New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century by John Morrison (best ereader for graphic novels txt) π
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CHAPTER IX NEW RELIGIOUS IDEASβARE THERE ANY? "From low to high doth dissolution climb.
Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear
The longest date do melt like frosty rime,
That in the morning whitened hill and plain
And is no more; drop like the tower sublime
Of yesterday, which royally did wear
His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain
Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of Time."
WORDSWORTH.
It would be interesting to speculate what the Renaissance of the sixteenth century would have done for Europe had it been unaccompanied by a Reformation of religion. Without the Reformation, we may aver there would have been for the British nation no Bible of 1611, no Pilgrim Fathers to America, and no Revolution of 1688, along with all that these things imply of progress many-fold. What might have been, however, although interesting as a speculation, is too uncertain to be discussed further with profit. I only desire to give a general idea of the religious situation in India at the close of the nineteenth century. There has been a Renaissance without a Reformation.
Into the new intellectual world the Hindu mind has willingly entered, but progress in religious ideas has been slow and reluctant. The new political idea of the unity of India and the consciousness of citizenship were pleasing discoveries that met with no opposition; but that same new Indian national consciousness resented any departure from the old social and religious ideas.
In speaking of the development of religious ideas in India, I use the term religious in the modern sense. Under religion, in India is comprehended much that in Europe would be reckoned within the social sphere. In India all questions of inter-marriage and of eating together, many questions regarding occupations and the relations of earning members of a family to idle members, are religious not social questions.
The case was similar among the Jews, we may remember. As recorded in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, two of the three injunctions of the Jerusalem Church to the Gentile Church at Antioch deal with these same socio-religious matters. Blood and animals killed by strangling were to be prohibited as food, and certain marriages also were forbidden.
Perhaps among Europeans the question of burial v. cremation may be instanced as a matter of social custom that has been made a religious question. But in no country more than in India have customs, mores, come also to mean morals. A halo of religious sanctity encircles the things that have been and are. Taking "religion," however, in the modern sense, we ask: Although there has not been any great Reformation of religion, have religious ideas undergone no noteworthy development? It is well to put the question definitely with regard to religion, although in the opening chapter abundant testimony to a general change in ideas has already been cited. There is no lack of specific evidence as to religious changes, and the adoption of certain Christian ideas.
Sir Alfred Lyall's observations let us first of all recall, for he possesses all the experience of an Indian Civil Servant and Governor of a Provinceβthe United Provinces. He speaks both for officials and for Europeans conversant with India.[47] Speaking in the person of an orthodox brahman surveying the moral and material changes that English rule is producing in India, he says: "We are parting rapidly under ... this Public Instruction with our religious beliefs." The old brahman warns the British Government that the old deities are being dethroned, and that the responsibility for famines, formerly imputed to the gods, is being cast upon the British Government. Another official witness speaks still more plainly. The Bengal Government Report upon the publications of the year 1899 asserts: "All this revolution in the religious belief of the educated Hindu has been brought about as much by the dissemination of Christian thought by missionaries as by the study of Hindu scriptures; for Christian influence is detectable in many of the Hindu publications of the year." The writer of the Report is a Hindu gentleman. The Report of the Census of India, 1901, declares that "the influence of Christian teaching is ... far reaching, and that there are many whose acts and opinions have been greatly modified thereby." After these statements from secular and official writers, we may refrain from quoting from Mission authorities more than the statement of the Decennial Conference of representative missionaries from all India in 1902. The statement refers to South India. "Christianity," we are told, "is in the air. The higher classes are assimilating its ideas."[48] Thus from East and North and South, from officials and non-officials, from Europeans and natives, comes concurrent testimony. There is no declared Reformation, but Christian and Western religious ideas are leavening India.
