The remarks which I made at the close of my last Lecture will prepare you to expect that I should speak in the present of Hindooism. That faith has been brought into conflict with Mahometanism, has succumbed to it, and yet has maintained its ground, leaving the victorious religion the religion of a small minority. Though it may pretend to an antiquity which it does not possess, it has certainly lasted 3000 years. The language in which its holy books are composed is the mothertongue—if I may use that phrase in its literal, rather than its ordinary sense—of the Greek, the Latin, and the dialects of our Gothic ancestors; consequently, of nearly all which are spoken in Western Europe at this day. From this fact it might, I think, be inferred, if other evidence were wanting, that the mythologies of these nations could be traced to an Indian source. But there is abundant evidence, so much as to have misled those scholars who were first struck with it into a forgetfulness of the important historical principle, that we cannot determine the character of nations, or of their belief, merely by finding the point from which they may have started; that each must be studied in itself and in its own utterances, and that we gain only a secondary aid in our investigations when we have the means of affiliating it to some other. That this mistake was committed by some of the great Orientalists of the last century, I think is now generally acknowledged; they seemed to suppose that they could learn more of the Greeks from Sanscrit books than from their own. But an extravagance which is natural to all discoverers does not make the discovery itself less valuable; in fact, we are only beginning to appreciate its importance. The more practically we learn to sympathize with our fellow-men in all countries and in all ages, to cultivate such sympathy for our own sake and for theirs, and for the glory of God, the more will all such hints respecting the relationship between different nations be reflected on and prized. And this remark suggests another, and much weightier reason, why a Boyle Lecturer should address himself to the subject of Hindooism, and why we all should take an interest in it. It is the faith, to say the least, of between eighty and ninety millions of people, subjects of the British empire. By conquests scarcely paralleled for rapidity in the annals of the world, we have obtained supremacy over them, and by civil policy we have tried to preserve it. As to the true character of this policy there has been the greatest variety of opinion; but I think intelligent men are now well agreed, that whatever it be, it must be grounded upon a knowledge of the character, institutions, faith of the people who are to be influenced by it. Civilians, military officers, and missionaries in India, have exerted themselves to acquire this knowledge, and to make it available for us. Their theories, as well as their facts, when they seem most contradictory, are worthy of study and of comparison; they may all help us in finding the principle of Indian life and belief, and that principle, when we apprehend it, may make the differences in their observations and opinions more intelligible.
There are, unquestionably, considerable difficulties in the investigation. This ancient people is strictly speaking without a history. “No date of a public event,”—I use the words of Mr. Elphinstone,—“can be fixed before the invasion of Alexander; no connected relation of the national transactions can be attempted until after the Mahometan conquest.” Yet it would seem that we were in the greatest need of such records to connect the phenomena which offer themselves to the eye of the traveller in this day with the early books which are still regarded with the profoundest veneration. A Hindoo will sometimes tell us in wild language that he acknowledges 300 millions of gods; he means, of course, that the number is indefinite, that any object or power in nature, any heroic man may be a god. And those who trace Oriental extravagance in such a description, will, nevertheless, remember to have heard of various beings who are acknowledged objects of Hindoo adoration of Brahma the Creator, of Vishnu the Preserver, of Sheeva the Destroyer, of Indra, the Lord of the Elements, of the fearful goddess Devi, of the beautiful hero Krishna, and a multitude more. Yet learned and trustworthy critics, Asiatic as well as European, confidently affirm that the ground of the Brahminical faith is Monotheistic; that One Being is assumed in the earliest of the sacred books to be the origin of all things; that this was no lazy, inoperative tenet, that it penetrated the whole system of worship, and the life of the worshipper. Putting such facts and such statements together, you might be ready to conclude that there was no real identity between the faith of one of these periods and of the other; that either by conquest, or some strange process of degeneracy, the character and feelings of the people had become so changed as to make the notion of one Hindoo or Brahminical religion a mere delusion. But many considerations will shew us that this opinion, however plausible, is untenable. I have said, that the early Vedas, composed, perhaps, 1500 years before the time of Christ, be their tenets what they may, are still regarded with unbounded veneration by the religious men among the Hindoos. The Menu code or institute, which is probably about 600 or 700 years younger than these, and which indicates some, though not radical, alterations of practice and opinion during the interval, must still be the great study of every English jurist who wishes to understand the grounds of Hindoo law and life at the present day. Five or six centuries after the composition of this code the troops of Alexander crossed the Indus. The picture which the Greeks give us of society as they observed it, accords