The clergy of London have been asked to join in a protest against a proposition lately issued by the new India Board. Its President has declared that the spheres of theological opinion and of government are entirely distinct. The protesters see in this maxim the start of a policy that would tie the Queen, now the direct ruler of India, to the religious neutrality that guided the Company’s acts while it held power. They think England would be forfeiting her national position and her duty to the religion she professes. They therefore wish to state solemnly to the Sovereign why her position and her oaths commit her to a different course.
The importance of these propositions is hard to exaggerate, even setting aside the millions in Hindostan who may be affected by their truth or falsehood. So we should not hurry to agree with either of the opposing statements; we should ask carefully what each means. I do not think a statesman as accomplished and well read in history as Lord Stanley can mean that the two spheres are separate in the sense that governors have found it easy to keep them from getting confused. He knows that even those most anxious to keep them apart have found in practice that they interfere. The Romans were very tolerant. Even if some of them, out of habitual tyranny, would have meddled with a new faith as with a new game, Trajan and Marcus Aurelius would surely have been inclined to leave theological opinions alone. They could not. They concluded that the Christian Church and the Empire were rival kingdoms, and that one must destroy the other or make it a servant.
That was an experiment on a large scale. I pass over the new Western Empire, where the two were naturally confounded, Charlemagne’s Capitularies mixing them as much as his wars. I pass over the Middle Ages, when Christians kept them as little distinct as Muslims did. But the Reformation asserted the distinct, individual Conscience, and monarchs apparently had nothing to do with it. Yet every German prince was affected by it, the policy of Charles V. was changed by it, and France was torn apart by it. The English monarch became first Defender of the Faith, then the great champion of the National King’s rights against the Universal Bishop. For two centuries the wars of the League, the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil Wars proved that the two spheres, by some strange fatality, will not separate. Did not the eighteenth century, which put questions about the balance of power in place of questions about Romanism and Protestantism, settle the division for ever? Was that not its philosophy’s great triumph? If so, the philosophy defeated itself, for the child destroyed the parent. It produced the French Revolution, and that Revolution, by overthrowing Catholicism and Christianity under the Convention and Directory and by trying to restore them under Napoleon, declared from first to last that the two spheres have learnt no more about separating in this century than in the second, ninth, sixteenth or seventeenth.
But if the experiment has been impossible in Europe, may it not be possible in the East? Yet the East is where theological opinion, opinion about divine things, has most mixed itself with all human affairs and most affected the acts of government. Every relation of life, all intercourse, the administration of justice, clothing, food and cleanliness are directly influenced by the natives’ “theological opinion”. Suppose the rulers had shed all theological opinions, formally and practically. They would still bring traditions, habits, indifference and scorn, which would collide in a thousand ways with what they find. A Government that wants to hold its position, and even to protect its Hindoo and Mussulman subjects, would be forced to interfere.
Lord Stanley knows these facts better than any of us and cannot mean to ignore them. Nor can he expect a sic volo, sic jubeo from a Board not six months old to produce a division of provinces that so many earlier statesmen could not achieve. But he is evidently convinced that government ought not to be impeded by theological opinion, and that theological opinion ought not to be made less sound or sincere by government’s interference. I do not think the protesters differ from him here. They would say that native theological opinion often clogs the wheels of government because it is mixed with so much falsehood, as it did in the Middle Ages. They would also admit that governments have done immense harm to faith, more by some efforts to advance it than by any to retard it. What Lord Stanley seems to imagine is that, these things admitted, Englishmen can work together, more effectively than any nation has, to prevent the evils experience warns of. Here again I cannot believe he is really at issue with those who dread a neutral policy and want the nation to do what it can to deliver India from an immoral worship.
Perhaps the protesters will seize on the words immoral worship and say: “You want to preach an ethical religion to replace that of Hindoos and Mussulmans; we want Christianity, definite Christianity.” I presume that is their aim: a message to all the races under our rule as definite as St. Paul’s at Corinth and Ephesus, in fact the very same. I will go further. That message was universal, it came from a member of no dominant race, and in delivering it St. Paul had to meet the exclusive national prejudices of his own people. Still, I do not forget that we are a nation and must send out this message in the form in which we hold it. So I take it for granted that, being a Protestant nation, we must evangelize India according to Protestant maxims, in a Protestant way. Let us see what follows from these premises.
