Chapter XVIII: Missions and Missionaries 213-223 (4)

Beautiful for situation as was Nurwara Eliya, we were glad, on account of the January cold, to leave it. And we went to Kandy. I wonder whether our word "candy" is derived from that sweet place. I agree with some celebrated author, whose name I forget, in saying that "Kandy is the loveliest city in the loveliest island in the world." Of late years Kandy has become the resort of tourists, though the present war has greatly diminished their number. A hotel that was accustomed to entertain fifty guests now has only half a dozen. But the beauty of the place abides. An artificial lake, with an island of green in its center and winding among a forest of stately palms, is surrounded by a circlet of hills. On the summit of one of these hills is the Missionary Rest-house, founded and endowed by a wealthy Christian woman for the relief of pilgrims, as was the House Beautiful of Bunyan's story. There we were invited to afternoon-tea, and as I looked upon the fairylike landscape I almost thought the Garden of Eden had come again.

But I could not long be deceived, for at the very foot of this hill was the most famous Buddhist temple of Ceylon. If this is Paradise, it is Paradise Lost. Here Buddha's tooth is worshiped, and here a newly discovered bone of his body is to add sanctity to the temple. We attended the evening worship, which consisted of a torchlight procession of priests, with beating of tom-toms and frenzied dancing of musicians, which would have done credit to the savagery of the Fiji Islands. The temple here has no lofty pagoda. It shows what the original pagoda really was, for this temple has a number of bell-shaped structures resting on the ground. Next, historically, came the elevation of the bell upon a stone platform; and, finally, the lifting of it into the air, resplendent with gilding. Kandy illustrates the humble beginnings of Buddhistic worship, but with later accessories begotten by irrational devotion.

I should mention, however, the only sign of intelligence which I found in this Buddhist temple. It was the library of Pali manuscripts containing the sacred books and stories of Buddha's life and doctrine. Many of these manuscripts were written on palm-leaves and were wrapped in silken coverings. Some had been presented by Siamese and by Burmese kings. Some were ancient. I saw no priest who could read them, and I fancy that the sacred books are really studied only by pundits, whose vocation is that of teaching, and whose personal beliefs may be very different from those of orthodox Buddhism. It was pleasant to find, not far from the Temple of the Tooth, a little church of the English Baptists, which sends out light into all the surrounding darkness. Its pastor is a native Christian, who preaches every Sunday morning in Cingalese and every Sunday evening in English, while his week-days are devoted to the work of conducting an English boys' school.

Kandy is celebrated also for its botanical gardens. Only those of Java compare with them in completeness. The long avenues of palms of different varieties--palmyra, talipot, sago, royal, sealing-wax--and the specimens of bamboo, India rubber, and rain-tree, are unique and wonderful. The rain-tree is so called because the vast spread of its branches and the density of its foliage collect the dew to such an extent as actually to water the ground upon which it drops. Think of viewing in one morning of two hours' length, a score of trees we had hitherto known only in the tales of the tropics: the traveler's tree with its fernlike leaves, the cannon-ball tree, the deadly upas, the nourishing breadfruit, the clove, the cinnamon, the mace or nutmeg, the vanilla, the guava, the cork, the almond, the mulberry, the mango, the sandalwood! There were great screw-pines, lignum-vitae, mahogany, mimosa, magnolia trees; and the tree-fern, the giant creeper, the panama-hat plant, the Peruvian cactus, the papyrus, the pineapple, and a great collection of orchids. Only the sunshine and the moisture of Ceylon could produce such a result. A tree cared for from its first sprouting, and favored by the elements, becomes a wonder of the world. It shows what man may become under the tutelage of God.

Anurajahpura was our last place to visit. Far to the north of Colombo, it is the most important extant specimen of the ruined cities of Ceylon. Before the time of Christ it was the seat of a kingdom that embraced the whole island. Buddhism, after a life-and-death struggle, captured it and erected in it structures for worship, which for grandeur and beauty rivaled those of Burma. Two pagodas, or dagobas, of solid brick, each of them more than two hundred feet high, tower up before one as he enters the town. These structures are covered with verdure, for grasses and shrubs have eaten their way into the mortar on the sides, until the dagobas resemble conical natural hills. It is said that the brick of a single one would suffice to build a wall eight feet high and a foot thick from Edinburgh to London. One of them is being restored, and fifty men are at work upon it, tearing away the vegetation and building anew the outside covering of brick. The dagoba itself is not a temple, for it is solid and has no chamber within; but at its base is a structure, infinitesimal in size as compared with the one that towers above it, and in this structure there is a reclining statue of Buddha seventy feet long. Buddha must have been a giant, for his footprints are four feet long, and his tooth is as large as the tooth of an alligator, and surprisingly like one.