with that which we gain from the earlier native source; but, what is still more to the point, it also accords in essentials with what our own countrymen tell us of India now. With the advantages we possess from the actual occupation of the country, from being able to examine parts of it which the Greeks never visited, and from modern habits of critical investigation, we must see many things much more clearly than they did; and therefore, even when their reports are different from the present state of things, it is not necessary to assume that there must have been really a great change. It is hardly needful, however, to take this remark into consideration, for we are assured, by those who have the best opportunities of judging, that one of the most remarkable features of Hindoo life, the constitution and government of the villages, is exhibited with surprising faithfulness in narratives which were derived from observations made more than 2000 years ago. Such permanence in social habits would surely lead us to expect something corresponding to it in the inward convictions of a people; and we are not left to conjecture. The soldiers of Alexander found a set of men whose great business was contemplation, who submitted to numerous privations and austerities that they might pursue it more effectually. The Brahmins they found were the leading class in the country; military, agricultural, commercial occupations were all subordinate to theirs—all society had, in fact, organized itself in conformity with their ideas. The Greek fancied they had less to do with civil affairs, than we know, from their own code, that they must have had. But the general conception which he formed of the Brahmins was singularly accurate. He called them Sophists, a name, which, in his own country, often denoted mere sceptics; here it had no such signification, but it implied that the Brahmins were not merely priests, such as were to be seen elsewhere, that their first business was study, and that the purely sacerdotal office was secondary to this. As the accounts which the Greek writers give of the objects of Hindoo worship are meagre, and evidently distorted by the desire of finding resemblances to their own mythology, we might suppose that, for our purpose, we cannot learn much from them. But I believe we shall find that their report of the Brahmins is, in fact, the key to the whole system; one which, if we use it rightly, will enable us to discover its leading characteristics, and to understand, however little we may be able to trace, the varieties of form which it has assumed.
The name of Brahmin at once suggests that of Brahm. The resemblance is no accidental one; nor does it merely signify that the Brahmin is the minister or priest of Brahm. The connection is of a far more intimate and wonderful kind. The learned man, the contemplative sage, aspires to be one with him whom he adores—to lose his own being in his. And what is this Being? He is the Absolute Intelligence; the Essential Light. Rest, Contemplation: this is his glory, his perfection. You will feel at once the direct opposition between this idea and that of the Mahometan. I bring it before you just at this point, that you may see how much we may impose upon ourselves by the word Monotheism, which is often used as if it were common to these two faiths, at least, in their origin; that you may see at the same time in what sense it has been honestly and rightly applied to Hindooism. Mahometanism began with a Prophet, but we saw the Prophet soon merged in the Khalif or Sovereign. This Sovereign was the organ of a Mighty Will, which had called all things into existence, and of whom all men are servants. He fulfils his service in perpetual conflict; only in such conflict does his faith make its meaning intelligible. There are no natural gradations of society, no hereditary ranks; all are merely officers holding their position under the one Ruler. The priest is an insignificant person. Strictly speaking, there is no priesthood. The dervish or learned man may be an important adviser of the sovereign: in times of quiet he may promote learning, or become the head of a sect; but when he is most regarded it is only as an interpreter of the Divine Will. The first principle of Mahometanism would be violated if he aspired to be himself divine. Here, on the contrary, the priest, the student, the beholder is judge, lawgiver, everything. The God is an Intelligence, not a Will himself a higher priest—a more glorious student a more perfect contemplator. You can scarcely conceive a mandate issuing from such a being: all things must flow from him as light from the sun, or thoughts from a musing man. Such an idea is ever implied in Hindooism; but it may not have been frequently expressed, it may sometimes have been contradicted, in the earliest stage; for the wrapt student, feeling it his highest calling and privilege to meditate on an Absolute Being in silence and awe, will have had such a practical reason for not confounding him with the world around, as no theoretical consistency could outweigh. It was far otherwise with the feeling of a relation between the human worshipper and the object of his adoration. This feeling was not resisted, but strengthened by his practical discipline. He was taught that he was intended to rise into the closest communion, nay, into actual identity with the Divinity: to realize such a state was the effort of his existence.
The Brahmin believed that there was in man a capacity for such intercourse or absorption as this; but surely not in all men. Some are merely animal: there must be a race intended for this high converse, there must be a race excluded from it. One would not say, however, that the highest sage is the only man who is not merely animal. The warrior must have something of the higher diviner faculty; it may be cultivated and ripened in him.