There is a Society for the Propagation of the Faith. Many Protestant countrymen of ours, I suspect, think it would be doing a great and good work if only it propagated our faith instead of the Romish one. They rightly admire the pains taken to train men for the service, the colleges for the missionaries’ languages, and the devotion and courage of many who have gone out from them. “If only such zeal and gifts were spent on spreading a Scriptural Christianity! If only our Government would favour our Church’s efforts as some Continental Governments favoured or favour the propagators of Romanism!”
I cannot join in these longings. The idea of propagating a Faith is false at its root, and if we import it we import the Romish system with it, for it is part of that system. When we try to throw a faith outward as a formal thing that can be conveyed and delivered to others, we must mean a congeries of notions and opinions we have inherited or adopted: tenets concerning God. The Romanist admits this at once. The Church holds certain doctrines that men must believe on pain of damnation, and bringing men inside the circle that holds them is the first duty. Priests chiefly fulfil it; kings aid it with money, patronage and, if needed, arms. I am confident that Francis Xavier and many great Romish missionaries became conscious of another object, which was unconsciously present to them from the start. To an earnest, self-denying man the name Christian, even the name Jesuit, suggested not a set of opinions but a living Person whom they could proclaim everywhere as Saviour and King. Still, the Propagandist maxim must be as I describe; a Romanist would struggle to frame another that defines clearly and adequately why he goes among savages or civilized men, heathens or heretics.
We ought to have no such difficulty. There is a word that told the Apostles plainly what they were sent to do: they were to preach a Gospel. That means not the tenets of certain doctors or of a certain Church about God, but His own message about Himself. The Reformers clung to this word for their work at home. When our ancestors woke to our responsibilities toward our colonists, they adopted it for missionary work abroad. In King William’s days they founded a Society not for the propagation of the Faith but for the Propagation of the Gospel.
I am not asking now how far that Society’s acts have lived up to its pretensions. All will admit it is less magnificent in plans and machinery than its counterpart in Italy. I would say that even in its feeblest time it showed the blessing of a rightly chosen title, and that even in its best it had not quite cleared itself of the false associations of the title it rejected. Its admirers may boast that it has stressed especially our duty to the children of our own soil; its enemies may say it has cared too little for the outlying world. But the enemies, even more than the admirers, would prize the word Gospel above every other and admit that it has a peculiarly Protestant sound. That is the point I am pressing. I want Churchmen and Statesmen to consider earnestly what we mean when we say we have a Gospel, good news, to declare to all nations.
For Churchmen the doctrine is at least familiar, part of their earliest belief and education. People may ask them, with wonder or perhaps contempt: “You know these things you are going to proclaim? You are sure of them? You can announce them as true?” Churchmen have always answered, in act if not in word: “Yes, we speak of what we have known and testify of what we have seen. We have had, and often still have, racking doubts whether anything is, whether all things only seem, whether we are mere shadows of a dream. What saves us from that horrible confusion, in which all action and thought are impossible, is the belief that God is. We are in an order, not a chaos, because there is an absolute, living, righteous Being from whom law and order proceed. We see every mythology as a search after that Being, a series of experiments to feel and find Him. We believe that He is, that all men in their inmost heart need Him, and that they must make lies about Him if He does not reveal Himself. So we think He has answered the cries He taught His creatures to pour out, and has revealed Himself in His Son. Our fathers reached that conviction by hard fighting. They were inclined to believe in dark, bloody, hateful gods, and the inclination kept returning. It mingled with their faith in a righteous God who had shown Himself in His only-begotten Son, reconciled them to Himself, claimed them as children, and given them His Spirit to be like Him. But that faith, held amid all inconsistencies, kept them from sinking into the cruelty, superstition and foulness natural to them, and led them to struggle after manhood and bravery. We have as hard a work to keep belief in this Name as they had to receive it. If we take it as an heirloom, we take it surrounded by opinions and habits at variance with it. We have had to grasp it for ourselves, as protection against superstition, grovelling thoughts of God, hateful feelings about men, unbelief in the glory of our race, and a readiness to become cowards and slaves, by all of which we are constantly beset. And because we believe God is the God of Hindostan as well as England; because Hindoos and Mussulmans have thought about Him and felt after Him in their different ways, and their whole history and life have been moulded by their speculations; because it is God’s will to reveal Himself to them; and because we see no hope of their deliverance from moral, intellectual and physical degradation except by this knowledge, therefore we will preach this Gospel to them, as Christ’s messengers did of old. Call it a theological opinion who will; the other name is shorter and simpler and expresses our object far better.” So Churchmen have been wont to speak; so, I trust, many still do.
