However, as Mr. Lyall does not stand alone in his opinions, and as others have claimed for Judaism and Zoroastrianism the same missionary character which he claims in the name of Brahmanism, a few explanations may not be out of place.
Till very lately, an orthodox Jew was rather proud of the fact that he and his people had never condescended to spread their religion among Christians by such means as Christians use for the conversion of Jews. The Parsi community, too, seemed to share with the Quakers a prudent reluctance in admitting outsiders to the advantages conferred by membership of so respectable and influential a community, while the Brahmans certainly were the very last to compass heaven and earth for the conversion of Mlecchas or outcasts. Suddenly, however, all this is changed. The Chief Rabbi in London, stung to the quick by the reproach of the absence of the missionary spirit in Judaism, has delivered a sermon to show that I had maligned his people, and that, though they never had missionaries, they had been the most proselytizing people in the world. Some strong arguments in support of the same view have been brought forward by the Rev. Charles Voysey, whose conception of Judaism, however, is founded rather on what the great prophets wished it should have been than on what history teaches us it was. As the facts and arguments advanced by the Jewish advocates did not modify my judgment of the historical character of Judaism, I did not think it necessary to reply, particularly as another eminent Rabbi, the editor of the “Jewish World,” fully endorsed my views of Judaism, and expressed his surprise at the unorthodox theories advanced by so high an authority as Dr. Adler. I am informed, however, that the discussion thus originated will not remain without practical results, and that something like a Jewish Missionary Society is actually forming in London, to prove that, if missionary zeal is a test of life, the Jewish religion will not shrink from such a test. “We have done something,” the Rev. Charles Voysey remarks, “to stir them up; but let us not forget that our reminder was answered, not by a repulse or expression of surprise, but by an assurance that many earnest Jews had already been thinking of this very work, and planning among themselves how they could revive some kind of missionary enterprise. Before long, I feel sure they will give practical evidence that the missionary spirit is still alive and striving in their religion.” And again: “The Jews will soon show whether their religion is alive or dead, will soon meet the rival religions of the world on more than equal terms, and will once more take the lead in these days of enlightened belief, and in search after conceptions worthy of a God, just as of old Judaism stood on a lofty height, far above all the religions of mankind.”
What has happened in London seems to have happened in Bombay also. The Zoroastrians, too, did not like to be told that their religion was dying, and that their gradual decay was due to the absence of the missionary spirit among them. We read in the “Oriental” of April, 1874, “There is a discussion as to whether it is contrary to the creed of Zoroaster to seek converts to the faith. While conceding that Zoroaster was himself opposed to proselytizing heathens, most of the Parsis hold that the great decrease in the number of his followers renders it absolutely necessary to attempt to augment the sect.”
Lastly, Mr. Lyall stands up for Brahmanism, and maintains that in India Brahmanism had spread out during the last hundred years, while Islam and Christianity have contracted. “More persons in India,” he says, “become every year Brahmanists, than all the converts to all the other religions in India, put together.” “The number of converts,” he maintains, “added to Brahmanism in the last few generations, especially in this country, must be immense; and if the word proselyte may be used in the sense of one that has come, not necessarily being one that has been invited or persuaded to come, then Brahmanism may lay claim to be by far the most successful proselytizing religion of modern times in India.”
The words which I have ventured to put in italics, will show at once how little difference of opinion there is between Mr. Lyall and myself, as long as we use the same words in the same sense. If proselytizing could be used in the etymological sense, here assigned to it by Mr. Lyall, then, no doubt, Brahmanism would be a proselytizing or missionary religion. But this is mere playing with words. In English, proselytizing is never used in that sense. If I meant by missionary religions nothing more than religions which are capable of increase by admitting those that wish to be admitted, religions which say to the world at large, “Knock and it shall be opened unto you,” but no more, then, no doubt, Brahmanism, or at least some phases of it, might be called by that name. But what, according to my explanation, constitutes a missionary religion is something totally different. It is the spirit of truth in the hearts of believers which cannot rest unless it manifests itself in thought, word, and deed, which is not satisfied till it has carried its message to every human soul, till what it believes to be the truth is accepted as the truth by all members of the human family.