Even the merchant, the traveller into other lands, must be more than a merely earthly creature. These orders of men should be kept apart from the lowest of all—the mere human animal, the Sudra. Yet the purely contemplative man should not be allowed too much intercourse even with these. He may educate them to be such men as they are meant to be, but he must keep himself and his race pure: this race must be carefully trained to be the model of humanity—to rise above humanity—by perpetual meditation on the unseen Brahm.
The so-called laws or institutes of the Hindoos are all designed for this purpose. They are, properly speaking, a system of education or discipline; a method of fitting the highest man for fulfilling his vocation, and all the others for preserving their proper relation to him. The idea of a separation between the twice-born man and the merely animal man, is the fundamental one; all the arrangements are for the purpose of giving effect to this idea—all other distinctions are secondary to it. The twice-born man must, by certain services or sacraments, the principal of which is reading the Vedas, maintain his relation to the unseen object. He must practise certain plans for lessening his dependence on mere material gratifications; he must cultivate rather the passive than the active qualities. In the progress of ages the two middle classes seem to have disappeared, or at least this is the prevailing Brahminical opinion. The system has undergone other modifications, till at length, in some places at least, it has so adapted itself to the different pursuits and occupations of men, as to offer an excuse for the European notion, that it was invented in an early stage of society by some legislator, who observed that labour must be divided in order to be successful, and that there is likely to be an hereditary aptitude for particular professions or trades. Such a notion seems to be refuted by the fact that, according to the early arrangement of castes, there was no accurate division of employments; that persons of the same order were allowed to perform many which were unlike and incompatible. Nor does another plausible hypothesis, that the Brahmins were a conquering tribe and the Sudras a conquered one, seem to be more tenable. Those who have the best opportunities for comparing them, say that they can discover no such differences between them as would warrant the supposition of their belonging to a different race, none greater than are naturally produced by meaner occupations, and a sense of degradation during a long course of years. But the great objection to the opinion is, that the Sudras are not in any sense slaves, and never can have been such; the Greeks were surprised to find all classes in India free citizens in some sense, in however low a one. So that probably we cannot get much further than the religious principle as the basis of the distinction than the idea, I mean, that there is a tendency in men to become purely animal, and that there is a race of men in which this tendency is realized and perpetuated; that there is in man that which may be raised to fellowship with the Divine; and that there is a race in whom this capacity is exhibited and transmitted.
In spite then of the fact, that there are in the very earliest Hindoo Vedas prayers and hymns to light and fire, and to many natural powers, nay, though the liturgical part of them consists mainly of such prayers, we may fully admit the assertion, - that the Brahmin is seeking after one Divine, unseen object; that he is only asking these different creatures to tell him what that object is, and how He is to be found; nay, that his aim in his whole life and discipline is to purify himself from outward, sensible things, that he may approach nearer to this One Source of Illumination.
But then how can we explain the fact, that men setting this end before them, looking upon the most mysterious powers in the universe as at best ladders to ascend to the highest region—ladders which the wise men could generally, in time, throw away—should have become so utterly entangled in sensible, outward idolatry as the modern Hindoo seems to be? The explanation often given, that the ordinary gods are but the gods of the vulgar, that the learned man has altogether another view of them, which he keeps to himself, is quite unsatisfactory. For the point we want to ascertain is this, how the Brahmin came to suppose that the divers and manifold beings of whom the Hindoo Pantheon consists, could be helps to the discovery or the presentation of the One Being; how he could possibly be induced to reverse the whole order and object of his studies and discipline; to introduce variety, that he might suggest the idea of unity; to bring in a host of visible forms, that he might lead his disciples more certainly to that which is beyond their senses. I do not deny the possibility of such a scheme, but the origin and the steps of it should be explained. If a modern Brahmin confesses that he attaches no importance to the things to which he seems to attach the greatest, we may accept his testimony against himself; still more willingly we may believe one who says that he loves the simple faith which he thinks has departed, and that he will spend his life in efforts to restore it. But we cannot take the witness of either respecting their fathers. The process by which they arrived at one strange conclusion after another may have been as simple and natural a one as that by which their traditions are discarded, or that by which they are traced to a deliberate purpose of imposture.
And this, I believe, is actually the case. While the Brahmin was learning, by various arts, to practise abstraction of spirit, was searching, by various helps, to arrive at the perception of the Perfect One, he felt that the light, the intelligence which entered into his own heart—that which raised him above his fellows—that which enabled him to see mysteries, must be the great expression of the Divine Being. Brahm becomes Brahma; the light which flows from the source of light, the wisdom which comes from the fount of wisdom is that which declares him—this is his Name. In that character the initiated disciple is to worship him: no sacrifices need be offered to him, no temples need be raised to him. It is the inward and purified intellect which does him homage. A very sublime conception, you may be inclined to say; one which it is no wonder that enlightened Brahmins in our day should wish to reproduce.
