embodiments of brute force, the fish, the
tortoise, the boar, up to heroes, and from these to the ninth avatar,
the Buddha, as a moralist and philosopher.[61] They left on record the
prediction that a tenth should come--and he is yet to come--who, in a
still higher range of moral and spiritual power, should redeem and
renovate the earth, and establish a kingdom of righteousness.

Meanwhile, in this renaissance of the Hindu faith, this wide, politic,
self-adapting system, we find not only Buddhism, Philosophy, the early
Aryanism, and the stiff cultus of Brahmanism, but there is also a large
infusion of the original superstitions of the Dravidians, Kohls,
Santals, and other nature worshippers of the hill tribes. Much of the
polytheism of the modern Hindus--the worship of hills, trees, apes,
cattle, the sun, the moon, unseen spirits, serpents, etc.--has been
adopted from these simple tribes, so that the present system embraces
all that has ever appeared on the soil of India--even Mohammedanism to
some extent; and as some contend, very much also has been incorporated
from the early teachings of the so-called St. Thomas Christians of
Malabar. Such is the immense composite which is called Hinduism. It
continued its development through the early centuries of the Christian
era, and down even to the Middle Ages. Since then there has been
disintegration instead of growth. The Brahmans have not only retained
the Aryan deities, and extended Vishnu's incarnate nature over the epic
heroes, but in the Puranas they have woven into the alleged lives of the
incarnate gods the most grotesque mythologies and many revolting vices.

It may be interesting to trace for a moment the influence of the
different lines of Hindu literature upon the general development of
national character. Of course, the early Vedic literature has never lost
its influence as the holy and inspired source of all knowledge to the
Hindu race; but we have seen how much more potential were the Brahmanas
and the Upanishad philosophy drawn from the Vedas, than were those
sacred oracles themselves; how the Brahmanas riveted the chains of
priestcraft and caste, and how the philosophies invigorated the
intellect of the people at a time when they were most in danger of
sinking into the torpor of ignorance and base subserviency to ritual and
sacrifice; how it gave to the better classes the courage to rise up in
rebellion and throw off every yoke, and think for themselves. We have
seen how Buddhism by its protest against sacerdotalism crippled for a
time the power of the Brahmans and raised a representative of the
soldier caste to the chief place as a teacher of men; how its
inculcation of pity to man and beast banished the slaughter and cruelty
of wholesale and meaningless sacrifice, and how its example of sympathy
changed Hinduism itself, and brought it into nearer relations with
humanity. Driven from India, though it was, it left an immense deposit
of influence and of power. We have seen how, as a counter-check to
philosophy and Buddhism, the Code of Manu reasserted the authority of
the Vedas, and riveted anew the chains of caste, and how it compensated
for its oppressiveness by many wholesome and benign
regulations--accomplishing more, perhaps, than all other literatures
combined to maintain the stability of Hinduism, through its many
vicissitudes, and in spite of the heterogeneous elements which it
received and incorporated.

Scarcely less important was the influence of the great epics--the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata--with their doctrine of Trimurti and the
incarnations of Vishnu in the national heroes. This conciliated the
soldier caste, subsidized the most popular characters in Hindu
tradition, at the same time that it made them tenfold more glorious than
before. The Epics widened out the field of Hindu mythology immensely.
Never before had there been such a boundless range for the imagination.
The early Brahmans had cramped all intellectual growth, and held mankind
by the leash of priestly ritual. The philosophies had been too strait
and lofty for any but the higher class; Manu's laws had been a stern
school-master to keep the people under curbs and restraints; even the
Brahmans themselves were the slaves of their own ritual. But all the
people could understand and admire Rama's wonderful victories over the
demon Ravana. All could appreciate the devotion of the lovely Sita, and
weep when she was kidnapped and borne away, like Grecian Helen, to the
demon court in Ceylon; and they could be thrilled with unbounded joy
when she was restored--the truest and loveliest of wives--to be the
sharer of a throne.