The grounds in the neighborhood of these towering dagobas are strewn with ruins. Sixteen hundred pillars of stone, seven feet high, remain to show the vast foundations of an ancient Buddhist monastery. There is also a temple excavated in the solid rock of the hillside, and adorned with curious carvings of elephants. We made the acquaintance of its high priest under very peculiar circumstances. We met him at a funeral. It was the cremation of one of his priests. On the outskirts of the village a great crowd surrounded a burning pyre. Two or three cords of rough wood had been piled up, with the body of the priest in its center and the bier on which the body had been brought laid upon its top. The fire was blazing upward, and a deafening beating of tom-toms gave sacredness to the obsequies. The awe-stricken followers of Buddha stood at a little distance around, while the flames grew fierce, and the sickening odor of burning flesh entered their nostrils. It was no wonder that they were willing to follow the high priest, when he came to salute me as a minister of religion from the other side of the world. He was eighty-eight years of age. Clothed in his saffron robe and holding with trembling hands his rod of office, he seemed the decaying specimen of a moribund religion. He presented me with an umbrella of yellow silk. It had an ivory handle with the carving of a lotus bud on its end. I could not let him make such a present without some reward, and he seemed grateful for the few rupees which my interpreter wrapped up in his handkerchief. He lifted up his fan and fanned me, as we parted, while he uttered some words of blessing. I could hardly doubt his good will, or fail to hope that some gleams of heavenly light had come to him from Christ, the Light of the world. But Anurajahpura was, like Pagan in Burma, the type of a vanishing religion, and its high priest was, like the Jewish high priest of old, the type of a priesthood sure to pass away, since Christ, the true High Priest, has come.

XIII

JAVA AND BUDDHISM

We have crossed the equator, and the Southern Cross, invisible to northern eyes, seems still to beckon us onward. But we have reached the most distant point of our journey, and henceforth we shall be homeward bound, taking China and Japan as we go. Java is not so hot as we expected. An island like Cuba, six hundred miles long and only two hundred broad, has sea-breezes enough to keep it tolerably cool. Rain falls almost every day, with an average of twelve feet in a year. As the moisture is excessive, all sorts of vegetation are luxuriant. Java is a gem of the ocean, and an emerald gem at that. Life here is as easy as anywhere on earth, and there is a swarming population. While Ceylon, similar in area, has only five millions of inhabitants, Java has thirty-five millions.

Java is the jewel of the Dutch Crown, one of the most fertile and productive islands of the world. Coffee and tea, rice and sugar, salt and spice, tobacco and corn, coal and oil, coconut and rubber, are exported in an aggregate of two hundred millions of our dollars every year, while the aggregate of imports is little more than a hundred and twenty millions. The Dutch have taken a colony whose deficits once frightened the English into abandoning it, and by the famous "culture system" of letting out the land upon wise conditions as to the kind and quantity of production, have turned the whole island into a veritable garden, and a principal source of revenue for Holland. The Dutch indeed have drawn from Java much more than they have given. The Roman Empire should have taught them that incorporation of a colony, and privilege granted to it, were the only security for permanent possession. Until ten years ago, however, the Dutch policy was one of repression rather than one of development. While Britain has tried by her schools and hospitals to Anglicize India, Holland, for many years, tried to keep the Javanese apart and in subjection, discouraging their study of the Dutch language and giving them also no share in the government. This policy has at last been seen to be suicidal; Chinese immigration has added an element of vigor, industry, and discontent; the modern movement in India and in Japan has provoked new aspirations here; even the Malay has become aware that he has rights. Dutch schools have at last begun to educate the people; the more progressive among the students are also learning English; and Java now bids fair to press forward to occupy a position in the van of national and democratic progress.

I am deeply impressed with the density and vastness of this population. Only Belgium surpasses Java in the number of inhabitants to the square mile. We have taken a ride by rail for four hundred miles through the center of the island. We have passed volcanoes actually smoking; for a long range of mountains, rising sometimes to a height of twelve thousand feet, constitutes the back-bone of Java. There are sublime and beautiful landscapes all along the way, sublime because of their occasionally rocky grandeur, and beautiful because of the minute cultivation that adorns both hillside and plain. The endless rice-fields, and the fields of sugar-cane that stretch for miles like a billowy sea, make a railway journey by day a constant source of delight. You ride in a perennial garden, and it is perfectly natural that the bird of paradise should have its habitat here. Like Ceylon, Java is sure to be the resort of innumerable tourists, for here are wonders beyond any to be found in localities more commonly visited.

And yet it is the people that interest one even more than the land they live in. We turned aside at different points, from the stations of the railways, and got glimpses of the Javanese in their country homes. I am bound to say that these homes were often primitive in the extreme, mere shacks or huts of bamboo and thatch, often without windows and with only a door in front and a door behind, sometimes standing in a pool of shallow water or lifted on stilts to escape the rain. But everybody seemed to be at work, except on market-days, when the whole population of a district gathered in a country fair. The throng and press of these trading-days, the strife and din, the variety of wares, and the sharpness of competition, were something new to us and long to be remembered. The amusements of the Javanese, their music, their shadow-dances, all show a vigor and passion, which explain their occasional use of the "kriss" or Malay dagger, and the difficulty of subduing and civilizing so ardent and imaginative a people. But they are a people _sui generis_, and sure, when roused and educated, to take their part on the modern stage.

