master. According to one account, Chet Ram made his bed on the grave in which his master lay; according to another, for three years his sleeping place was the vault within which his master was buried. It was at this time that he had the vision of "Jesus God," already referred to, between the years 1860 and 1865. Like Caedmon, he has described his vision in verse—
Their indefinite composite theology.
Whence came the Christian seed of Chet Ram's vision? His master Mahbub Shah was a Mahomedan, and Jesus Christ is reckoned one of the Mahomedan prophets. But it is the Christ of Christianity, not of Mahomedanism, that Chet Ram saw in his vision of the glorious form showing the face of mercy, at once the dispenser of justice, the revealer of mysteries, and the giver of salvation. Whatever the source of the vision, Chet Ram saw and believed and began to hold up Jesus Christ before other men's eyes, and Chet Ram himself thus became the guru or religious teacher of what may be called an indigenous Christian Church. A moderate estimate reckons the Chet Ramis at about five thousand souls, the religious force of the sect being represented by the Chet Rami ascetics, who go about making their gospel known and living on alms. Chet Ram himself died in 1894, and at the headquarters of the sect at Buchhoke, near Lahore, his ashes and the bones of his master Mahbub Shah are kept in two coffins, which the faithful visit, particularly on certain Chet Rami holy-days, on which fairs are held. In keeping with the command of the vision, several copies of the New Testament and one complete Bible were also on view when the writer of the
article in East and West visited the sanctuary in 1903. The Census Report for 1901 sums the Chet Ramis up by saying that "the sect professes a worship of Christ," and that is our present point of view. But we cannot leave them without noticing also how Indian they are in their unwillingness to define their thought, and in their readiness to enthrone a holy man and his relics. Undefined thought we see expressed in symbol. There are four doors to the sanctuary at Buchhoke,—the fakiri [Chet Rami ascetics'] door, the Hindu, Christian, and Mahomedan doors—expressing the openness of the Chet Rami sanctuary to all sects. Their theology is a corresponding conglomeration. It includes a Christian trinity of Jesus Son of Mary [the Mahomedan designation of Christ], the Holy Spirit, and God; and a Hindu triad of the world's three potencies, namely, Allah, Parameswar, and Khuda, a jumble of Hindu and Mahomedan names, but representing the Hindu triad of the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer.
Parallel between the nineteenth century in India and the second, third, and fourth centuries in the History of the Church.
The Theosophists and the Neo-Platonists.
The Neo-Platonists and New India's homage to Christ.
The Neo-Platonists and the Hindu Revivalists.
In respect of the phenomenon of the homage shown to Christ over against the hostility shown to His Church, the second, third, and fourth centuries in the history of the Church present a striking parallel to the nineteenth century in India.