The Epics took such hold of the popular heart that any fact, any theory,
any myth that could be attached to them found ready credence. The
Mahabharata especially became a general texture upon which any
philosophy, or all the philosophies, might be woven at will. And for a
long period, extending from three or four centuries B.C. onward far into
the Christian era, it was ever ready to receive modifications from the
fertile brain and skilful hand of any devout Brahman. A striking example
of this was the introduction of the Bhagavad Gita. When this was
composed, somewhere about the second or third century of our era, there
was no little conflict between the different schools of philosophy; and
its unknown author attempted to unite them all in a poem which should
harmonize their contradictions and exalt the virtues of each, and at the
same time reiterate all the best maxims of Hinduism. Some centuries
later, the pronounced Vedantist Sancarakarya revamped the poem and gave
its philosophy a more pantheistic character; later still the demigod
Krishna was raised to full rank as the supreme Vishnu--the Creator and
Upholder of all things.[62]

It is important to notice that in the trend of Hindu literature through
so many ages there has been no upward movement, but rather a decline.
Nowhere do we find hymns of so pure and lofty a tone as in the early
Vedas. No philosophy of the later times has equalled that of the
Upanishads and the six Darsanas. No law-giver like Manu has appeared for
twenty-four centuries. No Sanskrit scholarship has equalled that of the
great grammarian Panini, who lived in the fourth century B.C. And
although no end of poetry has succeeded the great Epics, it has shown
deterioration. The Puranas, written at a later day, reveal only a
reckless zeal to exalt the incarnate deities. They may properly be
called histories of the incarnations of Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, and
glorifications of Krishna. And the very nature of the subjects with
which they deal gives free scope to an unbridled imagination and to the
most reckless exaggeration.

If anything more were wanting to insure their extravagance, it may be
found in the fact that they were inspired by the rivalry of the
respective worshippers of different gods. The Puranas mark the
development of separate sects, each of which regarded its particular
deity as the supreme and only god. The worshippers of Vishnu and the
worshippers of Siva were in sharp rivalry, and they have continued
their separation to this day.[63] Those who came to worship Vishnu as
incarnate in Krishna, gained an advantage in the popular element
associated with a favorite hero. Yet this was matched by the influence
of the Sankhya philosophy, which assigned to Siva a male and female
dualism, a doctrine which finally plunged Hinduism into deepest
degradation. It brought about a new development known as Saktism, and
the still later and grosser literature of the Tantras. In these,
Hinduism reached its lowest depths. The modern "Aryas" discard both the
Tantras and the Puranas, and assert that the popular incarnations of
Vishnu were only good men. They take refuge from the corruptions of
modern Hinduism in the purer teachings of the early Vedas.


_The Contrasts of Hinduism and Christianity._

Hinduism has some elements in common with Christianity which it is well
to recognize. It is theistic; it is a religion, as distinguished from
the agnostic and ethical systems of India and China.[64] Hinduism always
recognized a direct divine revelation which it regards with profound
reverence; and through all its variations and corruptions it has
inculcated in the minds of the Indian races a deeply religious feeling.
It has been claimed that it has made the Hindus the most devotional
people in the world. Like Christianity, Hinduism appeals to man's
intellectual nature, and it is inwrought with profound philosophy. It
does not, however, like some modern systems, teach that divine truth has
been revealed to man by natural processes; rather it regards the early
revelation as having suffered obscuration.[65] It also has its trinity,
its incarnations, and its predictions of a Messiah who shall restore the
truth and establish righteousness. The Hindu traditions maintain that
mankind descended from a single pair;[66] that the first estate of the
race was one of innocence; that man was one of the last products of
creation; that in the first ages he was upright, and consequently happy.
"The beings who were thus created by Brahma are said to have been
endowed with righteousness and perfect faith; they abode wherever they
pleased, unchecked by any impediment; their hearts were free from guile;
they were pure, made exempt from toil by observance of sacred
institutes. In their sanctified minds Hari dwelt; they were filled with
perfect wisdom by which they contemplated the glory of Vishnu." Hartwell
has pointed out the fact that the early Hindu traditions here unite with
the Scriptural account in virtually denying all those theories of
evolution which trace the development of man from lower animals.[67]

But compared with Christianity, its contrasts are far greater than its
resemblances. First, as to the nature of God, there is an infinite
difference between the cold and unconscious Brahman, slumbering for ages
without thought or emotion or any moral attribute, and the God of
Israel, whose power and wisdom and goodness, whose mercy and truth and
tender compassion, are so constantly set forth in the Bible. The latter
compares Himself to a Father who cares for his children, and who has
redeemed the world by an infinite sacrifice. Even in the most popular
emanation of Brahman--even in Vishnu--there is nothing of a fatherly
spirit, no appeal as to children, no kindly remonstrance against sin, no
moral instruction, or effort to encourage and establish character, no
promise of reward, no enkindling of immortal hope.