I have intimated that the Dutch Government has seen its past mistakes, and has entered upon a new and more generous policy. Nothing could demonstrate this better than the botanical gardens at Buitenzorg. These are unique in the world, the most complete and the most practical. The gardens at Kandy in Ceylon are more artistically arranged and are more beautiful to the ordinary visitor. But these in Java are more scientific and more helpful to the general development of the country. They include the chemical investigation of agricultural products, as well as the testing of their nutritive value and their tensile strength. Rubber planters are shown proper methods of culture, and also improved methods of preparing the product for market. Seventy different varieties of rice have been discovered and classified; and the tillers of the soil have been shown how they can greatly increase the yield of their acreage. All the great botanical collections of the world communicate their novelties and discoveries to the Java gardens. Here at Buitenzorg there is a school of forestry and another of veterinary science, each of these with practical demonstrations. Trees and plants in the gardens are grouped in scientific classes, the palms by themselves, the pines by themselves. Here the _Victoria regia_, the royal pond-lily, flourishes in its proper habitat. The avenues of kanari trees, with their lofty overarching vaulting, are grander than any nave of French cathedral. It will be seen at once that the Botanical and Experimental Gardens of Java are of immense service to agriculture and to science throughout the world. We had the great privilege of being personally conducted through them by Dr. K. J. Lovink, Director of the Dutch Department of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce.

I wish I could say as much for the religious prospects of Java as I can say for its economical and political prospects. There is even greater need of change in this regard, for the island has been a very stronghold of Buddhism, as it is now of Mohammedanism. When driven out from India, the Buddhist missionaries came to Java and here found a welcome. Javanese kings erected temples so enormous and so rich in sculpture that, defaced and decayed as they now are, they have no superiors on earth. It was, indeed, the fame of Boro Budor, that most attracted us to Java, and we made a journey of thirteen hours to inspect this renowned ruin.

Imagine a structure upon an eminence from which it is visible for miles, yet walled in on one side by a lofty range of mountains, and on the other side commanding a magnificent view of cultivated plains. Imagine a temple of brick, like the great pyramid of Egypt, more than five hundred feet square, with five broad terraces, the uppermost of which encloses an immense sitting statue of Buddha. The topmost crown of this solid structure rises more than two hundred feet above the ground.

The wonder of Boro Budor is, however, not the vastness of the structure, containing though it does an amount of material five times as great as that of any English cathedral, so much as it is the enormous amount of artistic work that has been expended upon it. Each of these five terraces has sculptured upon its side walls some representation in bas-relief of the legendary incidents of Buddha's existence, not only in the present state, but in his previous states of being. You walk, as it were, through a picture-gallery of the life of Buddha. The bas-reliefs are wrought out with such delicacy as to suggest the influence of Greek art upon the multitude of artists who toiled for years to produce them. The effect, at least, is Grecian; and the number of the plaques is so great that, if they were placed in a continuous row, the line would be three miles long.

Besides these sculptures, the terrace-walls are interrupted at regular intervals by four hundred and thirty-six niches or alcove-chapels, each with its image of Buddha facing the outside world, so that the visitor approaching the temple cannot fail to see one hundred and nine Buddhas, or one-fourth of the total number, looking down upon him. Above these alcove-chapels there are seventy-two small latticed domes, or dagobas, each with its statue of Buddha imprisoned within, as if he were preparing himself, by seclusion and meditation, for the final state in which the great chamber which crowns the structure represents him, I mean the state of passivity and bliss, which has escaped the evils of transmigration and has attained to absorption of personal existence of the impersonal world-force which the Hindu called Brahma.

It is difficult to express the emotions which are roused by such an exhibition of man's religious instinct, enlightened simply by God's revelation of himself in the natural world and in the nature of man. Here is a seeking, but not a finding, a groping in the dark, with only the faint rays of conscience to show man the way. Yet he who is the Light of the World was lighting every man, before his advent in the flesh, and even Buddha was a reformer and an advance upon the Brahmanism of his time. He preached the doctrine of unselfish devotion, but he turned it into error by ignoring man's duty to himself. He made extinction of desire, rather than purification of desire, to be the way to happiness. How different this from that thirst after God, even the living God, which animated the Psalmist, or that hungering and thirsting after righteousness which Christ says shall be filled! Buddha found in self, rather than in God, the power to overcome evil. Buddhism has no personal God to whom appeal may be made for strength, and Buddha himself has no power to answer prayer, since he long ago passed into a realm of inactivity which is practically indistinguishable from non-existence. There is no atonement for past sin nor escape from its consequences, but by the giving up of being. Buddhism is a pessimistic and joyless religion. Hence it suffers deterioration in competition with the more active systems. Close by Boro Budor, where Buddhism reached its culmination, are the temples of Mendoet and Brambanam, which show a reversion in the popular mind to Hindu Brahmanism. And when the Moslem came, with his doctrine of a personal and living God, Buddhism had no force to combat it. Boro Budor, once the center of worship for a mighty kingdom, now stands alone and desolate in a great wilderness, without priest or worshiper. Djokjokarta, the next city in size to Batavia, is to-day more Mohammedan than Buddhist. Christian schools and missions are doing much to turn this moral wilderness into beauty. To convert Java to Christianity will add to Christ's subjects the very Queen of the East.