But imagine yourselves in the school where this sublime doctrine was taught; look at the self-satisfied, self-glorified person who is proclaiming it; see how he has gone on, step by step, till, from a profound idea of some awful, absolute Being, he has passed into the habitual conviction that this Being is himself; he has become his own God. Mark what contempt he manifests for persons about him, what utter inhumanity has grown out of this notion, that he is the very perfection of humanity, that he is above it. Suppose an earnest, enthusiastic disciple, struck with the contradiction, saying to himself, “Is this the devout, the self-losing, absorbed Brahmin whom I was taught to wonder at—whose teaching at first seemed to me so sublime?” In the tumult of his feelings, in the sadness of his disappointment, he goes forth from the school into Nature. What a change he finds there! What a sense of refreshment, freedom, calmness, penetrates through his whole being! Surely he has been living till this time in a close, pent-up atmosphere, thinking only of himself; ever hoping, and hoping in vain, to find his God in himself. But is he not here? What a wonderful order there is through this wide universe; an order of day and night; of seasons of heat and seasons of rain; an order in the planets over our heads; an order in the growth of the flowers at our feet; an order in the overflowings of the mighty river. Yes, his name is the Preserver! Conceive of him under that name—worship him under that name—call him Vishnu: bid men rejoice that they have such an One caring for them. The name, perhaps, had been known before in the Brahminical school. It had been one thought, among many, that Brahma was the preserver of things: now it becomes the name. Hundreds of hearts are ready to welcome it: even the poor Sudra can look up, and feel that it has a sound of blessing to him. And now the older worship becomes, comparatively, obsolete; the young reformer has prevailed. The Brahminical order must take up his doctrine, and proclaim it, and reconcile it as they can with that which they held before: if they do not so, a sect of Vishnu worshippers will form themselves—men will go out into the deserts and proclaim this faith, without respect to the laws of family or caste at all.
In some such way as this, I conceive, the popular Vishnu worship may have supplanted the original Brahma worship. It would be surely hard to say that the alteration was in itself for the worse: yet the effect of it must, undoubtedly, have been to withdraw the idea of divinity from the inner sanctuary in which it had dwelt; to bring it forth into the world. Then temples would be raised, the fruits of the earth offered, with songs and symbols, to the great Preserver. But soon there will have been a fearful re-action against this kind of service. How could the mere feeling of a beneficent Guardian of the Earth help men who were tormented with a sense of inward evil? What was there in such a Being at all corresponding to the dark visions which continually rose before them, whether they looked behind or before, to the past or the future. But was there nothing in Nature which did correspond to these inward agonies, which seemed to be the very echo of them? Were there no frightful floods and earthquakes—was there not a continual process of destruction going on in the universe? Is not death the mighty king to whom all must do homage? Poor worshippers of Vishnu, how miserably you are striving to hide the realities of the world from your eyes—to strew garlands over the grave. You have never yet dared to pronounce the real name: it is Sheeva the Destroyer. If you know your own state, and what you have to fear, you will invoke that name—you will propitiate that divinity. And do not think to approach him with such oblations as are signs of plenty and gladness. It is blood he craves for; the blood of your children and of yourselves. No sacrifices but these can appease his wrath, or abate the misery which he is sending to you, and designing for you. Here was another deep conviction working in the heart of the Hindoo, and destined to produce the most fearful fruits, from generation to generation. The Brahmins could not allay it—could not reduce it under his old notion of the Brahma, the one celestial Intelligence, who spoke only in the Wise. The Sheeva sect rose up in fierce antagonism to the Vishnu sect. He must endeavour to bring the different ideas into reconciliation; to assign the Brahma, the Vishnu, and Sheeva, each a part in the arrangements of Nature, and in the different ages of the universe. Religious books are composed, some with the Vishnu, some with the Sheeva element predominant in them; the former with a gracious, the latter with a stern, forbidding aspect; the first not denying the dark principle—only keeping it in the back-ground; the latter doing homage to the Preserver, but confessing the greater might of the Destroyer.