Second, there is a striking contrast in the comparative estimates which
Hinduism and Christianity place upon the human soul. Unlike Buddhism,
Hinduism does recognize the existence of a soul, but it is only a
temporary emanation, like the moon's reflection in the water. It
resembles its source as does the moon's image, but coldly and in a most
unsatisfactory sense; there is no capacity for fellowship, and the end
is absorption.[68] On the other hand, Christianity teaches us that we
are created in God's image, but not that we _are_ his image. We are
separate, though dependent, and if reunited to him through Christ we
shall dwell in his presence forever.

Third, the two systems are in strong contrast in the comparative hopes
which they hold out for the future. The doctrine of transmigration casts
a gloom over all conscious being; it presents an outlook so depressing
as to make life a burden, and the acme of all possible attainment is
individual extinction, or what amounts to the same thing, absorption
into deity. The logic of it is that it would be better still not to have
been born at all. Christianity promises an immediate transfer to a life
of unalloyed blessedness, and an endless growth of all our powers and
capacities; but why should Hinduism urge the cultivation of that whose
real destiny is "effacement?" Hinduism finds the explanation of life's
mysteries and inscrutable trials in the theory of sins committed in a
previous existence. Christianity, while recognizing the same trials,
relieves them with the hope of solutions in a future life of
compensating joy. The one turns to that which is past, unchangeable and
hopeless, and finds only sullen despair; the other anticipates an
inheritance richer than eye hath seen, or ear heard, or heart conceived.

Fourth, Hinduism has no Saviour and no salvation. It is not a religion
in the highest sense of _rescue_ and reconciliation. It avails us of no
saving power higher than our own unaided effort. It implies the ruin of
sin, but provides no remedy. It presents no omnipotent arm stretched
forth to save.

Its fatalism places man under endless disabilities, and then bids him to
escape from the nexus if he can; but it reveals no divine helper, no
sacrifice, no mediator, no regenerating Spirit. It has no glad tidings
to proclaim, no comfort in sorrow, no victory over the sting of death,
no resurrection unto Life. Though at a period subsequent to the
preaching of the Gospel in India--perhaps the seventh or eighth century
A.D.--a doctrine of faith (_Bakti_) was engrafted upon Hinduism, yet it
had no hint of a Saviour from sin and death.[69]

Fifth, in Hinduism there is no liberty for the free action of the human
spirit. Though the life of a Brahman is intensely religious, yet it is
cramped with exactions which are not only abortive but positively
belittling. The code of Brahmanism never deals with general principles
in the regulation of conduct, but fills the whole course of life with
punctilious minutiæ of observances. Instead of prescribing, as Christ
did, an all-comprehensive law of supreme love to God and love to our
neighbor as ourselves, it loads the mind with petty exactions, puerile
precepts, inane prohibitions. "Unlike Christianity, which is all spirit
and life," says Dr. Duff, "Hinduism is all letter and death." Repression
takes the place of inspiration and the encouragement of hope.

There are a thousand subtle principles in Hinduism whose influence is
felt in society and in the state, and to which the faith and power of
the Gospel present the very strongest contrasts. For example, while
Christianity has raised woman to a position of respect and honor, and
made her influence felt as something sacred and potential in the family
and in all society, Hinduism has brought her down even from the place
which she occupied among the primitive Aryans, to an ever-deepening
degradation. It has made her life a burden and a curse. Pundita Ramabai,
in her plea for high-caste Hindu women, quotes a prayer of a child widow
in which she asks, "O Father of the world, hast Thou not created us? or
has perchance some other God made us? Dost Thou only care for men? O
Almighty One, hast Thou not power to make us other than we are, that we
too may have some part in the blessings of life?" Even in this last
decade of the nineteenth century the priesthood of Bengal are defending
against all humane legislation those old customs which render the
girlhood of Hindu women a living death.[70]