XIV

THE RENAISSANCE IN INDIA

A recent book by Prof. C. F. Andrews, formerly of the Cambridge Brotherhood in Delhi, has arrested my attention, as the best extant synopsis of the religious history and prospects of that great country. It is entitled "The Renaissance in India." It has not yet been reprinted in America, and can be obtained only in the British Isles. I have thought it worth while to make it known among us by writing a review, and the following paper might perhaps serve such a purpose. But, in the writing, so many thoughts and illustrations of my own have suggested themselves, that I cannot credit Professor Andrews with the result, except in part, and I submit my work as my own almost as much as it is his.

Let me first, however, do Professor Andrews the justice of explaining that the Cambridge Brotherhood is a semimonastic fraternity of the Church of England, which aims to convert India to Christianity by indoctrinating its higher classes. All its members are bachelors, and their pure life as well as their learning and liberality are attractive to educated heathen seekers after God. Our author is himself a devout believer in a preexistent Christ, and he recognizes some rays of Christ's light in Buddha and in Confucius. This faith has led him to sever his connection with the Cambridge Brotherhood of late, and to connect himself with the school of Rabindranath Tagore, whom the British Government has recently knighted for his poetical gifts and for his political loyalty. Members of the Brotherhood have thought this leaving of their body a mistake of judgment, and too great a concession to a rival religion, while they still admire the self-devotion which leads their former brother to carry his advocacy of Christianity into what he regards as the most promising school of Hinduism. With this explanation I proceed to the treatment of my subject.

* * * * *

In the fifteenth century the European world was intellectually born again. The barbarian Goths and Vandals had put an end to the Roman Empire, and learning had taken refuge in the monasteries. Even that learning had become ecclesiastical. Precious manuscripts of the Greek classics had their original writing wiped off to make room for monkish homilies. The people were in ignorance and were ruled by the priests. But the Crusades had brought about a new intercourse between the West and the East. The fall of Constantinople sent Greek books and Greek scholars to Venice and to Rome. Greek art inspired Michelangelo and Raphael. A great wave of enthusiasm for the new learning swept over Europe. The printing-press multiplied copies of the old literature and put them in the hands of the poor. It was the precursor of a new civilization, and because it was a new birth of thought, we call it the Renaissance.

The Renaissance, however, needed another factor to complement it. Not merely intellect was sleeping, but also man's moral nature. Conscience and will required new stimulus. Religious reformation was necessary as much as intellectual revival. Greek books brought with them the vice, as well as the art, of the East. Renaissance without Reformation produced the Borgias and their unspeakable wickedness. Erasmus without Luther would never have saved Europe from ruin. It was the new view of Christ that showed men their sins, brought repentance and hope, purified literature, gave power to social truth, and united with the new learning to make possible our modern civilization. It was a triumph of Christianity over the powers of darkness, for Christianity involves both Renaissance and Reformation.

A similar intellectual change has been coming over the Eastern world, and has been awakening the slumbering nations. Who would have foretold a half-century ago that Turkey and Persia, Japan and China, would now have constitutional governments and legislative assemblies? The world has moved very fast during the past decade. Modern inventions have given new wings to thought, the nations have been coming to self-consciousness, freedom is in the air, even war is teaching the absurdity of committing the destiny of a whole people to the arbitrary rule of any single monarch. The success of Japan in her struggle with Russia aroused the whole East. China has awaked from the sleep of ages. And India is the scene of unrest, and will not be satisfied until her vast populations are given a larger share in her government.

India has witnessed the beginnings of her renaissance. The universities which her rulers have established have diffused the new learning. But they have also raised up a host of educated men, some of whom can find no employment except in sedition. False philosophies, imported from the West, have made these same men agnostic, and have disposed them to put evolution in place of God. Old religions have lost even their little power to control the moral life, and a vague desire for independence of all restraint has led to revolutionary and even anarchistic plots. We have some of the same dangers in our Southern States. The negro is in many cases receiving a higher education than he can utilize, and is becoming a possible leader of revolt, while there is a vast inflammable multitude of uneducated negroes whom he can incite to violence and disorder. As with us, Christianity is needed side by side with education, so in India to-day, intellectual renaissance needs to be supplemented by religious reformation.

A glance at the history of India's religious systems will help our understanding of the problem. The earliest record is that of the Rig-Veda. It is a recognition of the powers of nature, and an exaltation of them to divine honor and worship. The apostle Paul gives us the further explanation that this deification of God's works was the result of a previous unwillingness to retain the personal God in their knowledge. To worship God's manifestations is to lose the sense of his unity and his moral governance. Men preferred the sun in the heavens to the Sun of Righteousness. They lost sight of the true God in self-chosen admiration of his works. "While the Semitic mind gravitated toward the ethical and the personal, the Aryan gravitated toward the philosophic and the impersonal."