Soon the unsatisfied heart feels another necessity. If it be true (and can it be denied?) that the Power which divides and annihilates has such a direct influence over the destinies of the world, may not the Preserver yet have somewhere an undisturbed reign; and may he not descend from that region, at certain periods, to claim his rights over this earth too—to create again that which has perished? Is there not a principle of restoration implied in Preservation; nay, in Destruction itself? The animals die, but the race survives: and have there not been in the ages of man periods of deepest calamity, when all things seemed to sink in utter ruin, followed by bright sunny days—the earth coming forth out of darkness into light? These must have been the times of Vishnu’s descent. These animals, we have been told, all exhibit some side or aspect of the divinity, may have been, originally, portions of it. In these he may have appeared. Men may have been able, without becoming absorbed, to behold him, and converse with him. Again, the priest will partly have led the popular conviction, partly have been led by it. He will have arranged the number and method of these Vishnu incarnations, reducing dreams to a system, and sanctioning the hope that there might be an avatar, which should restore all things.
But these dreams were not sufficient. Was not a kind and gracious Rajah, who felt for his poor subjects, one in whom the Divinity was more likely to manifest himself, than in any one of those creatures, however sacred, of which man is practically the master? Have we not always felt that a man was permitted, in some mysterious way, to contemplate the Divine Being—to become one with Him? Why may not He in such a form, so much more beautiful than any other, appear to us? The bright Krishna becomes the centre of innumerable legends. He is felt to be the true form of the Divine Deliverer. As other dreadful apparitions rise up beside Sheeva, and claim the kind of worship which is offered to him—as there comes forth even a Kali to be a patroness of murder, to make strangling a virtue; this image of a friend and protector of the helpless is the more eagerly sought after, and delighted in.
At each step in this process more of the forms and images of outward nature will have been called in, to express the conception of which the heart was full; at each step the theoretic man will have been obliged to incorporate new schemes of the universe, new speculations upon all questions astronomical, geological, physiological, metaphysical, into his theology, in order to connect the later and more popular outgrowths of it with the original root. Nevertheless, it is certain that, amidst all these definite conceptions and idolatrous forms, the primary idea of an Inconceivable, Absolute, Unseen Being, whom it is the highest glory of the holiest man to behold, and in whom he is to be lost, has survived—survived not as a theory of some learned Brahmin, but as so deep and essential an article of popular faith, that all other habitual convictions, nay, the reverence for the Brahminical order itself, which seems worked into the very tissue of Hindoo society, must give place to it. Religious orders, formed without any reference to distinction of castes, shall be followed and reverenced in proportion as this seems to be the end of their existence: the perfectly abstracted Yogi shall be looked upon as greater, in the way to a higher knowledge, than he who can explain all the order of nature. In fact, in the worst form of what may be supposed modern corruptions we may trace the original feeling at work. The woman who gives up herself to death on her husband’s funeral pile, is exhibiting the same deep sense of the necessity of self-abandonment, self-sacrifice, which is implied in the desire of the contemplative man to be absorbed into the Divine Essence.
We have, then, a faith presented to us here, which the more we think of it, the more fairly we consider its apparent anomalies, the more light we receive respecting it from different and contradictory reports, the more heartily and affectionately we sympathize with the feelings of our fellow-men, the more we know of ourselves, will awaken in us the more of reflection, and wonder, and awe. It is the faith not of savages but of men in whose minds respect for learning has occupied all but the highest place; men whose whole commonwealth is modelled upon the notion, that the seer, the learned man, ought to be at the head; that all other people should look up to him. At the same time, these learned men have not been able to devise a belief at their pleasure for those whom they governed. Strong necessities have come forth out of the heart of the people, demanding satisfaction—compelling the wise men to remould their system, yet recognizing the worth and reality of that higher, older principle, which they seem to set at nought. I do not think it would be easy to find a fairer test of those assertions, respecting the religions of mankind, which I proposed to examine.
The first of them—that there are deep truths implied in each of these systems—receives, it seems to me, abundant confirmation from even the hasty glance we have been able to take of Hindooism. In the midst of the extravagancies and horrors which the most favourable testimonies prove it to have brought forth, and which have multiplied, not diminished, as it has expanded, we have been able to trace some convictions so sacred, so bound up in the heart of the people for thousands of years, as to sustain the credit of monstrous fictions, to make tormenting practices endurable; convictions which have been able to create and perpetuate a complicated form of society, and to defy the power of victorious invaders.
But it is affirmed next, that these deep convictions will in time disengage themselves from the theological element in which they dwell; that theology being only an inadequate attempt to explain the phenomena of the universe. Now, I have been careful that you should notice how much of the Hindoo system is an attempt to explain the phenomena of the universe; it was scarcely necessary for me to remark how ineffectual a one. But, if you have followed the course of my observations, still more, if you have made observations for yourselves, you will, I think, be convinced that these theories about the world are precisely the nontheological element of the system; precisely that which has been added to the theology, and become a part of it, in consequence of the inability of the Hindoo to distinguish between God and the world. His inward convictions, from first to last, have had reference to the Absolute, Unseen God, and to his relations with man. The drapery of these convictions has been his doctrine about Nature. Nor can that idolatrous, degrading, often filthy drapery ever be cast away, unless it can be shewn him that the theological riddles, for which he has been seeking a solution in Nature so long, and not finding it—which are bound up with the deepest wants of his heart, can receive their explanation somewhere else.