In its broad influence Christianity has raised the once savage tribes
of Europe to the highest degree of culture, and made them leaders and
rulers of the world; but Hinduism has so weakened and humbled the once
conquering Aryans that they have long been an easy prey to every
invading race. Christianity shows in its sacred Book a manifest progress
from lower to higher moral standards--from the letter to the spirit,
from the former sins that were winked at to the perfect example of
Christ, from the narrow exclusiveness of Judaism to the broad and
all-embracing spirit of the Gospel, from prophecy to fulfilment, from
types and shadows to the full light of Redemption; the sacred books of
Hinduism have degenerated from the lofty aspirations of the Vedic
nature-worship to the vileness of Saktism, from the noble praises of
Varuna to the low sensuality of the Tantras, from Vedic conceptions of
the creation, sublime as the opening of St. John's Gospel, to the myths
of the divine turtle or the boar, or the escapades of the supreme and
"adorable Krishna."[71]

Christianity breaks down all barriers which divide and alienate mankind,
and establishes a universal brotherhood in Christ; Hinduism has raised
the most insurmountable barriers and developed the most inexorable
social tyranny ever inflicted on the human race. The Hebrew economy also
recognized a priestly class, but they were chosen from among their
brethren and were only a distinct family; they made no claim to divine
lineage, and they were guiltless of social tyranny.

Christianity enjoins a higher and purer ethic than it has ever found in
the natural moral standards of any people; it aims at perfection; it
treats the least infraction as a violation of the whole law; it regards
even corrupt thoughts as sins; it bids us be holy even as He is holy in
whose sight the heavens are unclean. Hinduism, on the other hand, is
below the ethical standard of respectable Hindu society. The better
classes are compelled to apologize for it by asserting that that which
is debasing in men may be sinless in the gods. The offences of Krishna
and Arjuna would not be condoned in mortals; the vile orgies of the
"left-handed worshippers" of Siva would not be tolerated but for their
religious character. The murders committed by the Thugs in honor of Kali
were winked at only because a goddess demanded them. The naked
processions of Chaitanya's followers would be dispersed by the police
anywhere but in India.

It is the peculiar distinction of India that it has been the theatre of
nearly all the great religions. Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism
have all made trial of their social and political power and have failed.
Last of all came Christianity. The systems which preceded it had had
centuries of opportunity; and yet Christianity has done more for the
elevation of Hindu society in the last fifty years than they had
accomplished in all the ages of their dominion. Neither Buddhism nor
Mohammedanism had made any serious impression on caste; neither had
been able to mitigate the wrongs which Brahmanism had heaped upon
woman--Mohammedanism had rather increased them. The horrors of the satti
and the murder of female infants--those bitterest fruits of priestly
tyranny--were left unchecked until the British Government, inspired by
missionary influence and a general Christian sentiment, branded them as
infamous and made them crimes. But now even the native sentiment of the
better classes in India is greatly changed by these higher influences,
and the conventional morality is rising above the teachings of the
national religion. Widow-burning and infanticide belong almost wholly to
the past. Child-marriage is coming into disrepute, and caste, though not
destroyed, is crippled, and its preposterous assumptions are falling
before the march of social progress.

Perhaps the very highest tribute which Hinduism has paid to Christianity
is seen in the fact that the modern Arya Somaj has borrowed its ethics
and some of its religious doctrines, and is promulgating them under
Vedic labels and upon Vedic authority.[72] It has renounced those
corruptions of Hinduism which can no longer bear the light--such as
enforced widowhood and the general oppression of woman. It denounces the
incarnations of Vishnu as mere inventions, and therefore cuts up by the
roots the whole Krishna cult and dissipates the glory of the Bhagavad
Gita. It abhors polytheism, and not only proclaims the supremacy of one
only true God, self-existent, the creator and upholder of all things,
but it maintains that such was the teaching of the Vedas. But although
this modern eclectic system adopts the whole ethical outcome of
Christian civilization in India for its own purposes, it shows a most
uncompromising hostility to Christianity. Though it claims to be
positively theistic, it seems ready to enter into alliance with any form
of atheism or agnosticism, Eastern or Western, against the spread of
Christian influence in India.