The Upanishads are the second series of Hindu scriptures. These practically identify the human soul, as well as all natural objects, with the supreme God. The self is only a manifestation of Brahma. The trend is toward absolute pantheism. The individual is lost in the whole, and the realization of this is salvation. But humanity cannot be content without the semblance of personality in God, and since everything has become divine, it was easy to regard not only natural powers, but also personal beings as gods. Polytheism was the result. Vishnu and Siva, gods of reproductive and destructive powers, came to be worshiped. Incarnation and transmigration followed. The incarnation was not the incarnation of the supreme Brahma, but of one of the subordinate deities, Vishnu, and even this incarnation was but a temporary assumption of human form--a vanishing manifestation, to be put off again like a worn-out garment when the real god returned to his heaven. The Hindu Trimurti was never the Christian Trinity; for Christ is not only the supreme God manifest in the flesh, but also the eternal Revealer of God, who takes our humanity to be a part of himself forever, the partaker of his inmost being and the sharer of his throne.

While we credit Hinduism with the idea of incarnation, we regard it as only showing this to be a necessity of human thought, and as far from satisfying man's longings for union with God. Gautama Buddha, passionless and lost in the contemplation of his own excellence, is not the Christian Redeemer, who daily bears our burdens and takes upon himself, in order that he may take away, the sin of the world. And what shall we say of the other deities of the Hindu pantheon, but that they are personifications of every human caprice and vice. The Krishna of the Puranas has infected all India with his licentiousness, and has given sanction to the worst forms of lust.

The growth of caste was another result of the loss of a personal and moral God and the deification of his works. Since all things came to be regarded as manifestations of deity, the order of society and its distinctions became fixed. The origin of caste is to be found in the superiority of the Aryan conqueror to the Dravidian aborigines. The people of light complexion looked down on the dark-skinned race, and drove them to the wall. Intermarriage between the two classes of the population became abhorrent to the ruling class, and all manner of restrictions were put upon their intercourse, till even the shadow of the outcaste falling upon the Brahman brought contamination. Let us not blame the Aryan too hastily, for in South Africa and in our own Southern States we see the same denial that God has made of one blood all the races of men, and the same exclusion of the darker race from all privileges of human brotherhood. Slave-owners were shocked when Abraham Lincoln lifted his hat to salute a negro, and Southern men protested when President Roosevelt entertained Booker Washington at his table. Christian proclamation of human brotherhood constitutes one of the chief obstacles to the success of the gospel in India.

The low place of woman and her lack of education is another obstacle which must be removed if India is to profit by the renaissance of learning. This undervaluing of the physically weak is itself a fruit of man's apostasy from God. And as Brahmanism set its stamp of approval upon distinctions of caste and fixed them for centuries, so it was with woman's position and influence. She was condemned to inferiority. She became a mere instrument of man's pleasure, or a mere drudge in his household. She never sat with him at his meals, but ate what was left after he had been served; she never walked by his side, but always followed behind, when she was not shut up in the zenana at home. One of the best signs of a new civilization in India is the growing conviction among the higher classes that woman must be educated, if her children are to emerge from their superstitions and become of use in the modern world. The suttee has been abolished by law, but child-widowhood yet remains to curse the lives of millions. There is no better proof that Christianity is permeating society with its influence than is found in the increasing number of girls who are seeking education in our mission schools and colleges. Pundita Ramabai has become a glory to her own countrymen, as much as has Rabindranath Tagore by his utterance, "The regeneration of the Indian people to my mind, directly and perhaps solely, depends upon the removal of this condition of caste." We may add that the dominion of caste and the degradation of woman will come to an end together, and nothing but Christianity will abolish them.

The renaissance of learning is not enough. A new spirit of love is needed to solve the problems of India. For there is no country of the world where racial antagonisms are so felt. Entirely apart from the distinctions of caste, which are racial in their origin, there is the distinction of Hindu from Mohammedan, which has its origin in religion. Remember that, of India's population, sixty-five millions are Moslems, while one hundred and eighty millions are Hindus. The Hindu men of caste cannot help paying some respect to the Mohammedans, for they are compelled to acknowledge their financial and executive power, just as they acknowledge, without admiring, the power of their British rulers. They cannot treat Moslems as outcastes, but they will not associate with them; and they cherish a settled antipathy to them. All this the Mohammedans heartily reciprocate. English policy has in times past cultivated this mutual dislike, lest union between the two religious sects should lead to the formation of a party too strong for British rule to keep in subjection. One religion has been used to defeat the influence of the other. Of late years only has it been true that both have been forced to recognize the impartial justice of British rule; and this recognition has been gained by the gradual admission of able men from both parties to many important judicial and administrative positions in the Indian government. But the antagonism of religions still remains, and it constitutes a most serious bar in the way of a united India.

