Therefore I believe that all religion is natural, all revealed. What faith in humanity springs up, what trust in God, when one recognizes the sympathy of religions! Every race believes in a Creator and Governor of the world, in whom devout souls recognize a Father also. Every race believes in immortality. Every race recognizes in its religious precepts the brotherhood of man. The whole gigantic system of caste in Hindostan has grown up in defiance of the Vedas, which are now being invoked to abolish them. The Heetopades of Vishnu Sarman forbid caste. “Is this one of our tribe or a stranger? is the calculation of the narrow-minded; but, to those of a noble disposition, the earth itself is but one family.” “What is religion?” says elsewhere the same book, and answers, “Tenderness toward all creatures.” “He is my beloved of whom mankind are not afraid and who of mankind is not afraid,” says the Bhagvat Geeta. “Kesava is pleased with him who does good to others, ... who is always desirous of the welfare of all creatures,” says the Vishnu Purana. In Confucius it is written, “My doctrine is simple and easy to understand;” and his chief disciple adds, “It consists only in having the heart right and in loving one’s neighbor as one’s self.” When he was asked, “Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?” he answered, “Is not ‘Reciprocity’ such a word? What you wish done to yourself, do to others.” By some translators the rule is given in a negative form, in which it is also found in the Jewish Talmud (Rabbi Hillel), “Do not to another what thou wouldst not he should do to thee; this is the sum of the law.” So Thales, when asked for a rule of life, taught, “That which thou blamest in another, do not thyself.” “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” said the Hebrew book of Leviticus. Iamblichus tells us that Pythagoras taught “the love of all to all.” “To live is not to live for one’s self alone, let us help one another,” said the Greek dramatist Menander; and the Roman dramatist Terence, following him, brought down the applause of the whole theatre by the saying, “I am a man; I count nothing human foreign to me.” “Give bread to a stranger,” said Quintilian, “in the name of the universal brotherhood which binds together all men under the common father of nature.” “What good man will look on any suffering as foreign to himself?” said the Latin satirist Juvenal. “This sympathy is what distinguishes us from brutes,” he adds. The poet Lucan predicted a time when warlike weapons should be laid aside, and all men love one another. “Nature has inclined us to love men,” said Cicero, “and this is the foundation of the law.” He also described his favorite virtue of justice as “devoting itself wholly to the good of others.” Seneca said, “We are members of one great body, Nature planted in us a mutual love, and fitted us for a social life. We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole.” “Love mankind,” wrote Marcus Antoninus, summing it all up in two words; while the loving soul of Epictetus extended the sphere of mutual affection beyond this earth, holding that “the universe is but one great city, full of beloved ones, divine and human, by nature endeared to each other.”[C]
This sympathy of religions extends even to the loftiest virtues,—the forgiveness of injuries, the love of enemies and the overcoming of evil with good. “The wise man,” said the Chinese Lao-tse, “avenges his injuries with benefits.” “Hatred,” says a Buddhist sacred book, the Dhammapada, “does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love; this is the eternal rule.” “To overcome evil with good is good, and to resist evil by evil is evil,” says a Mohammedan manual of ethics. “Turn not away from a sinner, but look on him with compassion,” says Saadi’s Gulistan. “If thine enemy hunger, give him bread to eat; if he thirst, give him water to drink,” said the Hebrew proverb. “He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it,” said Plato, and adds, “It is never right to return an injury.” “No one will dare maintain,” said Aristotle, “that it is better to do injustice than to bear it.” “We should do good to our enemy,” said Cleobulus, “and make him our friend.” “Speak not evil to a friend, nor even to an enemy,” said Pittacus, one of the Seven Wise Men. “It is more beautiful,” said Valerius Maximus, “to overcome injury by the power of kindness than to oppose to it the obstinacy of hatred.” Maximus Tyrius has a special chapter on the treatment of injuries, and concludes: “If he who injures does wrong, he who returns the injury does equally wrong.” Plutarch, in his essay, “How to profit by our enemies,” bids us sympathize with them in affliction and aid their needs. “A philosopher, when smitten, must love those who smite him, as if he were the father, the brother, of all men,” said Epictetus. “It is peculiar to man,” said Marcus Antoninus, “to love even those who do wrong.... Ask thyself daily to how many ill-minded persons thou hast shown a kind disposition.” He compares the wise and humane soul to a spring of pure water which blesses even him who curses it; and the Oriental story likens such a soul to the sandal-wood tree, which imparts its fragrance even to the axe that cuts it down.[D]