But, most of all, the notion that all ideas respecting an unseen world are produced by the religious faculty in man, might seem to receive countenance from the Hindoo records. How active that faculty has been, what worlds it has called into existence, whilst there were no outward transactions to relate, or no one to relate them, we have indeed seen. The Hindoo in action the idlest, is in imagining, dreaming, combining, the most busy of all human creatures. But is this all we have learnt? Have we not found also an assurance in the mind of these people that all the efforts of thought in them must originate in a communication from above, and require fresh communications to meet them? In the thinking, or reasoning, or religious faculty, call it what you will—or, as I should say, in the man’s own heart, in his inmost being—have arisen desires and longings after converse with the unseen world, with some living being in that unseen world, with some one between whom and himself he feels there is a relation. His religious books echo the cry; they mutter a half response to it: but the response is only the question thrown into a more definite form. The highest student meditates on the problem, and repeats his own thoughts; or, more probably, what some ancient person, who meditated and conversed with the Divinity, said about it; or what some other said that he said. The circle is a very weary one; if we calmly consider it, and what kind of comfort those receive who are ever revolving in it, we shall confess that the Hindoo is right in his belief, that the wisdom of which he sees the image and reflection must speak and declare itself to him; that he cannot always be left to grope his way amidst the shadows which it casts in his own mind, or in the world around him. I ask nothing more than the Hindoo system and the Hindoo life as evidence that there is that in man which demands a revelation—that there is not that in him which makes the revelation. I ask no clearer proof of the fact, that whenever the religious feeling or instinct in man works freely, without an historical revelation, it must beget a system of priestcraft. It must be satisfied by God, or overlaid by man, or stifled altogether.
The question still remains: Is the help to this state of things to come from within the system? I hinted that there are, or have been, Hindoo patriots who have dreamed of bringing back the first state of Brahminism, setting up the Monotheism of the older Vedas, sweeping away the accumulations of centuries. But if the original Brahminism itself contained the great puzzle of all subsequent ages; if the Monotheism of the Vedas admitted the doubt whether man, nay, whether all things might not be parts of the Divinity; if those accumulations of centuries were the inevitable results of anxieties which men could only quell by destroying themselves, it seems somewhat unreasonable to go back to the beginning of a series, every step of which, so far as we can tell, would have to be repeated. Or, if the notion be, that some form of Monotheism, not involving the idea of direct connection between God and Man, or God and Nature, might supersede the existing superstition, is it not playing with words to speak of this as a revival or restoration? must it not be simply a denial of the fundamental principle of the whole system? We need not, however, enter upon this subject at present, for both these experiments have been made under every possible advantage. Buddhism, a doctrine to which I hope to devote a separate Lecture, may, at least under one of its aspects, be regarded as a formal effort to revive the original Brahminical idea; an effort not without very important results, which have affected a large portion of the world; but which have not displaced Hindooism in its proper soil, and which, I think, we shall find are scarcely what any modern Hindoo reformer would desire to produce. To the other experiment I have alluded already—it is that of Mahometanism. A considerable number of the Hindoo race were converted to this faith, and profess it to this day. But it could take no hold of the heart of the people, for it solved no one difficulty which was perplexing them; it affirmed a truth which staggered them, and before which they bowed; one, however, which in this form coalesced with scarcely any conditions of their intellectual or of their moral being.