* * * * *

There are signs of an approaching reformation in India which will supplement its intellectual renaissance. Just as the growing power of Christianity in the second and third centuries of our era was shown by the competition of new and imitative religions like that of Mithra, and by spasmodic attempts on the part of the old heathenism to interpret its mythology symbolically and to reform its moral practice; just as the growing power of the gospel in the fifteenth century led the Roman Church to slough off some of its abuses and to tolerate among its adherents reformers before the Reformation; so in India the new learning from the West and the missionary proclamation of the gospel have brought about a state of religious unrest which could only be allayed by efforts on the part of Hindus and Moslems alike to interpret their faiths more rationally and to prove that these faiths were equal if not superior to Christianity itself. The Brahmo-Somaj, which Ram Mohun Roy founded at the end of the eighteenth century, largely as a result of his horror at the murder of his sister by suttee, has led to the abolition of that cruelty. Ram Mohun Roy sought to purge Hinduism of its corruptions by appealing to its earlier and purer scriptures. He was the first to establish a vernacular press in India, and, with Alexander Duff, the first English schools. Though he did not formally profess Christianity, he studied our Christian Scriptures, acknowledged their value and influence, and published a book entitled "The Precepts of Jesus."

Another Hindu who exerted great influence during the half-century just passed was Keshub Chunder Sen. He passionately adored Christ as his true Master. Yet he was practically Unitarian, and his later years belied the promise of his brilliant beginnings. Though a member of the Brahmo-Somaj, he split the body in two by his violation of its prohibition of child-marriage, and wasted his strength in attempts to combine Western rationalism with the ecstatic fervors of the East. As the result, the Brahmo-Somaj has declined, until in numbers and influence it has now hardly more than five thousand adherents in all India. Mozumdar was one of its representatives who sought to give Oriental interpretation of Jesus, but one without ethical or saving power. The Arya-Samaj is a more consistent effort to reform Hindu religion by bringing it back to the purer standards of the Vedas. Swami Dayanand was the founder of the society. He was led to renounce idolatry by seeing a mouse eat food offered to an idol and run without hindrance over the idol's robes and hands. Of all the reforming bodies, the Arya-Samaj most retains the confidence of the masses in the north of India. But its tenets are not acceptable to the educated classes of the south, and it needs a further infusion of both science and religion.

Thus far we have treated only of Hindu progress. A word must be said of progress among the Moslem population of India. Here the Aligarh Movement demands attention. Sir Seyd Ahmad Khan was its leader. He was of noble family, entered the English service, and took part with the British in crushing the mutiny of 1857. When the Mohammedan population afterward fell under suspicion, he gathered round him a company of liberal young men and sought by educational means to bridge the gulf between Moslem and English. He claimed that British rule in India represented Christian civilization, and that this is no enemy to Islam, but only its complement and helper. He saw that only religion could heal the breach and rescue Islam from decline. He founded the Aligarh College in Delhi, and devoted himself to the cultivation of friendliness, not only between Moslem and English, but also between Moslem and Hindu. This college is one of the strongest educational forces in North India.

Returning to Hindu progress, we mark the work of such men as the Swami Vivekananda. It will be remembered that he represented India at our Chicago Parliament of Religions, where Joseph Cook challenged the priests of the Orient to answer Lady Macbeth's question, "Who shall cleanse this red right hand?" Vivekananda sought to blend Christian philanthropy with the Vedantic philosophy. Identity with the Supreme is to be attained, not only by passive contemplation, but also by active unselfish service. But this truth was mixed with strange interpretations of Scripture. Jesus' declaration, "I and my Father are one," was made to mean, "Every man and woman is God." And Vivekananda was quite willing himself to be worshiped. His fundamental error, indeed, was his lack of the sense of sin. He said to his audience in Chicago: "The Hindus refuse to call you sinners. Ye divinities on earth, sinners? It is a sin to call a man so. It is a standing libel on human nature." Yet, in spite of this deification of self and of all humanity, he did much to inspire pity for the poor, to awaken India to self-consciousness, and to give hope of national unity.

We must not ignore the work of The Theosophical Society, though it has made a name for itself more in Europe and America than in India. While it has done something to encourage education and to teach modern science, it has used the knowledge thus given as an instrument in defending superstition. The immoralities of Krishna are discussed and palliated in Mrs. Besant's Magazine for the instruction of young students. Charms, incantations, astrology, idolatry, caste, are all woven into the system, for the sake of propitiating the Indian mind, so that its influence is hostile to Christianity and to missions. Idols are to be worshiped because they are "centers of magnetism." In England Mrs. Besant predicts a second advent of Christ. But in India this becomes a new avatar of Krishna. In spite of her stout denunciation of child-marriages and her inculcation of modern science, her propaganda has not been so much a reform of Indian religion, as it has been a hindrance to reform. Hindu devotees indeed have eulogized her for what they call her successful opposition to the proselyting efforts of Christian missionaries.

And yet, even the Theosophical Society, with all its absurdities of levitation and the astral body, has been compelled to bear some witness to Jesus Christ. He is "the light that lighteth every man," and he has given even to this system some elements of truth. We do not hesitate to recognize the truth that Buddha and Confucius, taught, and to regard it as a ray of Christ's light shed forth before the rising of the sun. And it is our privilege to conclude our list of Hindu reformers with the name of Justice Renade, who recognized in Christ the source of all former revelations of God.