How it cheers and enlarges us to hear of these great thoughts and know that the Divine has never been without a witness on earth! How it must sadden the soul to disbelieve them. Worse yet to be in a position where one has to hope that they may not be correctly reported,—that one by one they may be explained away. A prosecuting attorney once told me that the most painful part of his position was that he had to hope that every man he prosecuted would be proved a villain. What is the painful circumstance in Mrs. Stowe’s Byron controversy? That she is obliged to hope that the character of a sister woman, hitherto stainless, may be hopelessly blackened. But what is this to their position who are bound to hope that the character of humanity will be blackened by wholesale, who are compelled to resist every atom of light that history reveals. For instance, as the great character of Buddha has come out from the darkness, within fifty years, how these reluctant people have struggled against it, still desiring to escape. “Save us, O God!” they have seemed to say, “from the distress of believing that so many years ago there was a sublime human life.” Show such persons that the great religious ideas and maxims are as old as literature; and how they resist the knowledge! “Surely it is not so bad as that,” they say. “Is there not a possibility of a mistranslation? Let us see the text, explore the lexicon; is there no labor, no toil, by which we can convince ourselves that there is a mistake? Anything rather than believe that there is a light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”
For this purpose the very facts of history must be suppressed or explained away. Sir George Mackenzie, in his “Travels in Iceland,” says that the clergy prevented till 1630, with “mistaken zeal,” the publication of the Scandinavian Eddas. Huc, the Roman Catholic Missionary, described in such truthful colors the religious influence of Buddhism in Thibet that his book was put in the index expurgatorius at Rome. Balmes, a learned Roman Catholic writer, declares that “Christianity is stripped of a portion of its honors” if we trace back any high standard of female purity to the ancient Germans; and so he coolly sets aside as “poetical” the plain statements of the accurate Tacitus. If we are to believe the accounts given of the Jewish Essenes by Josephus, De Quincey thinks, the claims made by Christianity are annihilated. “If Essenism could make good its pretensions, there, at one blow, would be an end of Christianity, which, in that case, is not only superseded as an idle repetition of a religious system already published, but as a criminal plagiarism. Nor can the wit of man evade the conclusion.” He accordingly attempts to explain away the testimony of Josephus.[E]
And what makes this exclusiveness the more repulsive is its modernness. Paul himself quoted from the sublime hymn of Cleanthes to prove to the Greeks that they too recognized the Fatherhood of God. The early Christian apologists, living face to face with the elder religions, made no exclusive claims. Tertullian declared the soul to be an older authority than prophecy, and its voice the gift of God from the beginning. Justin Martyr said, “Those who live according to Reason are Christians, though you may call them atheists.... Such among the Greeks were Socrates and Heraclitus and the rest. They who have made or do make Reason (Logos) their rule of life are Christians and men without fear and trembling.” “The same God,” said Clement, “to whom we owe the Old and New Testaments gave also to the Greeks their Greek philosophy by which the Almighty is glorified among the Greeks.” Lactantius declared that the ancient philosophers “attained the full truth and the whole mystery of religion.” “One would suppose,” said Minucius Felix, “either that the Christians were philosophers, or the philosophers Christians.” “What is now called the Christian religion,” said Augustine, “has existed among the ancients, and was not absent from the beginning of the human race, until Christ came in the flesh; from which time the true religion, which existed already, began to be called Christian.” Jerome said that “the knowledge of God was present by nature in all, nor was there any one born without God, or who had not in himself the seeds of all virtues.”[F]
How few modern sects reach even this point of impartiality! The usual course of theologians is to deny, and to deny with fury, that any such sympathy of religions exists. “There never was a time,” says a distinguished European preacher, “when there did not exist an infinite gulf between the ideas of the ancients and the ideas of Christianity. There is an end of Christianity if men agree in thinking the contrary.” And an eminent Unitarian preacher in America, Rev. A. P. Peabody, says, “If the truths of Christianity are intuitive and self-evident, how is it that they formed no part of any man’s consciousness till the advent of Christ?” How can any one look history in the face, how can any man open even the dictionary of any ancient language, and yet say this? What word sums up the highest Christian virtue if not philanthropy? And yet the word is a Greek word, and was used in the same sense before Christendom existed.[G]
Fortunately there have always been men whose larger minds could adapt themselves to the truth instead of narrowing the truth to them. In William Penn’s “No Cross No Crown,” one-half the pages are devoted to the religious testimony of Christians, and one-half to that of the non-Christian world. The writings of the most learned of English Catholics, Digby, are a treasure-house of ancient religion, and the conflict between the bigot and the scholar makes him deliciously inconsistent. He states a doctrine, illustrates it from the schoolmen or the fathers, proudly claims it as being monopolized by the Christian church, and ends by citing a parallel passage from Plato or Æschylus! “The ancient poets,” he declares, “seem never to have conceived the idea of a spirit of resignation which would sanctify calamity;” and accordingly he quotes Aristotle’s assertion, that “suffering becomes beautiful