To the student of Comparative Religion, or of Christianity, or of the general progress of nations, that testimony from India is particularly interesting. To the student of Comparative Religion, India presents a particularly attractive field. Not hidden away in sacred classics or in the records of travellers, but as elements of existing religions, professed by men around, are illustrations of most of the types of religious thought and practice. There are the pantheism of certain Hindu ascetics, the polytheism of the masses, the animism of aboriginal races, and the varieties of theism of Christians, Mahomedans, and the new Hindus respectively. There are the curious phenomena of goddesses as well as gods, and of distinctive features in the character and worship of the female deities. There is the whole scale of worship up from bloody sacrifices and self-tortures and from worship where the priest is everything, to worship like that of Mahomedans and of Protestant Christians, where a mediatory priesthood is virtually repudiated. There is the stage, still farther beyond, at which the worshipper is supposed to be able to say of himself "I am God." Of the first and last stages, India may be called the special fields, for probably nowhere else in the world are so many animals killed in sacrifice as at the temple of Kalighat in Calcutta; and the last stage, as an observable religious phenomenon, is peculiar to India. In India there is presented to us salvation in the attainment of an eternal existence along with God, as among Christians and Mahomedans and many of the less educated Hindus; and there is salvation in deliverance from further lives, as among those Hindus who hold the doctrine of transmigration. In India all these varieties of religious thought and practice are actual, perceptible phenomena, ready for first-hand observation by the student of Comparative Religion. But still more interesting to him is that they are there in mutual contact, and telling upon each other. For in the sphere of human beliefs, the student is much more than an outside observer and classifier. He has his own conception of truth, and is interested in observing how far in each case there is a convergence towards truth or a divergence from it. In the sphere of human beliefs he holds further, that, given opportunity, the nearer to truth the greater certainty of survival. Given opportunity, as already postulated, the law of beliefs is the survival of the truest. Truth will prevail.
To the student of Christianity, again, that same concurrent testimony is profoundly interesting. Certain Christian ideas are being assimilated in India. Certain cardinal aspects of Christianity are proving themselves possessed of inherent force and attractiveness. They are showing that they possess force not from authority, or tradition, or as part of a system of doctrine, or as racially fitting, but when presented in new and often very unfavourable surroundings. Borrowing an expression from physical science, certain elements of Christianity are proving themselves dynamical. For in non-Christian India, ecclesiastical authority or tradition and the system of Christian doctrine as such, possess no force. By illustrations from other spheres, let us make clear what is meant by such dynamical elements of Christianity. The doctrine of the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection was put before the world by Darwin in 1859, and within the half century has been accepted almost as an axiom by the whole civilised world. Undoubtedly that doctrine has proved itself dynamical. On the other hand, a few years earlier than the publication of The Origin of Species, another body of new doctrine was propounded to Britain and the world, and strongly urged by its upholders, namely, the doctrine of Free Tradeβthe advantage to the community of buying in the cheapest market. True or false, that body of doctrine has not proved dynamical among the nations, for the great majority of peoples still repudiate the doctrines of Free Trade. Similarly certain elements of Christianity are commending themselves to new India, and certain others are failing to do so at this time.
From century to century these dynamical elements of Christianity may vary; and it is profoundly interesting to the student of the history of religious beliefs to observe the variation. In the early apostolic times, when the apostles and disciples were "scattered abroad," we see plainly in the Acts of the Apostles that the dynamical element of Christianity is the Resurrection of Our Lord. It is that which tells, and His coming reignβwith Jewish audiences in particular. It was, e.g., the manifestation of Christ to St. Paul on his way to Damascus that completed the conversion of his life. And so, repeatedly throughout the record of the Acts of the Apostles, they are described as witnessβbearers of the resurrection to the outside world. [Greek: MegalΓͺ dynamei], "with great power gave the apostles their witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus; and great grace was upon them all."[49] And yetβdynamical elements varyβin the different atmosphere of Athens (we are twice told in so many words) this same resurrection of Christ dug a gulf between St. Paul and the Athenians.[50] Passing
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