Justice Renade, in his social reform movement of the last fifty years, has carried the spirit of philanthropy into practice, more fully than did Vivekananda or Mrs. Besant, and without any of their fantastic self-exaltation. Renade recognized the elements of truth in both the Hindu and Moslem systems, and he saw in Christianity the influence destined to unite them. He would not throw away the old, but he would utilize it while he added the new. And with this acknowledgment that "he who is not against us is on our side," we may well close our sketch of reformers before the reformation. We sum up the lessons of history when we recognize in Hinduism the two great ideas of divine immanence and incarnation, in Mohammedanism the two equally essential truths of divine transcendence and personality. And we see the absolute dependence of India upon Christianity for its true Reformation. India needs the missionary more than she needs the schoolmaster. Let us pray that she may have a religious revival that shall turn the intellectual awakening into moral channels. That religious revival will furnish a center of unity in Christ, the one and only Revealer of God; not in a Hindu philosophy, nor in a Moslem Koran, but in a living Person, present with all his people, the soul of their soul and the life, and imparting to them his own Spirit of love and brotherhood. In Christ alone can India's renaissance become a complete reformation.

XV

MISSIONS AND SCRIPTURE

The world of scholars has recently been startled by the pretended discovery that the "Great Commission," "Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations," is not an utterance of Jesus himself, but only one attributed to him by some enthusiastic follower of his in a later time. This pretended discovery is on a par with the earlier one that there never was such a person as Jesus at all, but that his personality is simply a myth that gradually grew up in the minds of some Jewish fanatics who sought a fulfilment of Messianic prophecy. We might treat these perverse and subversive conclusions as only curious instances of a wrong method of criticism. But they filter down from the scholars to the masses of Christian believers and weaken their faith. It becomes a duty to deal with the method which leads to such results, and threatens to destroy all our missionary zeal. Hence I proceed to test the value of the method itself, even though it is commonly called "the historical method" by those who adopt it. If we can bear a somewhat roundabout way of treating the subject, we shall gain a new and valuable light upon our missionary theory and practice.

To prevent misunderstanding, however, I must premise that it is the historical method as frequently employed, and not the historical method as it ought to be, to which I offer my objections. My criticism is directed against the historical method, only when it assumes to be the exclusive means of attaining truth, follows the methods of physical science, and ignores the far more important material for religious use which is furnished by intuition and revelation. The phrase "historical method" has come to imply much that does not properly belong to it. I criticize only its frequent exclusiveness and exaggeration. And I do this, as I think, in the interest of true science.

There are two methods of reasoning possible, in this case or in any other case, and there are only two--I mean the deductive, and the inductive. I make no mention of argument from analogy, for that proceeds upon a deductive basis, presuming that there is a designed order in the world which makes analogy possible. The deductive method argues from the universal to the particular, from the higher to the lower, from God to man. The inductive method, on the other hand, argues from the particular to the universal, from the lower to the higher, from man to God. Both of these methods are correct when each is taken in connection with the other. Much depends, however, upon the question which is taken first. Shall we begin with the particular, leaving out for the time all thought of the universal? There is danger that induction will come to be regarded as itself sufficient to lead us into the truth. This is a serious error, for correct induction presupposes deduction, and therefore deduction should be the guiding principle and safeguard of induction. If this is forgotten, induction may go fearfully astray.

To make my meaning still more plain, let me say that in our investigations we need a comprehensive method, a method that will look at facts from more than one point of view. A truly historical method will look at facts from above, as well as from each side, and so the deductive process may be popularly described as vertical. The historical method falsely so called errs in confining its view to what can be seen immediately around it, and so its process is exclusively horizontal. Deduction begins vertically, and makes that which comes from above to be its guide and standard in all inductive work. Induction begins horizontally, and tends to become self-sufficient, until all light from above seems untrustworthy and useless. For example, take the study of nature. If one begins, inductively and horizontally, with mere physical and material order, instead of beginning, deductively and vertically, with man's higher powers of conscience and will, he will end by finding only impersonal force in the universe, and by practically deifying it, as the Hindus deified Brahma. Begin rightly, and, with due care in the application of the deductive principle, he will come to right conclusions. There are certain truths which cannot be reached by induction. They are known by intuition, long before induction begins. The most fundamental of these truths is the truth of God's existence. A Power above us, which has moral perfection, and which claims our obedience, is revealed to every man by conscience. Begin with this knowledge, and to the obedient spirit the physical world seems ablaze with evidences of wisdom and love; the regularities of nature are recognized as God's methods of ordinary operation; evolution is only his usual plan of growth and progress; in other words, God's transcendence is manifest as well as his immanence, his personality as well as his revelation in the forces of the universe.

