generation they prove their "fitness to survive"! The whole onward career of the evolving species would seem to have been aimed at the latest form in which we find it. Yet quite as wonderful phenomena as the species that has survived are the many variations of the species that have presented themselves, but have not proved fit to survive. One species only survives for hundreds of would-be collaterals that are extinct. The religious evolution that we have been observing is the growing power of Christ's personality in New India; and now, as further testimony to its power, a number of collateral movements, similarly inspired yet eccentric and hardly likely to endure, attract our attention. In these eccentric movements the power of Christ's personality is manifest, and yet it appears amid circumstances so peculiar that the phenomena in themselves are grotesque.
The Punjab—two have set themselves up as Christ come again.
Hakim Singh.
Mirzā Gholām Ahmad.
Three of these strange movements let us look at as new evidence of the power of Christ's personality in India. All three occur in still another province than those named, the Punjab, a province sui generis in many ways. Within a generation past, at least two men have arisen, either claiming to be Christ Himself come again, or a Messiah superior to Him. A third received a vision of "Jesus God," and
proclaimed Him, wherever he went, as an object of worship. Of the first of the three leaders, Sir Alfred Lyall tells us, one Hakim Singh, "who listened to missionaries until he not only accepted the whole Christian dogma, but conceived himself to be the second embodiment [of Christ], and proclaimed himself as such and summoned the missionaries to acknowledge him." It sounds much like blasphemy, or mere lunacy; but in India one learns not to be shocked at what in Europe would be rankest blasphemy; the intention must decide the innocence or the offence. Hakim Singh "professed to work miracles, preached pure morality, but also venerated the cow,"—strange chequer of Hindu and Christian ideas.[101] The second case is the better known one of Mirzā Gholām Ahmad, of Qādiān, who sets up a claim to be "the Similitude of the Messiah" and "the Messiah of the Twentieth Century." As his name shows, he is a Mahomedan, but the assumption of the name "Messiah" also shows that it is in Christ's place he declares himself to stand. At the same time, his appeal is to his fellow-Mahomedans; for he explains that as Jesus was the Messiah of Moses, he himself is the Messiah of Mahomed. His superiority to Christ, he expressly declares. "
I shall be guilty of concealing the truth," he says in his English monthly, the Review of Religions, of May 1902, "if I do not assert that the prophecies which God Almighty has granted me are of a far better quality in clearness, force, and truth than the ambiguous predictions of Jesus.... But notwithstanding all this superiority, I cannot assert Divinity or Sonship of God." He claims "to have been sent by God to reform the true religion of God, now corrupted by Jews, Christians, and Mahomedans." Doubly blasphemous as his claims sound in the ears of orthodox Mahomedans, who reckon both Christ and Mahomed as prophets, his sect is now estimated to number at least 10,000, including many educated Mahomedans. Whatever its fate—a mere comet or a new planet in the Indian sky—it indicates the religious stirring of educated India in another province, and the prominence of Christ's personality therein. Mirzā Gholām Ahmad himself recommends the reading of the Gospels. As to Christ's death, Mirzā Gholām Ahmad has a theory of his own. The Koran declares, according to Mahomedan expositors, that it was not Christ who suffered on the cross, but another in His likeness. Mirzā Gholām Ahmad teaches that Jesus was crucified but did not die,
that He was restored to life by His disciples and sent out of the country, whence He travelled East until He reached Thibet, eventually arriving at Cashmere, where He died, His tomb being located in the city of Srinagar.[102] According to the latest report of this reincarnation, he now claims to be at once Krishna come again for Hindus, Mahomed for Mahomedans, and Christ for Christians.
Chet Ram claimed to be an apostle.
The third movement is that of the Chet Ramis, or sect of Chet Ram, whose strange history may be found in East and West for July 1905. Chet Ram was an illiterate Hindu, a water-carrier and then a steward in the Indian army that took part in the war with China in 1859-1860. Returning to his native district not far from Lahore, Chet Ram, the Hindu, came under the spell of a Mahomedan ascetic Mahbub Shāh, left all and followed him as his "familiar" disciple. How this relationship between Hindu and Mahomedanism is quite possible in India, we have already explained on pages 163-4; Mahbub Shāh's strange combination of religious asceticism with the consumption of opium and wine, it takes some years' residence in India to understand. Then Mahbub Shāh died, and the disciple succeeded the