The effect of these religious reforms has been highly beneficial; it has cut into the very roots of idolatry, and has spread throughout India an intelligent and spiritual worship, which may at any time develop into a higher national creed.
The same effect which Mohammedanism produced on Hinduism is now being produced, in a much higher degree, on the religious mind of India by the mere presence of Christianity. That silent influence began to tell many years ago, even at a time when no missionaries were allowed within the territory of the old East India Company. Its first representative was Ram Mohun Roy, born just one hundred years ago, in 1772, who died at Bristol in 1833, the founder of the Brahma-Samâj. A man so highly cultivated and so highly religious as he was, could not but feel humiliated at the spectacle which the popular religion of his country presented to his English friends. He drew their attention to the fact that there was a purer religion to be found in the old sacred writings of his people, the Vedas. He went so far as to claim for the Vedas a divine origin, and to attempt the foundation of a reformed faith on their authority. In this attempt he failed.
No doubt the Vedas and other works of the ancient poets and prophets of India, contain treasures of truth, which ought never to be forgotten, least of all by the sons of India. The late good Bishop Cotton, in his address to the students of a missionary institution at Calcutta, advised them to use a certain hymn of the Rig-Veda in their daily prayers.[13] Nowhere do we find stronger arguments against idolatry, nowhere has the unity of the Deity been upheld more strenuously against the errors of polytheism than by some of the ancient sages of India. Even in the oldest of their sacred books, the Rig-Veda, composed three or four thousand years ago—where we find hymns addressed to the different deities of the sky, the air, the earth, the rivers—the protest of the human heart against many gods, breaks forth from time to time with no uncertain sound. One poet, after he has asked to whom sacrifice is due, answers, “to Him who is God above all gods.”[14] Another poet, after enumerating the names of many deities, affirms, without hesitation, that “these are all but names of Him who is One.” And even when single deities are invoked, it is not difficult to see that, in the mind of the poet, each one of the names is meant to express the highest conception of deity of which the human mind was then capable. The god of the sky is called Father and Mother and Friend; he is the Creator, the Upholder of the Universe; he rewards virtue and punishes sin; he listens to the prayers of those who love him.
But granting all this, we may well understand why an attempt to claim for these books a divine origin, and thus to make them an artificial foundation for a new religion, failed. The successor of Ram Mohun Roy, the present head of the Brahma-Samâj, the wise and excellent Debendranâth Tagore, was for a time even more decided in holding to the Vedas as the sole foundation of the new faith. But this could not last. As soon as the true character of the Vedas,[15] which but few people in India can understand, became known, partly through the efforts of native, partly of European scholars, the Indian reformers relinquished the claim of divine inspiration in favor of their Vedas, and were satisfied with a selection of passages from the works of the ancient sages of India, to express and embody the creed which the members of the Brahma-Samâj hold in common.[16]
The work which these religious reformers have been doing in India is excellent, and those only who know what it is, in religious matters, to break with the past, to forsake the established custom of a nation, to oppose the rush of public opinion, to brave adverse criticism, to submit to social persecution, can form any idea of what those men have suffered, in bearing witness to the truth that was within them.
They could not reckon on any sympathy on the part of Christian missionaries; nor did their work attract much attention in Europe till very lately, when a schism broke out in the Brahma-Samâj between the old conservative party and a new party, led by Keshub Chunder Sen. The former, though willing to surrender all that was clearly idolatrous in the ancient religion and customs of India, wished to retain all that might safely be retained: it did not wish to see the religion of India denationalized. The other party, inspired and led by Keshub Chunder Sen, went further in their zeal for religious purity. All that smacked of the old leaven was to be surrendered; not only caste, but even that sacred cord—the religious riband which makes and marks the Brahman, which is to remind him at every moment of his life, and whatever work he may be engaged in, of his God, of his ancestors, and of his children—even that was to be abandoned; and instead of founding their creed exclusively on the utterances of the ancient sages of their own country, all that was best in the sacred books of the whole world was selected and formed into a new sacred code.[17,][B]
The schism between these two parties is deeply to be deplored; but it is a sign of life. It augurs success rather than failure for the future. It is the same schism which St. Paul had to heal in the Church of Corinth, and he healed it with the words, so often misunderstood, “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.”
In the eyes of our missionaries this religious reform in India has not found much favor: nor need we wonder at this. Their object is to transplant, if possible, Christianity in its full integrity from England to India, as we might wish to transplant a full-grown tree. They do not deny the moral worth, the noble aspirations, the self-sacrificing zeal of these native reformers; but they fear that all this will but increase their dangerous influence, and retard the progress of Christianity, by drawing some of the best minds of India, that might have been gained over to our religion, into a different current. They feel towards Keshub Chunder Sen[18,][C] as Athanasius might have felt towards Ulfilas, the Arian Bishop of the Goths: and yet, what would have become of Christianity in Europe but for those Gothic races, but for those Arian heretics, who were considered more dangerous than downright pagans?
If we think of the future of India, and of the influence which that country has always exercised on the East, the movement of religious reform which is now going on appears to my mind the most momentous in this momentous century. If our missionaries feel constrained to repudiate it as their own work, history will be more just to them than they themselves.[19] And if not as the work of Christian missionaries, it will be recognized hereafter as the work of those missionary Christians who have lived in India, as examples of a true Christian life, who have approached the natives in a truly missionary spirit, in the spirit of truth and in the spirit of love; whose bright presence has thawed the ice, and brought out beneath it the old soil, ready to blossom into new life. These Indian puritans are not against us; for all the highest purposes of life they are with us, and we, I trust, with them. What would the early Christians have said to men, outside the pale of Christianity, who spoke of Christ and his doctrine as some of these Indian reformers? Would they have said to them, “Unless you speak our language and think our thoughts, unless you accept our Creed and sign our Articles, we can have nothing in common with you.”
O that Christians, and particularly missionaries, would lay to heart the words of a missionary Bishop![20] “I have for years thought,” writes Bishop Patteson, “that we seek in our missions a great deal too much to make English Christians. . . . . Evidently the heathen man is not treated fairly, if we encumber our message with unnecessary requirements. The ancient Church had its ‘selection of fundamentals.’ . . . . Any one can see what mistakes we have made in India. . . . Few men think themselves into the state of the Eastern mind. . . . We seek to denationalize these races, as far as I can see; whereas we ought surely to change as little as possible—only what is clearly incompatible with the simplest form of Christian teaching and practice. I do not mean that we are to compromise truth . . . . but do we not overlay it a good deal with human traditions!”