The subject which I propose to consider in my present Lecture, is the relation between Christianity and Hindooism. That such a relation exists has been felt by most persons, different as their theories have been respecting the nature or the cause of it. Christian writers on Hindoo antiquities have spoken of various traditions, which they suppose must have been derived, originally, from Scripture narratives—upon various Hindoo doctrines which have an obvious resemblance to some which form part of the orthodox faith of Christendom. Infidel writers have been equally willing to notice these correspondences, and have turned them to their own account. If any part of the Hindoo theories about the origin of the world recalls the Mosaic account of it, this is evidence to them that both were alike the work of some early, imperfect theorist, that neither has any claim to divine authority. If the similarity is of an historical kind, the notorious confusion of the Hindoo records throws new doubt upon the Christian narratives. If, again, the likeness be between the great mysteries of the Christian faith, and the more recondite Hindoo speculations, what, they ask, does this shew but that these mysteries are the result of certain trains of human thought, and have only been attributed to a higher origin, because our forefathers had not the same means as we have of tracing them out in the minds of those whom they considered ignorant and idolatrous as we do.
I do not wish to conceal any of these objections; I am rather anxious to put them forward at the outset of my enquiry, because they concern not so much the results to which it may lead, as the method in which it shall be pursued. It is no doubt true that Christian writers have often caught at external, superficial indications of a resemblance between their own faith and that of other men, and have strained evidence to shew how it must have been produced. And I am satisfied that every such attempt to make out a case by ingenious twisting of words or perversion of facts, is sorely punished. For the impression left upon our minds, supposing the conclusion completely established, would be no more than this; that certain opinions of certain people upon matters of history, or upon questions of a very subtle and refined nature, had something to do with similar opinions existing among ourselves, and might, perhaps, have proceeded from the same source. But the mere theories which we find in the sacred books of different nations, either about the past state of the world, or the system of it now, though they are worthy of our study and reflection, as hints (not always the most important hints) towards understanding what is the radical principle of the mind and belief of the race which adopts them, are not themselves identical with that principle and that belief. Now when this is the case with that to which we compare the Christian doctrines, it is far too likely that we shall begin to think of them in the same way. They will appear to us also notions and opinions about certain great subjects; divine notions and opinions we may call them; but a mere name will not change their character: we shall not feel that they have to do with our own life and being; we shall regard them as truths which we are to hold, not as truths which are to hold us, which are to give us a standing ground for time and for eternity. I do not wonder, then, nor am I altogether sorry, that those who have put forward this view of the relations between Hindooism and Christianity should have been taught that their own weapons may be used against them. Such discoveries, instead of shaking our faith, may lead us to feel more diligently for the foundation of it; to ask whether other nations have not given evidence that they too need such a foundation; whether they are not craving to be told what it is.
In considering the relations between Mahometanism and Christianity, we did not satisfy ourselves with shewing that certain precepts of the Koran corresponded to certain precepts of the Bible, and that the one was wrong when it had departed from the other. It seemed necessary to examine whether the main principle of Mahometan life, that which had given strength to its hosts when they were most strong, be or be not embodied in Christianity, and whether there or here it has most vitality, and is most in harmony with other principles equally important. If we could not find that the great Mahometan truth was asserted more distinctly, mightily, livingly in Christianity than in Mahometanism, we did not feel that Christianity could ever be a substitute for Mahometanism. If that for which the Mahometans were content to give up their lives, were merely a formal proposition in our faith, we were sure we could not sustain ourselves against them. If anything wherein we differed from them weakened this principle, that was so much of evidence against us. Nothing seemed sufficient to us but the discovery that the belief in an Absolute Living God, actually ruling in the world, seeking men, not first sought by them, which is the root of all their convictions, is the root of ours; that Christianity perishes even more completely than Mahometanism when this truth is forgotten; that this principle has lost its power over the Mahometan mind, or been changed into one of the most opposite character, just because it wants the support of other kindred truths, which belong to the essence of Christianity.
Precisely in the same manner I would deal with the present subject. In my second Lecture I considered what were the permanent characteristics of Hindooism, those which had survived in all its changes, and made its different changes intelligible, those which had resisted all opposition, even from truths which seemed mightier than they, and from men who were braver and stronger than those who upheld them. I would now inquire whether these characteristics have their counterparts in Christianity; whether they enter into the substance of it, as they do into the substance of Hindooism; whether the difficulties and contradictions which we found had grown naturally out of these convictions, and yet had weakened and impaired them, belong also to our belief; whether in that belief these Hindoo truths are or are not reconciled with those with which they had seemed to stand in deadly hostility. I have said again and again, that I do not think we prove our confidence in the divinity of that which we confess by subjecting it to light tests, by arguing that this or that is not justly required of it. Whatever has been found necessary in the course of six thousand years’ experience, we have a right to ask of that which offers itself as the faith for mankind. And I do not think that it ever has shrunk, or ever will shrink, from any demands of this kind that we make upon it.