Whether Christianity can do for the Hindoo what these systems have not done, is a question for our future consideration. One or two remarks I would make here which may remove some difficulties from that enquiry, and which seem to arise naturally out of the present subject. I cannot feel surprise that the statesmen and scholars of British India, observing the failure of the Mahometans to overthrow the faith and institutions of this strange people, should have pressed strongly upon their own government the duty of respecting what it had not power to subvert. I cannot believe that an indifference to evils which were continually before their eyes, or a feeling that the safety of English dominion is the highest of all considerations, can have induced men often of the greatest cultivation and humanity to protest against the efforts which some of their countrymen were making to spread the faith of Europe in the East. It is much pleasanter, and surely more reasonable, to believe that they felt there was something hard-hearted, almost impious, in trampling upon convictions which had struck root into the soil for many thousand years, which had created the whole fabric of society. For such a feeling one is bound to entertain the greatest respect; only I think men generally so clear-sighted must by this time have perceived that there was an important oversight in the inference which they drew from it. No doubt it is a very serious thing to assault the belief, even the prejudices, of any ancient people. But this assault had already been made; every circumstance which brought Englishmen into contact with the Hindoo was a repetition of it. When all nature is peopled with divinities it does not require an adverse theologian to wound the prejudices of the worshipper,—the army commissary, the judge, the ordinary traveller, must interfere with them continually. Above all, when it came to be perceived, as it would of course be in time perceived by any benevolent government, that Englishmen ought not to be settled in a country without communicating to its inhabitants some portion of that knowledge which they possess so largely; or rather, when it was found that a people so eager for information, so quick in receiving it as the Hindoos, would not be content until they had learnt the secret of our mechanical achievements,—it was certain that some cherished tenet must be outraged, some express statement in the religious books contradicted, if the teacher of European science advanced beyond his alphabet. Such considerations do not prove that the idea of respecting a people’s convictions is a false one: they show only that there are certain accidents of these convictions which we are not only permitted, but obliged, to make light of. Just in proportion to that necessity which is laid upon us for showing the Hindoo that visible things cannot be treated with the reverence which he has been taught to feel for them, should be our desire and determination to preserve him from the danger to which he is certainly exposed, of thinking that all the questionings of his fathers respecting the invisible world had no purpose or meaning. These questionings belong to the most radical portion of the Hindoo mind; in them you see what the Hindoo is, what his existence means, and how he has been able to stamp such an image of himself upon society. To these questionings he owes the activity of his intellect and imagination when all his other tendencies and his outward circumstances would make him indolent—hence have arisen his love of letters and his desire for science. But the time has evidently come when he cannot be questioning merely; he must have answers. I contend that he who is able to give them is not a destroyer, but a preserver; that he will have a right to boast of having upheld all that was strongest and most permanent in the Hindoo life and character, while other influences, however innocently and inevitably, were threatening to undermine them. I concede with equal readiness, that if Christianity do not offer these answers, it cannot make this boast; it must leave to some other instrument the work of regenerating Hindostan. As the question is brought to this test, let us gather up in a few words the enigmas which have tormented the Hindoo so long, and of which, for the sake of his practical life, he demands a solution.
First, he has had the deepest assurance that God must be an Absolute and Living Being, who can be satisfied with nothing less perfect than himself; and yet he has an equally deep conviction that this Absolute and Eternal Being cannot merely live in self-contemplation; that there must be some object in which He sees His image reflected. The thought is expressed with great earnestness and beauty in one of the early Vedas, where Brahm is introduced seeking for the image of himself. The words which are imputed to him express the strong feeling, that a merely solitary, self-seeking, abstracted being would be one whom a man, experiencing his own need of sympathy and fellowship, could not bear to contemplate. The thought expands itself through the whole Hindoo mythology. It utters itself from the beginning in the idea of a Brahma, as well as a Brahm; it gives birth to all the later notions of goddesses dwelling beside the gods. If no voice comes from the secret place to interpret this mighty contradiction which the learned man has perceived, which the most ignorant Hindoo feels, their thoughts of God and their human life must continue a hopeless maze.
For the perplexity which grows out of this lies close to personal, as well as social existence. “May not man himself be this partner of the Divinity? If he is, what means that deep assurance of a Divinity retired within the sanctity and awfulness of his own nature?—if he is not, what mean these yearnings in the spirit after the knowledge of him; this promise in the heart that it may be attained; this discontent while it is wanting? It is an idle thing to cut this knot by affirming either principle and denying the other; all confusions, theoretical and practical, of the Hindoo arise from the attempt to do this, and from the experience of its impossibility; only if you can shew that they have been reconciled, and how, will you lead him to any clearness or freedom. Man has this glorious faculty; but a portion of men seem without it. It must dwell in a caste; the rest must be cut off from it. Leave this thought to work, and it will bring forth the fruits which it has brought forth hitherto. The modern Hindoo, with his European culture and science, will be just as contemptuous to all who want his information and intellect as the Brahmins of old; the twice-born notion may change its form, in effect it will be as rampant and tyrannical as ever. You cannot extirpate it, until you justify it—until you can shew that some eternal truth lies in the distinction, and yet that it excludes no human creature; that it asserts the common privilege of Brahmin and Sudra.
