New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century, John Morrison [free ebook reader TXT] 📗
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"That incarnation of the Divine Love, the lowly Son of man," writes another, even while he is rejoicing over the revival of Hinduism.[97]
CHAPTER XVI JESUS CHRIST THE LODESTONE "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men
unto myself."
—ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL, xii. 32.
Interesting phases of that divided mind—homage to Christ, resentment towards His disciples—may be found on opposite sides of the great continent of India. In Bengal, a not-infrequent standpoint of Brāhmas in reference to Christ is that they are the true exponents of Christ's spirit and His teaching. Western Christian teachers, they say, are hidebound by tradition; and the ready-made rigidity of the creeds of the Churches is no doubt a factor in the state of mind we are describing. Looking back as far as to 1820, we see in The Precepts of Jesus, published by the founder of the Brāhma Samāj, that standpoint of homage to Christ and dissent from accepted views regarding Him. Illustrative of that Brāhma standpoint, we have also the more recent book, The Oriental Christ, by the late Mr. P.C. Mozumdar, the successor of Keshub Chunder Sen. But the attitude is by no means limited to Brahmas. "Without Christian dogmas, cannot a man equally love and revere Christ?" was a representative question put by a senior Hindu student in Bengal to his missionary professor. In South India, Mahomedans sometimes actually describe themselves as better Christians than ourselves, holding as they do such faith in Jesus and His mother Mary and His Gospel. The case of Mahomedans is not, of course, on all fours with that of Hindus, since Mahomedans reckon Christ as one of the four prophets along with their own Mahomed. In Bombay province, on the other side of India from Bengal, we find Mr. Malabari, the famous Parsee, pupil of a Mission School, doubting if it is possible for the Englishman to be a Christian in the sense of Christ's Christianity, the implication being that an Indian may. What element of truth is there in the idea, we may well ask? From Indian Christians, be it said, we may indeed look for a fervency of loyalty to Christ that does not enter into our calculating moderate souls; and from India, equally, we may look for that mystically profound commentary on St. John's Gospel which Bishop Westcott declared he looked for from Japan. But to return. About Mr. Malabar! himself, his biographer writes: "If he could not accept the dogmas of Christianity, he had imbibed its true spirit," meaning the spirit of Christ Himself. "The cult of the Asiatic life" is the latest definition of Christianity given by a recent apologist of Hinduism, one of a small company of Europeans in India officering the Hindu revival. Crossing India again and going south, we find the late Dr. John Murdoch, of Madras, an eminent observer, adding his testimony regarding the homage paid to the Founder of Christianity. "The most hopeful sign," he writes, "is the increasing reverence for our Lord, although His divinity is not yet acknowledged."[98] And of new India generally, again, we may quote Mr. Bose, the Indian historian. "The Christianity [of North-western Europe] is no more like Christianity as preached by Christ than the Buddhism of the Thibetans is like Buddhism as preached by Gautama." Take finally the following sentences from a recent number of a moderate neo-Hindu organ, the Hindustan Review (vol. viii. 514): "Christ, the great exemplar of practical morality ...; the more one enters into the true spirit of Christ, the more will he reject Christianity as it prevails in the world to-day. The Indians have been gainers not losers by rejecting Christianity for the sake of Christ."[99]
Another phase of that same divided mind, acknowledging Christ and resenting Indian discipleship, may be perceived in the willingness to discover Christian ideas in Hindu Scriptures, and Christ-like features in Hindu deities and religious heroes. To express it from the Indian standpoint,—they see Christ and Christianity bringing back much of their own "refined and modernised." In a sense, as a Bengali Christian gentleman put it, Christ and Christianity have become the accepted standards in religion.