“Yes,” it will be said, “that high discourse may do among us, but Statesmen cannot follow it. We must talk to them of advancing our English religion. They may not agree, but they will understand our purpose.” What a silly, ignoble policy, which has degraded Churchmen and made them unintelligible as well as insolent to those they hope to influence! I say Statesmen can understand talk of a Gospel for our subjects in India, and cannot understand talk of spreading a particular religion there. They themselves have a calling to preach a Gospel and know it; they have no calling to advance a religion and feel they have none. They preach a Gospel whenever they see justice administered in a Law Court, impose and collect taxes honestly and fairly, or labour through military and civil servants to establish order and put down anarchy. All these acts witness to Righteousness and Truth. They are part of Christ’s witness: when He declared God’s Kingdom in words, He also healed the sick and cast out devils. Any healing of men’s bodies or outward condition, any deliverance from the devils that torment and possess them, testifies against the false and unrighteous powers they worship and for the true and righteous Power we profess to worship. This is the common national duty to which the remonstrants think we are appointed, and this is the distinction of spheres Lord Stanley desires. The Priest cannot deliver one part of the Gospel message and the civil Ruler another. Each, delivering his own, fulfils his portion of the Nation’s vocation, and each doing his own duty helps the other’s.
How does the case stand, then, about the natives’ “theological opinions”? While the notion of propagating a faith displaces the older Apostolic, Protestant and English doctrine of propagating a Gospel, it is hard to explain; such complications and contradictions are inevitable under that theory. It is natural that a Christian Priest, thinking he must set his faith against a rival one, should be glad of the magistrate’s help in crushing what his words cannot. It is natural that the Magistrate, caring for a whole land, should resist that cry, even winking at practices he sees as unsocial and criminal because they belong to the popular religion. But this inverts the proper relation. Naturally the Magistrate is the stern Iconoclast, while the Priest, seeing signs of good and dawnings of truth under a people’s superstitions, is too inclined to be gentle. When both feel they have different sides of the same message, and neither thinks his business is to suspect and supplant the other, that will again be the rule. The Magistrate will put down widow-burning or any other enormity, not as a compliment to Christianity, but because it disturbs social order. The Priest will remember that St. Paul laid the axe to the root of slavery not by denouncing it as an institution but by telling Philemon to receive Onesimus as a brother, and he will follow that precedent with Hindoos and Mussulmans. He will sometimes show the Governor how a venerable Eastern institution may be rescued from its corruptions and restored to the meaning hidden under it. He will be sure that a Magistrate bent on his land’s moral improvement will be destructive enough of the evil rites and habits that hinder it; to quicken and renovate is the Priest’s function.
So Teacher and Ruler will be fellow-workers and, to some degree, checks on each other, but in a sense opposite to the usual one. I think Buchanan and the eminent men who established an Episcopate in India, and those who extended it since, served this end. It was not chiefly, as is sometimes said, because they set the Anglican Church in its full proportions before the natives, but far more because they presented the Gospel as that of a Fatherly Kingdom over all nations, rather than the announcement of an English religious system. If our Bishops strive to be Fathers, to the English of every creed and to the Natives, they will be what mere Governors cannot be and should not attempt to be. We know in Europe what mockery and tyranny lie under the affectation of a Fatherly Monarchy; the King who loves his subjects best knows he is the just head of a Nation, not the gracious parent of a Family. But awkward attempts to unite the offices prove the need of both. Nowhere, I believe, more than in India can they co-operate for the blessing and education of the land.
The word Education raises a long question I shall not enter. But I believe the hint in this paper might make that controversy less embarrassing. The Missionary School that teaches the Bible presents the native child with a Being altogether unlike those its fathers worshipped. The Government School teaching European Science equally outrages the doctrine of the Shasters. Both bring a light from which darkness must recoil. Both should do their utmost to wound no feeling of reverence in the child for its fathers, only to make it glad to have found what they were groping for. If the Government aims at this for the sake of peace and order, the Missionary must desire it equally, lest he kindle self-conceit when sent to cultivate humbleness of mind. The task of both is difficult and will not be easier if they thwart each other. If they are willing to do God’s work each in his own place, He will make the whole nation an Evangelist.