For Western minds it is difficult to realise the close connection between the doctrine of transmigration and the mood of India, rightly or wrongly termed pessimism. Our instinctive feeling is that life is sweet; while there is life there is hope, we say; "healthy optimism" is the expression of Professor James in his Varieties of Religious Experience; it is "more life and fuller that we want." In keeping with this Western and human instinct, the Christian idea of the Hereafter is a fuller life than the life Here, a perfect eternal life. To the pessimist, on the contrary [and Hindu philosophy is pessimistic, whatever be the new mood of India], the question is, "Why was I born?" The Indian doctrine of transmigration comes with answer—"Life is a punishment: it is the bitter consequence of our past that we are working out; we must submit to be born into the world again and again, until we are cleared." "Yes, until your minds are cleared," the Indian pantheist adds, "life itself is a delusion, if you only knew it; life itself, your consciousness of individuality or separateness, is a delusion." But the pantheist's thought is here beside our present point.
Transmigration the antithesis of eternal life.
To the pessimistic Indian accepting the Indian view of transmigration, it is therefore no gospel to preach the continuation of life, either here or hereafter. "To be born again" sounds like a penance to be endured. Mukti, commonly rendered salvation, is not regeneration Here and eternal life Hereafter; it is deliverance from further lives altogether. If, however, we accept the statement that the value of human life in India is rising, that life is becoming worth living, and that the pessimistic mood is no ingrained fundamental trait, we are prepared to believe that the hopeful Christian conception of the Here and the Hereafter is finding acceptance. Rightly understood, the Christian conception is at bottom the antithesis of pessimism and its corollary, transmigration. To deny the one is almost to assert the other. The decay of the one is the growth of the other. For the Christian conception of the Here and the Hereafter—what is it? Life, eternal, in and through the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. "God gave unto us eternal life, and the life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath the life."[110] Says Harnack in his volume What is Christianity? "The Christian religion means one thing, and one thing only—eternal life
in the midst of time by the strength and under the eyes of God." Not that the new idea in India is to be wholly ascribed to Christian influence. A marked change in Christian thought itself during the nineteenth century has been the higher value of this present life. Christianity has become a vitalising gospel for the life Here even more than for the Hereafter. But assuming the truth of what we have sought to show, namely, that within the past century the winning personality of Christ has come to New India, a new incentive to noble life and service, we have at least a further reason for believing that pessimism and transmigration are fading out of Indian minds. The new Advent, as that at Bethlehem, is a turning-point of time; the gloomy winter of pessimism is turning to a hopeful spring.
CHAPTER XVIII
INDIAN TRANSMIGRATION AND THE CHRISTIAN HERE AND HEREAFTER
Over against Transmigration, Christian immortality is continuity of the individual's memory.
To appreciate the impact of the Christian idea of the Here and Hereafter upon the Hindu idea of Transmigration and Absorption, the two ideas must be more fully examined. Stated briefly, the Christian idea is that after this life on earth comes an Eternity, whose character has been determined by the life on earth. The crisis of death terminates our bodily activities and renders impossible any further action, either virtuous or sinful, and ushers
the soul, its ledger closed, its earthy limitations cast off, into some more immediate presence of God. If in communion with God, through its faith in Jesus Christ, the soul is in a state of blessedness; if still alien from God, the soul is in a state of utter misery, for its spiritual perception and its recollection of itself are now clear. That, at all events, seems a fair statement of the belief of many Protestants, so far as their belief is definite at all. But over against transmigration, what are the essential and distinctive features of that Christian belief? Its essentially distinctive feature, both in the case of the blessed and of the miserable, is a continuity of the consciousness in the life that now is with that which is to come. The soul in bliss or misery is able to associate its existing state with its past. Even on earth, as the modern preacher tells us, heaven and hell are already begun. Over against the Hindu idea of transmigration, accordingly, we define the Christian idea of immortality as the continuity of our consciousness, or the immortality of the individual consciousness.
Transmigration is essentially dissolution of the individual's memory.