Thus Christianity meets and accepts the truth of Brahmanism. But how does it fulfil Brahmanism? The deficiencies of Brahmanism are these,—that holding to eternity, it omits time, and so loses history. It therefore is incapable of progress, for progress takes place in time. Believing in spirit, or infinite unlimited substance, it loses person, or definite substance, whether infinite or finite. The Christian God is the infinite, definite substance, self-limited or defined by his essential nature. He is good and not bad, righteous and not the opposite, perfect love, not perfect self-love. Christianity, therefore, gives us God as a person, and man also as a person, and so makes it possible to consider the universe as order, kosmos, method, beauty, and providence. For, unless we can conceive the Infinite Substance as definite, and not undefined; that is, as a person with positive characters; there is no difference between good and bad, right and wrong, to-day and to-morrow, this and that, but all is one immense chaos of indefinite spirit. The moment that creation begins, that the spirit of the Lord moves on the face of the waters, and says, "Let there be light," and so divides light from darkness, God becomes a person, and man can also be a person. Things then become "separate and divisible" which before were "huddled and lumped."

Christianity, therefore, fulfils Brahmanism by adding to eternity time, to the infinite the finite, to God as spirit God as nature and providence. God in himself is the unlimited, unknown, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; hidden, not by darkness, but by light. But God, as turned toward us in nature and providence, is the infinite definite substance, that is, having certain defined characters, though these have no bounds as regards extent. This last view of God Christianity shares with other religions, which differ from Brahmanism in the opposite direction. For example, the religion of Greece and of the Greek philosophers never loses the definite God, however high it may soar. While Brahmanism, seeing eternity and infinity, loses time and the finite, the Greek religion, dwelling in time, often loses the eternal and the spiritual. Christianity is the mediator, able to mediate, not by standing between both, but by standing beside both. It can lead the Hindoos to an Infinite Friend, a perfect Father, a Divine Providence, and so make the possibility for them of a new progress, and give to that ancient and highly endowed race another chance in history. What they want is evidently moral power, for they have all intellectual ability. The effeminate quality which has made them slaves of tyrants during two thousand years will be taken out of them, and a virile strength substituted, when they come to see God as law and love,—perfect law and perfect love,—and to see that communion with him comes, not from absorption, contemplation, and inaction, but from active obedience, moral growth, and personal development. For Christianity certainly teaches that we unite ourselves with God, not by sinking into and losing our personality, in him, but by developing it, so that we may be able to serve and love him.

Chapter IV.

Buddhism, or the Protestantism of the East.

§ 1. Buddhism, in its Forms, resembles Romanism; in its Spirit, Protestantism.

