“After a few months’ travel I came to Hardwar, and then proceeded to a place called Rishikes, celebrated for its Sadhus and Sanyasis. My intention was to stay there and practise yoga dharmsala, I was going to bring water from the Ganges when I smelt a very bad odour. As I turned round I saw a dead body in the street, rotting in the mud. Around the corpse were the huts of the Sanyasis, who were performing tap-jap almost the whole day; but none of them had even enough of compassion to dispose of the body of the poor man who had died helpless on the street. I thought that if this was religion, then what was irreligion? My spirit revolted against these Sadhus.
“I perceived in my heart of hearts that yog-sadhan cannot create that love in man which makes a man feel for a fellow-man. Where there is no such love there can be no religion from God.”
And then he goes on to relate how, leaving Rishikes, he fell in with a Christian preacher, and eventually found in Christ that peace which all his voluntary hardship had failed to afford, and how he had been led on and on in his pilgrim walk, till he had now the blessed and responsible work of teaching others of his fellow-countrymen how best to bring the good news of the eternal love to all the hungry and thirsty souls around. (He was then Principal of a theological seminary.)
There have already been many such cases of Sadhus and faqirs converted to Christianity, and these men and women have, as might be expected, exerted an immense influence on their fellow-countrymen. They have presented them with a Christianity in an Eastern dress which they can recognize as congenial to the sentiments of their country, and exemplified in their own self-denying lives, full of the spirit of that austerity which the Indian has long believed to be inseparable from religious zeal.
Devotion, austerity, and asceticism in the cause of religion have been characteristic of India as far back as history records. Life has always been precarious for the majority of the population in the East, and plagues, famines and wars have familiarized them with the tragic spectacles of multitudes of young and old being suddenly carried off in the midst of business or enjoyment. Consequently, their sages dwelt much on the uncertainty of life, and developed the doctrine that the world and its gay shows were only an illusion of the senses, and the goal of the spirit was to divest itself of this illusion and rise superior to the limitations of matter. By the practice of austerities, the grossness of the flesh, the demands of the body, and the storms of the passions, would be subdued, and the spirit gain freedom from the endless round of reincarnation, and ultimately join the illimitable sea whence it came, as the drop on the lotus-leaf falls back into the water and is lost therein.
Then, it is universally believed that by these austerities the ascetic gains power with the gods, and can bring down blessings from above for himself and his votaries. He can, in fact, extort favours from the unwilling gods if he only carry his self-torture and privations to the requisite extreme.
We find much the same idea in the ascetic saints of the early Christian era. Thus Tennyson, in his poem “St. Simeon Stylites,” puts the following words into the mouth of the saint. He is addressing a crowd of people who have come to worship him, and who believe that, owing to his great austerities, he has the power of granting their requests.
“Speak! is there any of you halt or maim’d?
I think you know I have some power with Heaven
From my long penance; let him speak his wish.”