when any one bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility, but through greatness of mind.” “There is not a passage in the classics,” he declares, “which recognizes the beauty of holiness and Christian mildness;” and in the next breath he remarks, that Homer’s description of Patroclus furnishes “language which might convey an idea of that mildness of manner which belonged to men in Christian ages.” And he closes his eloquent picture of the faith of the middle ages in immortality by attributing to the monks and friars the dying language of Socrates, that “a man who has spent his life in the study of philosophy ought to take courage in his death, and to be full of hope that he is about to possess the greatest good that can be obtained, which will be in his possession as soon as he dies;” and much more of that serene and sublime wisdom. Yet all this is done in a manner so absolutely free from sophistry, the conflict between the scholar and the churchman is so innocent and transparent, that one forgives it in Digby. In most writers on these subjects there is greater bigotry, without the learning which in his case makes it endurable, because it supplies the means for its own correction.[H]
And, if it is thus hard to do historical justice, it is far harder to look with candor upon contemporary religions. Thus the Jesuit Father Ripa thought that Satan had created the Buddhist religion on purpose to bewilder the Christian church. There we see a creed possessing more votaries than any in the world, numbering nearly one-third of the human race. Its traditions go back to a founder whose record is stainless and sublime. It has the doctrine of the Real Presence, the Madonna and Child, the invocation of the dead, monasteries and pilgrimages, celibacy and tonsure, relics, rosaries, and holy water. Wherever it has spread, it has broken down the barrier of caste. It teaches that all men are brethren, and makes them prove it by their acts; it diffuses gentleness and self-sacrificing benevolence. “It has become,” as Neander admits, “to many tribes of people a means of transition from the wildest barbarism to semi-civilization.” Tennent, living amid the lowest form of it in Ceylon, says that its code of morals is “second only to that of Christianity itself,” and enjoins “every conceivable virtue and excellence.” It is coming among us, represented by many of the Chinese, and a San-Francisco merchant, a Christian of the Episcopal Church, told me that, on conversing with their educated men, he found in them a religious faith quite as enlightened as his own. Shall we not rejoice in this consoling discovery? “Yes,” said the simple-hearted Abbé Huc: so he published his account of Buddhism, and saw it excommunicated. “No!” said Father Ripa, “it is the invention of the devil!”[I]
With a steady wave of progress Mohammedanism is sweeping through Africa, where Christianity scarcely advances a step. Wherever Mohammedanism reaches, schools and libraries are established, gambling and drunkenness cease, theft and falsehood diminish, polygamy is limited, woman begins to be elevated and has property rights guaranteed; and, instead of witnessing human sacrifices, you see the cottager reading the Koran at her door, like the Christian cottager in Cowper’s description. “Its gradual extension,” says an eye-witness, “is gradually but surely modifying the negro.... Within the last half century the humanizing influence of the Koran is acknowledged by all who are acquainted with the interior tribes.”[J] So in India, Mohammedanism makes converts by thousands (according to Col. Sleeman, than whom there can be no more intelligent authority) where Christianity makes but a handful; and this, he testifies, because in Mohammedanism there is no spirit of caste, while Christians have a caste of their own, and will not put converts on an equality. Do we rejoice in this great work of progress? No! one would think we were still in the time of the crusades by the way we ignore the providential value of Mohammedanism.
The one unpardonable sin is exclusiveness. Any form of religion is endangered when we bring it to the test of facts; for none on earth can bear that test. There never existed a person, nor a book, nor an institution, which did not share the merits and the drawbacks of its rivals. Granting all that can be established as to the debt of the world to the very best dispensation, the fact still remains, that there is not a single maxim, nor idea, nor application, nor triumph, that any single religion can claim as exclusively its own. Neither faith, nor love, nor truth, nor disinterestedness, nor forgiveness, nor patience, nor peace, nor equality, nor education, nor missionary effort, nor prayer, nor honesty, nor the sentiment of brotherhood, nor reverence for woman, nor the spirit of humility, nor the fact of martyrdom, nor any other good thing, is monopolized by any one or any half dozen forms of faith. All religions recognize, more or less distinctly, these principles; all do something to exemplify, something to dishonor them. Travelers find virtue in a seeming minority in all other countries, and forget that they have left it in a minority at home. A Hindoo girl, astonished at the humanity of a British officer toward her father, declared her surprise that any one could display so much kindness who did not believe in the god Vishnu. Gladwin, in his “Persian Classics,” narrates a scene which occurred in his presence between a Jew and a Mohammedan. The Mohammedan said in wrath, “If this deed of conveyance is not authentic, may God cause me to die a Jew.” The Jew said, “I make my oath on the Pentateuch, and if I swear falsely I am a Mohammedan like you.”