again from the Āryas to the new citadel of Benares, and Hinduism, the Hindu College, Benares, we find that along with the Text-book already mentioned, there was published a Catechism in Hindu Religion and Morals for boys and girls. One question is, "Can we know that eternal Being (the "One only without a second," or "The All," i.e. pantheistic Deity)? The answer is, "Only when revealed as Ishwar, the Lord, the loving Father of all the worlds and of all the creatures who live in them." That idea of the loving Father, of divine Law and Love in one person, is new to Hinduism. The law of God may be only imperfectly apprehended, but the loving Fatherhood of God, the approachable one, has become manifest in India—one of Christianity's dynamic doctrines. Strangest confirmation of all, a Mahomedan preacher of Behar a few years ago was expounding from the Koran the Fatherhood of God. The name and thought of the divine Father established, we may leave name and thought to be invested with their full significance in the fulness of time.
"It is with Pantheism, not Polytheism, that a rising morality will have to reckon," says Sir Alfred Lyall.[87] The result of all our observation
has been different. Pantheism is melting out of the sky of the educated, and if nothing else take its place, it will be a selfish materialism or agnosticism, not avowed or formulated yet shaping every motive, that the new morality will have to reckon with.
CHAPTER XV
JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF
Pantheism does not lead to belief in "the Son of God."
Pantheism, it has been said, lends itself to the lead to belief idea of avatars or incarnations of deity, and Hinduism, therefore, is familiar with avatars. Observation contradicts this à priori reasoning, nay, it justifies a statement almost contrary. To the philosopher who is thinking out a pantheistic system, or to the ascetic who is seeking after identity of consciousness with the One, the Hindu Avatars are only a part of the delusion, the Maya, in which men are steeped. To a pantheist, holding that his own consciousness of individuality is delusion, born of spiritual darkness and ignorance, the conception of an avatar or concrete presentation of deity as an individual is only still grosser delusion. "The name of God and the conventions of piety are as unreal as anything else in Maya," writes a
modern British apostle of Hinduism, while advocating the realisation of Maya as our salvation.[88] It does not seem to me justifiable to say that through Pantheism the Indian mind can approach the thought of Christ the Son of Man and the Son of God. But pantheism, with its allied doctrine of transmigration, may encourage the thought that our Lord was a great jogi or religious devotee, the last climax of many upward transmigrations, and that Christ had attained to the goal of illumination of the jogi, namely, identity of consciousness with deity, when he felt "I and the Father are one." That statement about Our Lord is sometimes made in India.
The avatars of popular theology.
It is not through the pantheism of the brahmanically learned and of religious devotees that the Indian mind has come within Christ's sphere of influence, but rather through the beliefs of the multitude and the new education of the middle class. And how, we ask, has Christ been introduced to India by association with the popular beliefs—how, rather, has the attempt been made to do so? The theology of the people begins, as has been already stated, with the Hindu Triad, the three great personal deities, namely, Brahmā, Vishnu, and Siva,—Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer respectively.