In speaking of the movement of revived Aryanism I assume that with the
more intelligent and progressive classes of India the old Hinduism is
dead. Of course, millions of men still adhere to the old corruptions.
Millions in the remoter districts would retain the festival of
Juggernaut, the hook-swinging, even infanticide and widow-burning, if
they dared. The revolting orgies of Kali and Doorga, and the vilest
forms of Siva worship, even the murderous rites of the Thugs, might be
revived by the fanatical, if foreign influence were withdrawn; but,
taking India as a whole, these things are coming to be discarded. The
people are ashamed of them; they dare not undertake to defend them in
the open day of the present civilization. All intelligent Hindus are
persuaded to accept the situation, and look to the future instead of the
past. The country is full of new influences which must be counted as
factors. British rule is there, and is there to stay. Education has
come--good, bad, and indifferent. English University training is
bringing forward a host of acute thinkers of native blood. But the
forces of Western infidelity are also there, grappling with Western
Christianity on Indian soil, and before the eyes of the conquered and
still sullen people. The vilest of English books and the worst of French
novels in English translations are in the markets. All the worst phases
of European commerce are exhibited. The opium monopoly, the liquor
traffic, and all the means and methods of unscrupulous money-getting,
with the wide-spread example of drinking habits, and unbounded luxury
and extravagance.

And, in opinions, the war of aggression is no longer on one side only.
While the foreigner speaks and writes of superstition, of heathenism, of
abominable rites now passing away, the native Hindu press is equally
emphatic in its condemnation of what it calls the swinish indulgence of
the Anglo-Saxon, his beer-drinking and his gluttony, his craze for money
and material power, his disgust at philosophy and all intellectual
aspiration, his half-savage love for the chase and the destruction of
animal life. Educated Hindus throw back against the charge of idolatry
our idolatry of pelf, which, as they claim, eclipses every other thought
and aspiration, leads to dishonesty, over-reaching, and manifold crime,
and sinks noble ethics to the low level of expediency or self-interest;
the conquest is not yet won.

A hundred varieties of creed have sprung up beneath this banyan-tree
which I have called Hinduism. There are worshippers of Vishnu, of Siva,
of Kali, of Krishna as Bacchus, and of Krishna as the supreme and
adorable God. There are Sikhs, and Jains, and Buddhists; Theosophists,
Vedantic Philosophers, Mohammedans, Brahmos, Parsees, Evolutionists, and
Agnostics; Devil-worshippers, and worshippers of ghosts and serpents;
but in considering these as forces to be met by Christian influence, we
must regard them all as in virtual alliance with each other. They are
all one in pride of race and of venerable custom. They are all one in
their hatred of foreign dominion, and of the arrogance and overbearing
assumption of the European.[73]

The Hindu religions, therefore, however divided, and however weak and
moribund they may be taken singly, find a real vitality in the union of
common interests, in the sentiments of patriotism, in the pride of their
philosophy, in the glory of their ancient history as the true and
original Aryans, compared with whom Western nations are mere offshoots.

Their religious faith is mixed and involved with patriotism, politics,
and race prejudice, and on the other hand Christianity in India is
handicapped by political and commercial interest and a hated domination.
On both sides these combined influences must be considered in estimating
the future issues of the great conflict. The question is not how
Christianity and Hinduism would fare in a conflict pure and simple,
unembarrassed by complications, but how Christianity with its drawbacks
is likely to succeed against Hinduism with its manifold intrenchments.

But, while weighing well the obstacles, how great are the
encouragements! What an auspicious fact that even a hostile organization
has appropriated the Christian cultus bodily, and can find no better
weapons than its blessed truths. Christianity is felt as a silent power,
even though under other names. It is, after all, the leaven that is
working all-powerfully in India to-day.

There was a period in the process of creation when light beamed dimly
upon the earth, though the sun, its source, had not yet appeared. So
through the present Hinduism there is a haze of Christian truth, though
the Sun of Righteousness is not yet acknowledged as its source.

But the Spirit of God broods over the waters, and the true Light of the
world will break on India.


FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 34: The fact that environment has to a certain extent affected
the religions of mankind is entirely overworked, when men like Buckle
make it formative and controlling.]

[Footnote 35: Instead of the later and universal pessimism, there was in
the Vedic religion a simple but joyous sense of life.]

[Footnote 36: _Hinduism_, p. 31.]

[Footnote 37: _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. i., p. 15.]

[Footnote 38: _Aryan Witness_, p. 204; also _Hinduism_, p. 36.]

[Footnote 39: Ibid., p. 37.]

[Footnote 40: A son of Hariscandra. _Hinduism_, p. 37.]

[Footnote 41: This is in strong contrast with the Old Testament
precepts, which everywhere had greater respect to the heart of the
offerer than to the gifts.]

[Footnote 42: The Brahmans had found certain grades of population marked
by color lines, shaded off from the negroid aborigines to the
Dravidians, and from them to the more recent and nobler Aryans, and they
were prompt also to seize upon a mere poetic and fanciful expression
found in the Rig Veda, which seemed to give countenance to their
fourfold caste distinction by representing one class as having sprung
from the head of Brahma, another from the shoulders, the third from his
thighs, and a fourth from his feet. Altogether they founded a social
system which has been the wonder of the ages, and which has given to the
_Brahmans_ the prestige of celestial descent. The _Kshatreych_ or
soldier caste stands next, and as it has furnished many military leaders
and monarchs who disputed the arrogant claims of the Brahmans, conflicts
of the upper castes have not been infrequent.

The _Vaishya_, or farmer caste, has furnished the principal groundwork
of many admixtures and subdivisions, until at the present time there are
endless subcastes, to each of which a particular kind of employment is
assigned. The _Sudras_ are still the menials, but there are different
grades of degradation even among them.]

[Footnote 43: _Hindu Philosophy_, Bose, p. 47.]

[Footnote 44: _Indian Wisdom_ on the Brahmanas and Upanishads. Also
_Hindu Philosophy_, Bose.]

[Footnote 45: _Colebrook's Essays_, foot-note, p. 85.]

[Footnote 46: See _Introduction to the Sacred Books of the East_, vol. i.]

[Footnote 47: Vaiseshika Philosophy, in _Indian Wisdom_.]

[Footnote 48: Mimansa Philosophy. Ibid.]

[Footnote 49: Sir Monier Williams assigns the Code of Manu _in its
present form_ to the sixth century B.C. _Indian Wisdom_, p. 215. Other
Oriental scholars consider it older.]

[Footnote 50: These tendencies were more intensely emphasized in some of
the later codes, which, however, were only variations of the greater one
of Manu.]

[Footnote 51: See p. 82.]

[Footnote 52: Quoted on p. 76.]

[Footnote 53: See note, p. 80.]

[Footnote 54: Sir Monier Williams declares that some of Mann's precepts
are worthy of Christianity. _Indian Wisdom_, p. 212.]

[Footnote 55: It should be set down to the credit of the Code of Manu
that with all its relentless cruelty toward woman it nowhere gives
countenance to the atrocious custom of widow-burning which soon
afterward became an important factor in the Hindu system and desolated
the homes of India for more than two thousand years.

There would seem to be some dispute as to whether or not widow-burning
is sanctioned in the Rig Veda. Colebrooke, in his _Essays_ (Vol. I., p,
135), quotes one or two passages which authorize the rite, but Sir
Monier Williams (_Indian Wisdom_, p. 259, note) has shown that changes
were made in this text at a much later day for the purpose of gaining
Vedic authority for a cruel system, of which even so late a work as the
Code of Manu makes no mention, and (page 205 Ibid.) he quotes another
passage from the Rig Veda which directs a widow to ascend the pyre of
her husband as a token of attachment, but to leave it before the burning
is begun.]

[Footnote 56: As the spread of Buddhism had owed much to the political
triumph of King Ashoka, so the revival of Hinduism was greatly indebted
to the influence of a new dynasty about a century B.C.]

[Footnote 57: _Indian Wisdom_, p. 314.]

[Footnote 58: Ibid., p. 317.]