That spirit imparts to certain religions a character of their own, a character which, if I am not mistaken, constitutes the vital principle of our own religion, and of the other two which, in that respect, stand nearest to Christianity—Buddhism and Mohammedanism. This is not a mere outward difference, depending on the willingness of others to join or not to join; it is an inward difference which stamped Christianity as a missionary religion, when as yet it counted no more than twelve apostles, and which lays on every one that calls himself a Christian the duty of avowing his convictions, whatever they may be, and gaining others to embrace the truth. In that sense every true Christian is a missionary. Mr. Lyall is evidently aware of all this, if we may judge by the expressions which he uses when speaking of the increase of Brahmanism. He speaks of the clans and races which inhabit the hill-tracts, the out-lying uplands, and the uncleared jungle districts of India, as melting into Hinduism. He represents the ethnical frontier, described by Mr. Hunter in the “Annals of Rural Bengal,” as an ever-breaking shore of primitive beliefs, which tumble constantly into the ocean of Brahmanism. And even when he dwells on the fact that non-Aryans are invited by the Brahmans to enter in, he adds that this is done for the sake of profit and repute, not from a wish to eradicate error, to save souls, or to spread the truth. Such instances occurred even in the ancient history of India; and I had myself, in my “History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature,” pointed out the case of the Rathakaras or carpenters who were admitted to the Vedic sacrifices, and who, probably from a mere similarity of name—their leader being called Bribu,—had the old Vedic Ribhus assigned to them as their peculiar deities. But these were exceptions, they were concessions aux nègres, deviations from traditional rules, entirely owing to the pressure of circumstances; not manifestations springing from religious impulses. If Mr. Lyall remarks himself, that a religion which thus, half involuntarily, enlarges its borders, is not, in the strict sense of the word, a missionary religion, he shows that he is fully aware of the profound difference between a religion that grows by mere agglomeration and a religion that grows by its own strength, by its irrepressible missionary zeal. In answer to his concluding remark, that this ground was not taken in my lecture, I can only say that it was, nay, that it formed the very foundation on which the whole argument of my lecture was meant to rest.
There is more force in the objections which Mr. Lyall raises against my calling Brahmanism already dead. The word was too strong; at all events, it was liable to be misunderstood. What I meant to say was that the popular worship of Śiva and Vishṇu belongs to the same intellectual stratum as the worship of Jupiter and Apollo, that it is an anachronism in the nineteenth century, and that, for our purposes, for prognosticating the issues of the religious struggles of the future, it may simply be set aside. For settling any of the questions that may be said to be pending between Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Buddhism, Brahmanism is dead. For converting any number of Christians, Mohammedans, and Buddhists back to idolworship, Brahmanism is dead. It may absorb Sonthals, and Gonds, and Bhils, and other half savage races, with their rough-hewn jungle deities, it may even raise them to a higher stage of civilization, and imbue them with the first principles of a truer faith and a purer worship, but for carrying any of the strong positions of Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity, Brahmanism is powerless and dead. In India itself, where it clings to the soil with a thousand roots, it was beaten by Buddhism, and, if it afterwards recovered its position, that was due to physical force, not to persuasion and conversion. The struggle between Mohammedanism and Brahmanism in India was on both sides a political rather than a religious struggle: still when a change of religion arose from conviction, we see Brahmanism yielding to the purer light of Islam, not Islam to Brahmanism.
I did not undervalue the actual power of Brahmanism, particularly its power of resistance; nor did I prophesy its speedy extinction. I said on the contrary that “a religion may linger on for a long time, and be accepted by the large masses of the people, because it is there, and there is nothing better.” “It is true,” I added, “there are millions of children, women, and men in India who fall down before the stone image of Vishṇu, with his four arms, riding on a creature, half-bird, half-man, or sleeping on the serpent; who worship Śiva, a monster with three eyes, riding naked on a bull, with a necklace of skulls for his ornament. There are human beings who still believe in a god of war, Kârtikeya, with six faces, riding on a peacock, and holding bow and arrow in his hands; and who invoke a god of success, Gaṇeśa, with four hands and an elephant’s head, sitting on a rat. Nay, it is true that, in the broad daylight of the nineteenth century, the figure of the goddess Kali is carried through the streets of her own city, Calcutta, her wild disheveled hair reaching to her feet, with a necklace of human heads, her tongue protruded from her mouth, her girdle stained with blood. All this is true; but ask any Hindu who can read and write and think, whether these are the gods he believes in, and he will smile at your credulity. How long this living death of national religion in India may last, no one can tell: for our purposes, however, for gaining an idea of the issue of the great religious struggle of the future, that religion is dead and gone.”
