And again:—
Worship the gods as if the gods were there;
But, if you worship not, the gods don’t care.[65]
The absence of the instinct of reverence may be judged by the following episode related by Dr. Smith: “A District Magistrate tried a case which involved a priest, and, by implication, the Buddha which was the occupant of the temple. This god was summoned to appear before the magistrate and told to kneel, which he failed to do, whereupon the magistrate ordered him to be given five hundred blows, by which time the god was reduced to a heap of dust, and judgment was pronounced against him by default.”[66] (Of their manner of treating devils I had, not long ago, a personal experience. Standing on the quay at Shanghai, I was deafened by the bang, bang, bang of ear-splitting bombs exploded by a crowd of Chinamen. However crude their method, their intentions were excellent. They wished to scare away the devils who might have elected to accompany their friends on the voyage to England.)
Finally, as a commentary on the oft-repeated assertion that the great difference between the sacred books of the East and of the Bible is the low plane of morality in the former, the following words quoted by Dr. Smith are of considerable interest: “No people,” says Mr. Meadows, “whether of ancient or modern times, has possessed a sacred literature so completely exempt as the Chinese from licentious descriptions, and from every offensive expression. There is not a single sentence in the whole of the Sacred Books and their annotations that may not be read aloud in any family circle in England.”[67] Can this be said of our Bible?
APOSTATES IN CHRISTENDOM.
If I have given the religious attitude of the modern Chinese the largest share of attention, it must be remembered that they far outnumber any other nation in the world. Also I think the fallacies regarding the religious instinct will perhaps stand out more clearly if we consider the present twentieth century, instead of millenniums B.C. I have said nothing as yet of the apostates in Christendom—the Darwins, the Huxleys, and the Spencers—who declare that they are without the religious instinct. We must consider them ruled out of court, for are we not told[68] that “there are men with faculties of insight amounting to genius in other regions of mental activity who have never developed the spiritual faculty, and are thus debarred the privileges of spiritual geniuses—geniuses in the region in which man holds communion with God”?
Lately much capital has been made out of the following statement appearing in Darwin’s Autobiography: “Up to the age of thirty or beyond it, poetry such as Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, etc., gave me great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have lost my taste for pictures and music. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.” This loss of certain tastes indicated—so the pulpit would have the pew suppose—that that portion of Darwin’s mind which was competent to understand spiritual things had atrophied. Does God reveal Himself, then, only or especially to the æsthetic? The artist—and here I include the poet, painter, sculptor, musician, artistic novelist, and also the man who has created nothing, but who has the artistic temperament—will, if he has a religion, have one of a sort harmonising with his artist soul. It must be a religion which allows scope for the cultivation of the beautiful, without being necessarily too closely associated with a rigid code of ethics. Is the æsthetic mind always perfectly balanced? How does it compare on an average with that of the moral philosopher guiding his life by the light of reason and living up to the standard of his professions? Darwin has assisted in establishing a great truth concerning the development of the world. He has been, according to the Christian evolutionist, the chosen instrument for a fresh revelation of God’s majesty. Yet, in spiritual endowments, every pious Christian, however ignorant and unintellectual, ranks before him! Strange, passing strange. The very qualifications necessary for accomplishing God’s purpose debarred Darwin from fellowship with Him! For such an argument to be worth a moment’s consideration it should at least apply generally. This it most distinctly does not. Preachers, who find Darwin’s candid remark about himself a convenient one upon which to base a homily, have neglected to acquaint themselves with the statements of other agnostic scientists—of Huxley, for instance. “I have yet,” he declared, “to meet with any form of art in which it has not been possible for me to take as acute a pleasure as, I believe, it is possible for men to take.”[69]
RELIGION IN MODERN JAPAN.
At the risk of increasing the citation of examples ad nauseam, I cannot omit a passing reference to the Japanese. I shall reserve for the last chapter my remarks on the “phenomenon” of their non-theological moral training, and confine myself to the present condition of their faith as given by a clergyman, the Rev. Herbert Moore, who was for some years a missionary in Japan. Mr. Moore tells us: “We are all Shintoists to a certain extent, for Shinto is the non-Christian version of the Communion of Saints. And we recognise the truth that Buddhism contains when we read Ecclesiastes in church.... But these old faiths are fast perishing from the hearts of the Japanese, leaving behind them blank godlessness, indifference, and materialism.... Out of 942 students in Tokyo who recently gave an account of their religious position, 555 declared themselves unbelievers in any religion, 68 were Christians, 18 Shintoists, and most of the remaining 319 Buddhists.”[70]