[Footnote 59: Brahmanism and Hinduism are often used interchangeably,
but all confusion will be avoided by confining the former to that
intense sacerdotalism which prevailed during the Brahmana period, while
the latter is used more comprehensively, or is referred particularly to
the later and fully developed system.]

[Footnote 60: _Hinduism_, pp. 12, 13.]

[Footnote 61: The Brahmans were careful, however, to brand the Buddha,
while admitting him as an avatar. Their theory was that Vishnu appeared
in Gautama for the purpose of deluding certain demons into despising the
worship of the gods, and thus securing their destruction. This affords
an incidental proof that Gautama was regarded as an atheist.--See
_Indian Wisdom_, p. 335.]

[Footnote 62: See _Aryan Witness_, closing chapter; also _Christ and
Other Masters_, p. 198, notes 1, 2, and 3.]

[Footnote 63: See _Brahmanism and Hinduism_, Monier Williams.]

[Footnote 64: Hardwick traces similarities between Hindu traditions and
Christianity in such points as these: 1, The primitive state of man; 2,
his fall by transgression; 3, his punishment in the Deluge; 4, the rite
of sacrifice; 5, the primitive hope of restoration.--_Christ and Other
Masters_, p. 209.]

[Footnote 65: The Hindus hold that "truth was originally deposited with
men, but gradually slumbered and was forgotten; the knowledge of it
returns like a recollection."--_Humboldt's Kosmos_, ii., p. 112.]

[Footnote 66: _Professor Wilson's Lectures_, p. 52.]

[Footnote 67: _Vishnu Puranas_, p. 45, note 4.]

[Footnote 68: Buddhism is still more disheartening, since it denies the
separate conscious existence of the ego. There cannot be divine
fellowship, therefore, but only the current of thoughts and emotions
like the continuous flame of a burning candle. Not our souls will
survive, but our Karma.]

[Footnote 69: _Christ and Other Masters_, p. 182.]

[Footnote 70: Yet in spite of Manu and the inveteracy of old custom,
there gleams here and there in Hindu literature and history a bright
ideal of woman's character and rank; while the _Ramayana_ has its model
Sita, the _Mahabharata_, i., 3028, has this peerless sketch:

   "A wife is half the man, his truest friend;
    A loving wife is a perpetual spring
    Of virtue, pleasure, wealth; a faithful wife
    Is his best aid in seeking heavenly bliss;
    A sweetly-speaking wife is a companion
    In solitude; a father in advice;
    A mother in all seasons of distress;
    A rest in passing through life's wilderness."

This, however, is a pathetic outburst: the tyranny of the ages remains.]

[Footnote 71: Even in the later development of the doctrine of faith
(Bakti) Hinduism fails to connect with it any moral purification or
elevation. See quotations from Elphinstone and Wilson in _Christ and
Other Masters_, p. 234.]

[Footnote 72: See a recent _Catechism_ published by the Arya Somaj.]

[Footnote 73: The following hymn, quoted from the Arya _Catechism_,
reveals the proud spirit of revived Aryanism:

   "We are the sons of brave Aryas of yore,
    Those sages in learning, those heroes in war.
    They were the lights of great nations before,
    And shone in that darkness like morning's bright star,
    A beacon of warning, a herald from far.
    Have we forgotten our Rama and Arjun,
    Yudistar or Bishma or Drona the Wise?
    Are not we sons of the mighty Duryodani?
    Where did Shankar and great Dayananda arise?
    'In India, in India!' the echo replies.
    Ours the glory of giving the world
    Its science, religion, its poetry and art.
    We were the first of the men who unfurled
    The banner of freedom on earth's every part,
    Brought tidings of peace and of love to each heart."]




LECTURE IV.

THE BHAGAVAD GITA AND THE NEW TESTAMENT


No other portion of Hindu literature has made so great an impression on
Western minds as the Bhagavad Gita, "The Lord's Lay," or the "Song of
the Adorable." It has derived its special importance from its supposed
resemblance to the New Testament. And as it claims to be much older than
the oldest of the Gospels or the Epistles, it carries the inference that
the latter may have borrowed something from it.

A plausible translation has been published in Boston by Mr. Mohini M.
Chatterji, who devoutly believes this to be the revealed word of the
Supreme Creator and Upholder of the universe

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