[100] Again we quote from the same page of the Hindustan Review: "A revival of Hinduism has taken place.... It [Christianity] has given us Christ, and given us noble moral and spiritual lessons, which we have discovered anew in our own Scriptures, and thereby satisfied our self-love and made our very own." We have mentioned how missionaries used to find the doctrine of the atonement in the name of the Indian God Hari; the argument has now in turn been annexed by Hindus, and employed as an argument in their favour. Within the last twenty years, there has been a great revival of the honouring of Krishna among the educated classes in Bengal and the United Provinces. Krishna has set up distinctly as the Indian Christ, or as the Indian figure to be set up over against Christ. A Krishna story has been disentangled from the gross mythology, and he has become a paragon of virtue,—the work of a distinguished Bengali novelist. I mean no sarcasm. From the sermon of a Hindu preacher in a garden in Calcutta in 1898, I quote: "The same God came into the world as the Krishna of India and the Krishna of Jerusalem." These are his words. From the catalogue of the Neo-Krishnaite literature in Bengal, given by Mr. J.N. Farquhar of the Y.M.C.A., Calcutta, it appears that since 1884 thirteen Lives of Krishna or works on Krishna have appeared in Bengal. Many essays have appeared comparing Krishna with Christ. There have been likewise many editions of the Bhagabat Gita, or Divine Song, the episode in the Mahabharat, in which Krishna figures as religious teacher. It may be called the New Testament of the Neo-Krishnaite. Perhaps the most striking of these Neo-Krishnaite publications is The Imitation of Sri-Krishna, a daily-text book containing extracts from the Bhagabat Gita and the Bhagabat Puran. The title is, of course, a manifest echo of "The Imitation of Christ," which is a favourite with religious-minded Hindus. The Imitation of Buddha, likewise we may observe, has been published. About "The Imitation of Christ" itself, we quote from a Hindu's advertisement appended to the life of a new Hindu saint, Ramkrishna Paramhansa. "The reader of 'The Imitation of Christ,'" it says, "will find echoed in it hundreds of sayings of our Lord Sri-Krishna in the Bhagabat Gita like the following: 'Give up all religious work and come to me as thy sole refuge, and I will deliver thee from all manner of sin.'" The notice goes on: "The book has found its way into the pockets of many orthodox Hindus."
From Krishna we turn to Chaitanya, surname Gauranga, the fair, a religious teacher of Bengal in the fifteenth century, who is also being set up as the Christ of Bengal, in that he preached the equality of men before God and ecstatic devotion to the god Krishna. A Christ-like man, indeed, in many ways, Chaitanya was, and the increased acquaintance of educated Bengal with Jesus Christ naturally brought Chaitanya to the front. The new cult of Chaitanya and his enthronement over against Jesus Christ are manifest in the titles of two recent publications in Bengal, the first entitled, Lord Gauranga, or Salvation for all, and the other, Chaitanya's Message of Love. Chaitanya and his two chief followers, it should be said, were called the great lords (prabhus) of the sect, but the title "Lord Gauranga" is quite new, an echo of the title of Jesus Christ. With regard to the new power of Christ's personality, it should be noted that the author of Lord Gauranga strongly deprecates the idea that his desire is to demolish Christianity, or other than to extend the kingdom of Jesus Christ. He declares that Jesus Christ is as much a prophet as any avatar of the Hindus, and that Hindus can and ought to accept him as they do Krishna or Chaitanya. This is in accord with the spirit of Hinduism—namely, the fluidity of doctrine, and the free choice of guru or religious teacher, as set forth in a previous chapter—although it is still an advanced position for a Hindu to take up publicly.
Could we observe the course of evolution down which a species of animals or plants has come from some remote ancestry to their present form, with what interest would we note the specific characteristics gathering strength, as from generation to generation they prove their "fitness to survive"! The whole onward career of the evolving species would seem to have been aimed at the latest form in which we find it. Yet quite as wonderful phenomena as the species that has survived are the many variations of the species that have presented themselves, but have not proved fit to survive. One species only survives for hundreds of would-be collaterals that are extinct. The religious evolution that we have been observing is the growing power of Christ's personality in New India; and now, as further testimony to its power, a number of collateral movements, similarly inspired yet eccentric and hardly likely to endure, attract our attention. In these eccentric movements the power of Christ's personality is manifest, and yet it appears amid circumstances so peculiar that the phenomena in themselves are grotesque.
Three of these strange movements let us look at as new evidence of the power of Christ's personality in India. All three occur in still another province than those named, the Punjab, a province sui generis in many ways. Within a generation past, at least two men have arisen, either claiming to be Christ Himself come again, or a Messiah superior to Him. A third received a vision of "Jesus God," and proclaimed Him, wherever he went, as an object of worship. Of the first of the three leaders, Sir Alfred Lyall tells us, one Hakim Singh, "who listened to missionaries until he not only accepted the whole Christian dogma, but conceived himself to be the second embodiment [of Christ], and proclaimed himself as such and summoned the missionaries
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