The position of the Brahmin in reference to the rest of Hindoo society was that which seemed to us at once the most obvious outward mark of the system, and its essential characteristic. Here was the radical distinction between Hindooism and Mahometanism; here was the key to its connexion with Buddhism, and to the divergence of the latter from it. The Greeks under Alexander had seen that the Hindoo people were cast in the Brahminical mould—they retain this mould under the English government in this nineteenth century after Christ. Whatever principle then be the ground of the belief in the superiority of the Brahmin to other men, can be no mere accident of Hindoo belief, no mere notion or opinion in the sacred books; it must belong to the innermost heart of the race. This principle we found expressed in that distinction between the twice-born man and other men, which is the characteristical one of the Menu code. All mere distinctions of occupation, even the distinctions of the four original classes, seemed to resolve themselves into this. This, therefore, had endured, though two of those classes had disappeared, and though the whole caste system had undergone great outward modifications. This had continued universal amidst all its local varieties. Nor was there much difficulty in ascertaining the main elements of which this distinction consisted. First of all, it stood on the conviction that there is in man that which is meant to converse with an Unseen Spiritual Being, that this is the vocation of the highest, wisest man, of him who is properly the man, who is alone able to guide and rule his fellows. Next, upon the consideration that this is not the natural, ordinary state of men, that that is an ignominious, degraded, animal state, out of which whoever is raised, must be raised by different acts of purification, acts which are to bring him into a relation more or less intimate with Brahm. Thirdly, we saw that the idea of hereditary succession became involved with this, that the twice-born men became a distinct family, to be preserved pure from generation to generation.
I repeat these observations in this place the more carefully, because I am anxious that you should not suppose I am attaching any force to a mere phrase like that of the twice-born man. This phrase instantly suggests to every Christian an idea with which all his life he has been familiar. Hence, it might lead us to one of those hasty analogies against which I have already warned you. A person thoughtfully and earnestly considering such a subject as this for a great practical purpose, will be suspicious of himself when he finds that he is noticing a verbal correspondence; he will be aware of the temptation to build an argument upon it, and will understand how very easily he may be deceived by a translation from another language, made by men who were formed in an English school of thought, and were, perhaps, glad to catch at a rendering which would bring a lively and well-known image before the mind of their readers. I am quite willing, therefore, to forget this expression altogether, or to adopt any other that an Oriental scholar shall give me as a substitute for it, which has no resemblance to our own sacred dialect. It is the thing, and not the word, I wish you to notice; the deep conviction which has wrought itself into the mind of the Hindoo, and which has gone along with him through every stage of his history. Still more earnestly would I remind you that it is not the words New Birth, or Second Birth, which characterize Christianity, but the meaning indicated by them. To realize that conviction, let us, as on the last occasion, look at the context of the Scriptures, not confining ourselves to the New Testament, but beginning with the opening of Jewish history.
I. You will remember how we traced the idea of a Divine call through the whole of that history. I referred to it then for the purpose of shewing how everything in our faith, as in the Mahometan, rests upon the recognition of an act on the part of God. But in that call was involved the idea of distinction, of separation. Abraham is called out of his father’s house, he is set apart to be the head of a peculiar family, and the whole of that family have a sign of that separation appointed for them. When the nation is called out of its Egyptian bondage, not only is this sign carefully preserved; not only is every institution expressly contrived to keep this people distinct from other people; but within the nation itself distinctions begin to be established. The priest is called out to the special work of presenting sacrifices, a whole tribe is set apart to the service of the tabernacle. They are carefully designated; the anointing oil is poured upon their heads; garments of honour and beauty are given them; Holiness to the Lord is inscribed on the forehead of the high priest. The last fact shows you how completely the idea not only of a separation is involved in these appointments, but of a separation for the very purpose to which the Brahmin is devoted. The priest is dedicated to the service of the Unseen Jehovah. He is to enter into His presence; to hold awful converse with Him. His separation, in fact, is never for an instant spoken of as having another object than this. A gross animal taste, a disposition to honour visible things and bow before them, is characteristic of men generally; the elect people are taken from the surrounding nations, that they may be emancipated from this slavish tendency. Yet the Jew is reminded that he is liable to it like other men; that he must be cut off from it; that he must look upon himself as intended for intercourse with that which the eye cannot tell him of. The priest explains the end of the nation’s existence. It is expressly declared that the tribe of Levi is taken instead of the firstborn of all the families of Israel.