On first becoming acquainted with the mighty and ancient religion of Buddha, one may be tempted to deny the correctness of this title, "The Protestantism of the East." One might say, "Why not rather the Romanism of the East?" For so numerous are the resemblances between the customs of this system and those of the Romish Church, that the first Catholic missionaries who encountered the priests of Buddha were confounded, and thought that Satan had been mocking their sacred rites. Father Bury, a Portuguese missionary,[92] when he beheld the Chinese bonzes tonsured, using rosaries, praying in an unknown tongue, and kneeling before images, exclaimed in astonishment: "There is not a piece of dress, not a sacerdotal function, not a ceremony of the court of Rome, which the Devil has not copied in this country." Mr. Davis (Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, II. 491) speaks of "the celibacy of the Buddhist clergy, and the monastic life of the societies of both sexes; to which might be added their strings of beads, their manner of chanting prayers, their incense, and their candles." Mr. Medhurst ("China," London, 1857) mentions the image of a virgin, called the "queen of heaven," having an infant in her arms, and holding a cross. Confession of sins is regularly practised. Father Huc, in his "Recollections of a Journey in Tartary, Thibet, and China," (Hazlitt's translation), says: "The cross, the mitre, the dalmatica, the cope, which the grand lamas wear on their journeys, or when they are performing some ceremony out of the temple,—the service with double choirs, the psalmody, the exorcisms, the censer suspended from five chains, and which you can open or close at pleasure,—the benedictions given by the lamas by extending the right hand over the heads of the faithful,—the chaplet, ecclesiastical celibacy, religious retirement, the worship of the saints, the fasts, the processions, the litanies, the holy water,—all these are analogies between the Buddhists and ourselves." And in Thibet there is also a Dalai Lama, who is a sort of Buddhist pope. Such numerous and striking analogies are difficult to explain. After the simple theory "que le diable y était pour beaucoup" was abandoned, the next opinion held by the Jesuit missionaries was that the Buddhists had copied these customs from Nestorian missionaries, who are known to have penetrated early even as far as China.[93] But a serious objection to this theory is that Buddhism is at least five hundred years older than Christianity, and that many of these striking resemblances belong to its earliest period. Thus Wilson (Hindu Drama) has translated plays written before the Christian era, in which Buddhist monks appear as mendicants. The worship of relics is quite as ancient. Fergusson[94] describes topes, or shrines for relics, of very great antiquity, existing in India, Ceylon, Birmah, and Java. Many of them belong to the age of Asoka, the great Buddhist emperor, who ruled all India B.C. 250, and in whose reign Buddhism became the religion of the state, and held its third Œcumenical Council.

The ancient Buddhist architecture is very singular, and often very beautiful. It consists of topes, rock-cut temples, and monasteries. Some of the topes are monolithic columns, more than forty feet high, with ornamented capitals. Some are immense domes of brick and stone, containing sacred relics. The tooth of Buddha was once preserved in a magnificent shrine in India, but was conveyed to Ceyion A.D. 311, where it still remains an object of universal reverence. It is a piece of ivory or bone two inches long, and is kept in six cases, the largest of which, of solid silver, is five feet high. The other cases are inlaid with rubies and precious stones.[95] Besides this, Ceylon possesses the "left collar-bone relic," contained in a bell-shaped tope, fifty feet high, and the thorax bone, which was placed in a tope built by a Hindoo Raja, B.C. 250, beside which two others were subsequently erected, the last being eighty cubits high. The Sanchi tope, the finest in India,[96] is a solid dome of stone, one hundred and six feet in diameter and forty-two feet high, with a basement and terrace, having a colonnade, now fallen, of sixty pillars, with richly carved stone railing and gateway.

The rock-cut temples of the Buddhists are very ancient, and are numerous in India. Mr. Fergusson, who has made a special personal study of these monuments, believes that more than nine hundred still remain, most of them within the Bombay presidency. Of these, many date back two centuries before our era. In form they singularly resemble the earliest Roman Catholic churches. Excavated out of the solid rock, they have a nave and side aisles, terminating in an apse or semi-dome, round which the aisle is carried. One at Karli, built in this manner, is one hundred and twenty-six feet long and forty-five wide, with fifteen richly carved columns on each side, separating the nave from the aisles. The facade of this temple is also richly ornamented, and has a great open window for lighting the interior, beneath an elegant gallery or rood-loft.

The Buddhist rock-cut monasteries in India are also numerous, though long since deserted. Between seven and eight hundred are known to exist, most of them having been excavated between B.C. 200 and A.D. 500. Buddhist monks, then as now, took the same three vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience, which are taken by the members of all the Catholic orders. In addition to this, all the Buddhist priests are mendicants. They shave their heads, wear a friar's robe tied round the waist with a rope, and beg from house to house, carrying their wooden bowl in which to receive boiled rice. The old monasteries of India contain chapels and cells for the monks. The largest, however, had accommodation for only thirty or forty; while at the present time a single monastery in Thibet, visited by MM. Huc and Gabet (the lamasery of Kounboum), is occupied by four thousand lamas. The structure of these monasteries shows clearly that the monkish system of the Buddhists is far too ancient to have been copied from the Christians.