If what I have frequently repeated in these chapters be correct—that in the nineteenth century educated India has become largely monotheistic, it is in keeping therewith that the prevailing conception of religion should have changed, alongside, from the quest of Saving Knowledge to that of Bhakti or enthusiastic devotion to a person. Direct confirmation of that inference, a recent Hindu historian supplies. In a different context altogether, he declares: "The doctrine of bhakti (Faith) now rules the Hindu to the almost utter exclusion of the higher and more intellectual doctrine of gnan (Knowledge of the Supreme Soul)." The conception of the all-comprehending impersonal Brahma has, indeed, lost vitality; for the educated also the externals of the popular religion have lost their significance and become puerile. But for them also, the objects of popular bhakti, Ram and Krishna, are as much epical as religious heroes. Hinduism needs an object of bhakti for her educated people. The fact explains
several of the novel religious features of the past half-century. The great jogi, Buddha, although not a brahman, was rediscovered as a religious hero for Hindus; at the commencement of the century he was a heretic to the brahmans. "The head of a sect inimical to Hinduism," the great Rammohan Roy calls him. So Sir Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia had a great vogue some twenty years ago. Then Krishna has had his life re-written and his cult revived—purged of the old excesses of the Krishna-bhakti. More recently, Chaitanya, the religious teacher in Bengal in the fifteenth century, has been adopted by certain of the educated class in Bengal as an object of bhakti. Here, it seems to me, is found the place of Christ in the mind of educated India. They are fairly familiar now with the story of the New Testament, and Jesus Christ stands before them as the supereminent object of bhakti; and I venture to say is generally regarded as such, although comparatively few as yet have adopted the bhakti attitude towards Him. The Imitatio Christi, however, is a well-known book to the spiritually minded among the educated classes. India has advanced beyond the cold, intellectual, Unitarian appreciation of Jesus Christ that marked the early Brāhma and Prārthanā Samāj movements
and manifested itself in their creeds in express denial of any incarnation. For Brāhma worship, I have seen the hymn, "Jesus, lover of my soul," transformed into "Father, lover of my soul." Hindus of the newer bhakti attitude to Christ would find no difficulty in singing the hymn as Christians do, provided the doctrinal background be not obtruded upon them. Sober faith has dawned, and will formulate itself by and by.
CHAPTER XXI
CONCLUSION
Sailing, say to India, from Britain down through the Atlantic, close by the coast of Portugal and Spain, and then, within the Mediterranean, skirting the coast of Algeria, and so on, one is often oppressed with a sense of his isolation. We can see that the land we are passing is inhabited by human beings like ourselves; and those houses visible are homes; and signs of life we can see even from our passing vessel. What of all the tragedies and comedies that are daily being enacted in these houses—the exits and the entrances, the friendships and the feuds, the selfishnesses and self-sacrifices, the commonplace toil, the children's play, that are going
on the very moment we are looking? We are out of it, and our affections refuse to be wholly alienated from these fellow-beings, although the ship of which we form a part must pursue her own aim, and hurries along.
The Briton's tie to India and Indians is of no passing accidental character. Our life-histories are not merely running parallel; our destinies are linked together. Christian feeling, duty, self-interest, and the interest of a linked destiny all call upon us to know each other and cherish mutual sympathy. Not that the West has ever been without an interest in India, as far back as we have Indian history, in the Greek accounts of the invasion of India by Alexander the Great in 327 B.C. Writing in the first century B.C. and rehearsing what the earlier Greek writers had said about India, Strabo, the Greek geographer, testifies to the prevailing interest in India, and even sets forth the difficulty of knowing India, exactly as a modern student of India often feels inclined to do. "We must take with discrimination," he says, "what we are told about India, for it is the most distant of lands, and few of our nation have seen it. Those, moreover, who have seen it, have seen only
a part, and most of what they say is no more than hearsay. Even what they saw, they became acquainted with only while passing through the country with an army, in great haste. Yea, even their reports about the same things are not the same, although they write as if they had examined the things with the greatest care and attention. Some of the writers were fellow-soldiers and fellow-travellers, yet oft-times they contradict each other.... Nor do those who at present make voyages thither afford any precise information." We sympathise with Strabo, as our own readers also may. The interest of the West was of course interrupted when the Turks thrust themselves in between Europe and India and blocked the road Eastward overland. But the sea-road round the Cape of Good Hope was discovered, and West and East met more directly again, and Britain's special interest in India began. Judged by the recent output of English books on India, the interest of Britons in things Indian is rapidly increasing, and, pace Strabo, it is hoped that this book, the record of the birth of New Ideas in India, will not only increase the knowledge but also deepen interest and sympathy. For even more noteworthy than the number of new books—since many of the new
books deal only with what may be called Pictorial India—is the deepening of interest manifest in recent years.