Man is a theist, before he becomes a Christian. Theism is a universal intuition, ready to assert itself in practice wherever it is not prevented by an evil will from its normal manifestation. But, because man is in an abnormal condition, this normal action of his powers can be restored only by the Holy Spirit. "When he is come," says our Lord, "he will convince the world of sin, because they believe not on me," and "of righteousness, because I go unto the Father." Only when the prodigal repented, did he "come to himself," and begin to act normally. Under the influence of the Spirit, God's holiness reveals to man his sin, and God's love leads him to the feet of Jesus. This is the first step in Christian experience. To put my doctrine unmistakably and in a nutshell, deduction from the existence of God normally precedes and insures the acceptance of Christ. The sinner comes to have personal knowledge of One who has atoned, and therefore can forgive. But to him who has accepted Christ, his Lord is more than a historical Redeemer, he is a present Saviour from both the penalty and the power of sin. Without this personal knowledge of Christ, we might think of him as only one of many human examples or teachers, like Confucius or Buddha. Now, he is nothing less than God manifest in the flesh, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, whom having seen we have seen the Father.

But there is a second step in Christian experience, which I wish also to describe in a nutshell and to define as unmistakably as I described and defined the first. I claim that deduction from the existence of Christ normally precedes and insures the acceptance of Scripture. Our Lord himself has said, "My sheep hear my voice." The Christian recognizes in Scripture the voice of Christ. No change in his experience is more marked and wonderful than the change in his estimate of the Bible. A little time ago, Scripture was commonplace and unmeaning. Now it speaks to him with a living voice such words of instruction and comfort, of warning and promise, that his soul is filled alternately with sorrow and with joy. He wonders that he never saw these things before. He perceives for the first time that he has been in an abnormal condition of mind, and that condition has been due to his own perversity of will. But now the prodigal has "come to himself." Only the Holy Spirit could have made possible this new and normal exercise of his powers. The change is not in the Scripture, it is in himself. He has come in contact with a word of God that "liveth and abideth." He sees in it the divine workmanship. He can no longer regard Scripture as merely the work of man; it is also the work of the same Spirit who has transformed him, namely, the eternal Christ. Christ is the author and inspirer of Scripture, even though imperfect human agents have been employed to communicate his revelation. In spite of the rudeness and diversity of the instruments, there breathes through them all a certain divine melody and harmony. While the inductive and horizontal method would give us only finite and earthly truth, the deductive and vertical can give us truth that is infinite and eternal. The indispensable condition of success in the interpretation of Scripture is therefore a hearty belief that the Bible is Christ's revelation of God, and not merely a series of gropings after truth on the part of men. Deduction will give us truth from above, whereas induction will give us only scattered facts on the horizontal plane.

I am convinced that the so-called "historical method" of Scripture interpretation, as it is usually employed, fails to secure correct results, because it proceeds wholly by induction, leaving out of its account the knowledge of Christ which comes to the Christian in his personal experience. I do not regard such a "historical method" as really historical; I deny that it discovers the original meaning of the documents; I claim that, when made the sole avenue of approach to truth, it leads to false views of doctrine. It assumes at the outset that what rules in the realm of physics rules also in the moral and religious realm. But the Christian has learned that Christ is the supreme source of truth. By a process of either conscious or unconscious deduction he recognizes in Scripture the utterance of Christ. He must begin his investigations with one of two assumptions: Is the Bible only man's word? or, Is it also Christ's word? Is it a mere product of human intelligence? or, Is it also the product of a divine intelligence, who indeed uses human and imperfect means of communication, but who nevertheless at sundry times and in divers manners has brought to the world the knowledge of salvation?

I claim that we should begin by assuming that the Bible is a revelation of Christ. This assertion is justified, as I have already intimated, by our Christian experience. That experience has given us a knowledge of the heart, more valuable in religious things than any mere knowledge of the intellect. Doctor Tholuck, in an address to his students at his fiftieth anniversary, said that God's greatest gift to him had been the knowledge of sin. Without that conviction of sin which the Spirit of Christ can work in the human heart, there can be no proper understanding of Scripture, for Scripture is a revelation to sinners. The opening of the heart to receive Christ, and the new sense of his pardoning grace and power, give to the converted man the key to the interpretation of Scripture, for "the mystery of the gospel," the central secret of Christianity, is "Christ in you, the hope of glory." He whom the Holy Spirit has first led to the knowledge of sin, and has then led to the acceptance of Christ, is prepared to enter into the meaning of Scripture, and no other man can understand it.

This was the way in which Paul came to understand Scripture. It was not by criticism of the documents, but by receiving Christ, that "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" entered into his soul. He knew himself to be the chief of sinners. He knew Christ as his manifested God and Saviour. He applied to Christ all that the Old Testament had revealed with regard to the dealings of God with his chosen people. The light that shone upon him on the way to Damascus was the Shekinah that led Israel in the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, that dwelt over the mercy-seat in the tabernacle and in the temple, and that thundered and lightened from Sinai in the giving of the Law. "The Rock that followed them" in the wilderness, and gave water to the thirsty, "that Rock was Christ." And so Paul came to know Jesus Christ as preexistent and omnipresent, as Redeemer of the whole world, Gentile as well as Jew; and Christ's Cross became the embodiment and symbol of God's amazing sorrow for human sin, and of his sacrifice for its cure. All Paul's later conclusions were developments and expressions of his initial knowledge of Christ. It was a deductive and not an inductive process, by which he arrived at his theology.