I ask Mr. Lyall, is this true or is it not? He says himself, “that Brahmanism may possibly melt away of a heap and break up, I would not absolutely deny.” Would Mr. Lyall say the same of Buddhism, Mohammedanism, or Christianity? He points himself to the description which Gibbon gives of the ancient Roman religion in the second century of the Christian era, and shows how closely applicable it is to the present state of Brahmanism in India. “The tolerant superstition of the people, ‘not confined by the claims of any speculative system,’ the ‘devout polytheist, whom fear, gratitude, and curiosity, a dream, or an omen, a singular disorder, or a distant journey, perpetually disposed to multiply the articles of his belief, and to enlarge the list of his protectors;’ the ‘ingenious youth alike instructed in every school to reject and despise the religion of the multitude;’ the philosophic class who ‘look with indulgence on the errors of the vulgar, diligently practice the ceremonies of their fathers, and devoutly frequent the temples of their gods;’ the ‘magistrates who know and value the advantages of religion as it is connected with civil government;’—all these scenes and feelings are represented in India at this moment, though by no means in all parts of India.” If, then, in the second century a student of religious pathology had expressed his conviction that in spite of the number of its professors, in spite of its antiquity, in spite of its indigenous character, in spite of its political, civil, and social influences, in spite of its temples and priests, in spite of its schools and philosophers, the ancient religion of Jupiter had lost its vitality, was sick unto death, nay, for all real purposes was dead, would he have been far wrong? It may be replied, no doubt, that similar corruptions have crept into other religions also, that gaudy dolls are carried about in Christian cathedrals, that people are invited to see tears rolling down from the eyes of images, or to worship wine changed into blood, to say nothing of even more terrible hallucinations on the Eucharist propounded from so-called Protestant pulpits, and that, in spite of all this, we should not call the Christian religion dying or dead. This is true, and I thought that by my remarks on the different revivals of Hinduism from the twelfth to the nineteenth century, I had sufficiently indicated that new life may spring even from such apparently hopeless corruption. If it is Brahmanism that lives in the sects of Râmânuja and Râmânanda, in the poetry of Kabir and the wisdom of Nànak, in the honest purposes of Ram Mohun Roy and in the high aspirations of Keshub Chunder Sen, then I quite agree with Mr. Lyall that Brahmanism is not dead, but lives more intensely than ever.
But here, for some reason or other, Mr. Lyall seems to demur to my hopeful estimate of Brahmoism. He had expressed his own conviction that Brahmanism, though it might suddenly collapse and vanish, was more likely gradually to spiritualize and centralize its Pantheon, reduce its theology to a compact system, soften down its morals by symbolisms and interportations, discard “dogmatic extremes,” and generally to bring itself into accordance with improved standards of science and intelligence. He had also quoted with implied approval the remark of qualified observers, “that we might at any time witness a great Brahmanic reforming revival in India, if some really gifted and singularly powerful prophet were to arise among the Hindus.” But when I hinted that this prophet had actually arisen, and that in Brahmoism, as preached by Ram Mohun Roy, Debendranath Tagore, and Keshub Chunder Sen, we ought to recognize a transition from Brahmanism to a purer faith; when I pointed out that, though Christian missionaries might not wish to recognize Brahmoism as their work, it was 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, Mr. Lyall replies that “Brahmoism, as propagated by Keshub Chunder Sen, seems to be Unitarianism of an European type, and, so far as one can understand its argument, appears to have no logical stability or locus standi between revelation and pure rationalism; that it propounds either too much or too little to its hearers.” “A faith,” he continues, “which contains mere fervent sentiments, and high conceptions of morality, does not partake of the complexion or nature of those religions which have encompassed the heart of great nations, nor is it generally supposed in India that Brahmoism is perceptibly on the increase.”