Then we come to another set of questions—This Absolute Being, what manner of being is he? If it be true that he stands in some relation to us and the world, in what relation? Is he benignant, or hateful? is he a preserver or destroyer? You cannot answer the question with any vague flourishes of rhetoric. The Hindoo is willing enough to acknowledge a kind and gracious ruler, but the worshipper of Sheeva meets you with a set of facts. Here is misery, here is death. You must encounter these facts—you cannot blink them. You must be able to say—“I can shew that this misery and death do not interfere with the idea of a God of Order, Mercy, Love; I can shew it by practical tokens and demonstrations;” otherwise you must leave the sects to fight on for ever, with a tolerable certainty that the darker will in general have the ascendency. Again, the idea of a struggle between life and death, order and disorder, good and evil, and of the victory having been achieved by the God actually descending into the battle-field, and himself taking part in the strife; the idea that he must assume some form which is subject to all the accidents of earthly calamity; this is one which a European may easily scoff at, when he sees it presented to him in the Hindoo stories, and, doubtless, he will find many a learned Brahmin who is ready, with more or less reserve, to scoff too, nay, to represent such a notion as quite incompatible with the higher Brahminical theology. But let it be well considered that a stern demand of the popular conscience carries with it a very mighty witness; if the learned order bows to that demand, allows the people to clothe their inward belief in their own shapes, and reduces their crudities to a system, we may be sure that the faith of the taught is stronger and more vital than that of the teacher: it may be grosser, but it must contain, at least, as real an element. Except this part of the Hindoo conviction can be recognized; unless it can be shewn how the belief of such a divine descent is compatible with the highest idea any Brahmin can entertain of the divine perfection, or of man’s spirit being intended to ascend to the apprehension and participation of it; I cannot see how the Hindoo race can ever be permanently raised above its present degradation, or how that respect and justice, which have been so passionately demanded for the faith and institutions of centuries, can be practically rendered. Once more—It is, undoubtedly, a right thing in a government to suppress, by actual edict and physical force, human sacrifices. The Roman, tolerant as he was of all polytheistic systems in the provinces, took this course in our own country when he was dealing with the practices of Druidical worship. But neither by this act, nor by establishing municipal institutions in Britain, nor by building and encouraging the natives to build baths, and porticoes, and temples, did he provide any real substitute for those dark, mysterious thoughts of the unseen world, which had haunted the mind of the Celt under his oaks, and which found a fearful expression in these sacrifices. Those thoughts were the stamina of the British heart; when an external civilization expelled them, what remained was a feeble colony, groaning for help to the masters who could give it help no longer; a colony which needed to have all its arts and polish destroyed by a people possessing some real faith, some inward strength, that the soil might, by this process, be prepared to bear genuine native fruits. It will be the same with Hindostan, if, while we put down the burnings of widows, and bestow a culture which makes such practices disgusting, we are not able to shew them what is the true form of self-immolation, and how wife, and maiden, and widow—how men, whether called to the contemplative, or active life, may practise it.
I know that I am asking no light thing of any faith when I say, All this it must do if it is to satisfy the heart and conscience of this Asiatic people. But let me ask you, before I conclude, whether a faith which does less than this can satisfy your hearts and consciences? We are in a world of action, and energy, and enterprize, more unlike that dreaming and speculative world we have been hearing of than the soil and climate of England are unlike those of Hindostan. And yet, I will be bold to say it, the same thoughts which stir the spirit of the Indian sage and the Indian Sudra, are working secretly beneath all our bustling life, are affecting the councils of statesmen, are entering into the meditations of the moralists and metaphysicians who most despise theology; in another form, are disturbing the heart of the country peasant, and the dweller in St. Giles’s. They are such questions as these—What do we worship? A dream, or a real Being? One wholly removed from us, or one related to us? Is He a Preserver, or a Destroyer? Has Death explained its meaning to us, or is it still a horrible riddle? Is it still uncertain whether Life or Death is master of the world, or how has the uncertainty been removed? What is the evil which I find in myself? Is it myself? Must I perish in order that it may perish, or can it be in any wise separated from me? Can I give up myself, and yet live? What are these desires which I feel in myself for something unseen, glorious, and perfect? Are they all phantasy, or can they be realized? If they can, by what means? Has He to whom they point made himself known to me? How am I connected with Him? Must I utterly renounce all the things about me, that I may be absorbed into Him, or is there any way in which I can devote them and myself to Him, and only know Him the better by fulfilling my place among them? These are the great human questions; distance in time and space does not affect them; if we are not concerned with them, it is because we have not yet ceased to be savages, or because we are returning, through an extreme civilization, into the state of savages: if they do occupy us, we shall find that there can be but one answer to them for the Englishman and the Hindoo.