LECTURE III.
THE BUDDHA OF THE PITAKAS: THE CHRIST OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
The condition of Palestine and the progress of events in it at the beginning of the Christian era, are set in the clear light of history, and defined by an accurate chronology. To the superficial observer it appeared to be a prosperous land, for it was fertile and carefully tilled, populous, and, in the northern regions especially, teeming with the fruits of industry. It had reached the commercial stage of civilisation, and everywhere, in well-built cities adorned with palatial buildings, many of them the abodes of merchants who rivalled the Italian nobles and Herodian princes in the costliness of their manner of living, it yielded indications of the luxury which successful commerce brings in its train. But as always happens when wealth abounds in a land, there was a corresponding amount of poverty. While the rich were lavishing fortunes upon selfish and gigantic follies, an increasing multitude, born and bred in squalor, were struggling for very existence. In the days of the Son of Man their numbers were vastly increased by political troubles which disturbed trade and depressed agriculture. So to an eye that looked beneath the surface this seemingly prosperous Palestine was diseased and in a dangerous condition, for pauperism and discontent were rapidly maturing the seeds of anarchy, and preparing for the successive revolutions in which so many perished before the Roman eagles swept down upon the carcass of a State politically dead, because morally and socially corrupt.
Under the Herodian dominion, secured as it had been by the destruction of an illustrious royal house and the sacrifice of their bravest patriots, the sympathies of the people revolted from the throne to cluster for a time around the temple; but just as the dignity of the office of the high priest was rising in their estimation, successive nominations to it by the king and procurator of men odious to the good turned the tide in a different direction. The hierarchy was represented by the Sadducees, a party small in number and far from popular. Though wearing names of ancient and honoured families, they were obviously careless alike of the sanctuary and of the interests of the nation. Strict observers of the law of their Davidic ancestor, they rejected the prevalent interpretations of it, and all the new-fangled doctrines concerning angels and spirits, and the resurrection of the just, which had been formulated since the Exile. Especially opposed to the belief that the keeping of the law would procure for a man recompence in a future state, they held that the law must be kept to the letter just because it was God’s will, even though the soul died with the body. Their wealth and position as the aristocracy brought them into connection with the representatives of the great foreign powers of the times, whose manners and fashions they copied; but the nearer they drew to the Roman and Asmonean nobility the further they drew apart from the people whom they never pretended to love, and who, equally alienated, regarded them with similar dislike.
Withdrawn from the temple, the affections of people were freely given to the synagogue leaders as the representatives and fosterers of the national ideals and hopes. In these days every small town had its synagogue, while in Jerusalem alone there were said to be four hundred and eighty. These were not only places of worship, but schools in which the Law was made the common possession of all without distinction, and also arenas for exciting discussion, in which was nursed that love of dialectics to which so many striking analogies exist both in India and Greece. They were dominated by the Scribes, the sole copiers for the ever increasing synagogues of the ancient Scriptures, and the true interpreters of the law. Pedantic and self-important though they generally were, they were revered so by the people for their piety and gifts that from them were chiefly selected the members of the court of the Sanhedrim, which represented all that was left to the nation of executive power. Their Cabbala, revealing the secret doctrines to be found in names, of which we have specimens in the writings of St. Paul,[[120]] and the mystic significance of numbers, of which we have traces in the Apocalypse, may be only interesting now as curiosities, but we must never forget that they rendered undying service to the world in preserving from corruption, by many arts carefully studied and applied, the texts of Holy Scripture.[[121]]
The Pharisees, the Nazarites of the nation as their name implies, the democratic antagonists of the aristocratic Sadducees, the staunch opponents of the Gentile, the believers in the coming kingdom of the just, were deservedly the most popular of all the religious sects in Palestine. More liberal than the Sadducees in their interpretation of the law in its bearing upon the people, they never thought of exacting for faults or transgressions the ancient penalties; but they were far more severe in their personal observance of it.[[122]] To the mass of them it was a ladder by which they might climb into the kingdom of heaven; and out of it, to make sure of this end, they evolved a most comprehensive system of bye-laws, as sacred to them as the original precepts by which every action and word and relation of life was regulated. Pharisaism was just Brahmanism, and though more ethically applied it was in its spirit and aim as selfish. Bent only upon accumulating merit, in character it became eventually as morally impure. Forgetting in their attention to petty details the weightier obligations of life, disregarding their neighbours that they might provide for their own recompence, the Pharisees became as a class so corrupt as to draw upon them the most scathing of all the denunciations of our Lord.
More Pharisaic than the Pharisees, said to be an offshoot or secession from them, the Essenes in their desert communities sought by the worship of Jehovah in the spirit of the prophets, and yet apparently by prayers to the sun, and by an ascetic and celibate life, to deliver the immortal soul from material impurity, to educate it to enjoy the beatific vision, and to prophesy the secret things of the future. In these communities of pious people, the very flower of Judaism,[[123]] the only ray of light in the deepening darkness, some may be pardoned in professing to find the dawn of Christianity—not in its external arrangements, but its inward dispositions and beliefs. In its avowal that morality was superior to legal observance, in its endeavour to prepare the mind by calm to receive the Divine instruction, in its sabbatic sanctification of all days of the week, in its estimate of all work as religious, and of every meal as sacramental, it pre-intimated the teaching of the coming gospel; but while its arrangements may have suggested the monastic institutions of Christendom, we can never regard it as the matrix of Christianity. Its life was just the last flickering ray of Judaism, a bright gleam irradiating the features of a moribund age, but not that of a new birth with promise of a mighty future. It was not the rush of a new force into the battle of the redemption of humanity, but the sauve qui peut of a rout which it believed to be universal. As pessimist as Brahmanism in its views of life, though more Buddhist than Brahman in its methods, its aim was the same—that of rescuing the individual from a world nigh unto perdition and really not worth the saving.[[124]]
In the virtuous Pharisee and the pious Essene Judaism found its best representatives;[[125]] but at most there were only six thousand Pharisees[[126]] and four thousand Essenes[[127]] in all the nation, and, alas! the majority of the Pharisees were not sincere; and the Essenes, though really in earnest, had abandoned the nation to its fate. Among the religious classes piety and morality had become so dissociated that a man who in the matter of belief or of worship would strain at a gnat, might in practice without condemnation swallow a camel. The result of this fatal divorce between creed and conduct was seen in a social corruption which augured everywhere the gathering of the storm-clouds of retribution. At that time Greece was dead, and what was best in its spirit had passed into Alexandria. There, blending with the more robust spirit of the Hebrew religion, it was forming that Hellenism which, though it never could account for the origin, was yet powerfully to influence the unfolding of our religion. In Hellenism we have the natural resultant of the conflux of Eastern and Western thought, which, according to some, will explain the birth of Christianity. In it certainly the Aryan and the Semite were seen contributing their very best thoughts, and the product was—Philo; but Philo-Judæus is neither St. Paul nor St. John, and the Christ of the Gospels is further beyond him than the heavens are above the earth.
In Alexandria Greece might be said to live, but Rome was hopelessly dying. Drunk with the cup of the sorceries of all nations, embruted with every lust, it was staggering to a doom which neither law, even the best conceived and most thoroughly administered, nor philosophy, even the wisest and most consistently illustrated, could avert. The civilisation of the Western world was marvellous: it was a world not only of poets and artists, of brave soldiers and subtle statesmen, but of sound moralists too; but civilisation, powerless to save, could only cover with broidered robes the leprous body, or adorn with golden trappings its bier, and morality could not restore what was sick unto death. When Rome and Palestine were alike corrupt, there was no hope for the world in man; yet when all help in man faileth, there never lacketh help in God, and so, just when the night was blackest, and despair had seized on all save a few aged people in the courts of Zion, and a few thoughtful Magi in the distant East, lo! over a Babe in the cattle-crib of a leewan in Bethlehem was descried the shining of the Star of Hope.
When we turn from Palestine to the holy land of Magadha, the cradle of Buddhism in the sixth century B.C., we find no light of history streaming upon it. All is dim and shadowy, with no chronology to define events, and no incidents to distinguish personalities. It is like a land of dreams to our modern conception, but it is not a chaos. We can trace to a certain extent movements in it, and as we follow them there emerges in outline sufficiently clear a real civilisation, which, though lacking the stir and endeavour, the commerce and the art of the West, and really inferior to it, is yet most interesting in its pathetic resemblances, and all the more instructive that its beliefs and institutions were formed out of antecedents and predispositions very different from any of which the Western world had experience.
It is evident from the very cursory survey already made that religious belief in India and in the West must have passed through phases significantly similar. In both it proceeded from faith in a revealed system of truth—in India in the inspired Vedas, in Palestine in the inspired oracles. Human speculation in both cases was begotten, and for long it was educated in faith in revelation, then beginning to rationalise; in both cases it unintentionally undermined what at first it only endeavoured to explain. Turning from ancient scrolls to the study of the book of human nature, whose pages, though often tattered and defiled, are always fascinating, it was staggered by the contradiction between man’s ideals of goodness and justice and the realities of human history. Out of this collision arose the Promethean demand that the divine powers that govern life “should either explain or abdicate.” In Palestine this wrestle with the inequalities of providence originated early, and continued all along; but it was confined within limits by faith in the personality of Deity as one so infinitely greater than man that only a part of His ways could be understood. Indian speculation never reached the approaches to this idea of God: it wandered into a Pantheism of a grosser type than ever the West was acquainted with, and once it reached that stage it could not stop. Just as in Greece pantheism ripened into the materialism of the Epicurean and the atheism of the Stoic, so in India, even before the days of Gotama, may have begun that open revolt against Deity, in the perilous attempt of reason to explain by itself the universe, with which his name has since then been most closely associated.