Here you see one very clear indication of the principle which Hindoo society embodies; and this principle is not less characteristic of the later history than of the earlier. True the people began in process of time to mix with the nations round about them, and to adopt their habits. But the wise man always warns them, and the fact proves, that hereby they were destroying themselves. When they forgot their covenant, when they no longer looked upon themselves as a chosen, separated people; above all when their priests lost sight of their own vocation, and the purpose of it, feebleness, division, subjection to their neighbours, followed of course. The fact does not change in the least degree from one generation to another. The only change is in the increased knowledge which the Jews obtain of the reason and ground of the fact. This progress is very remarkable. The prophets tell them more and more distinctly, that they require to be circumcised in heart; that the separation must not be merely from surrounding people, but from an evil and corruption in themselves; that if they remembered the covenant of their God, and clave to Him, they would overcome not merely the Moabites and Edomites, but a perverse, grovelling habit of soul, which was the cause of their idolatry; that if they forgot this covenant, they would sink first under the yoke of their own inclinations, then under that of Assyria or Babylon. The more you read the Old Testament prophets the more you will see that amidst all the various circumstances which surround them, amidst all the different methods of instruction which they are taught to adopt, this is their great burden. But is there not a change in the New Testament? Did not our Lord destroy that separation which the teachers of the old time had been so careful to establish? Did not his coming put Jews and Gentiles on a level? We must not permit vague phrases of this kind to hide from us the fact that our Lord, so far from obliterating the principle for which the Jewish nation had testified, asserted it, established it, expressed it for the first time in all its clearness and fulness. That, He said, which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit. Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of heaven. In this language he gathers up the very meaning of the old dispensation; shews us what a truth was involved in every part of it; how every part had been a preparation for the full revelation of this truth. His coming was, no doubt, to destroy the barrier between Jew and Gentile; but not till that barrier had been proved to have its justification in the very condition and being of man, in his relation to God and to the world. If there is a flesh in man, by obedience to which he becomes degraded, sensual, idolatrous, if he naturally is obedient to this flesh, and can only attain the rights of a spiritual creature, when the Lord of All raises him above his nature, above himself, then we can understand why a whole nation should have been called by its position in reference to other nations, by its own strength and weakness, righteousness and sins, by the experience of all its individual members, to set forth this mighty fact in which the eternal destinies of men must be involved. And this testimony we hold is not, and cannot be, obsolete. The Christian Church claims to be a body of twice-born men; claims to be a witness of that mighty privilege which men have of conversing with the Unseen and Infinite, as well as a witness of the tendencies which there is in man to be merely animal and sensual. The Christian Church claims a set of ministers who shall represent the spiritual glory and privileges of the whole body, shall be instruments in overcoming the low and grovelling propensities of its members. Here, then, is a principle which is as characteristic of our faith as it is of the Hindoo, which has scarcely moulded Oriental society more than it has the society of modern Europe.
II. It is impossible to separate the belief in the superiority of the Brahmin to other men, from the belief in his relation to Brahm. Technically we may call one a political, the other a theological idea; practically, the former may, for a while, survive the latter. But in any serious investigation of the grounds of the religious system they must be contemplated as identical. Brahm is Wisdom or Light; the Brahmin is the reflection of this Wisdom or Light. Such a view of the divinity, and of the way in which man is related to him, is found in different modifications among all those people who are members of what is called the Indo-Germanic stock, and, perhaps, in some who do not belong to it. While creative Will, Command, Sovereignty, Separation from man, are the attributes of Him whom the Arabian proclaimed to be the one God, Persians, Greeks, Goths, each recognized Intelligence, an Intelligence communicable to man, and quickly involving human worship, as the object of their reverence. But long before this reverence had taken any definite form among these people, hear how strongly it was expressed by those Hebrew sages who seemed to live for the assertion of the Mahometan truth:
I Wisdom dwell with Prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions. I am Understanding; I have strength. By me kings reign, and princes decree justice. By me princes rule, and nobles, and all the judges of the earth. The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His works of old. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: while as yet He had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When He prepared the heavens, I was there: when He set a compass upon the face of the deep: when He established the clouds above: when He strengthened the fountains of the deep: when He gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass His commandment: when He appointed the fountains of the earth: then I was by Him as one brought up with Him: and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him; rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.
Here we have the origin of the universe ascribed to Wisdom; kings and judges are said to rule by Wisdom; Wisdom is said from the first to have had her delight in the sons of men. Is this an isolated passage; the dream of some particular writer, who had perhaps been instructed by Chaldeans? On the contrary, it expresses the very spirit of the Jewish economy, as it is presented to us in the writings of all its historians and prophets. The wise king or the wise prophet is ever spoken of in Scripture as having the divine Wisdom, the divine Word with him, nay, in him. He does not shrink from the pretension. In his truest, humblest state of mind, he feels and confesses himself to be only a reflection of the divine Light, an utterer of the divine Voice. He charges it as a sin upon the false teachers, that they only speak words out of their own hearts. Here again, the New Testament takes up, expands, and interprets the language of the Old.
In the beginning, says St. John, was the Word. In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men. And the Light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.
Of these words, and of some which I have for the present omitted, St. John’s Gospel and his First Epistle are the exposition. They declare what this life was which had been the light of men, how it was manifested, who it was that could say, “I am the Light of the World; he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness.”
III. But we detected a yet deeper conception beneath that one of the relation of the Brahmin to Brahma; we found that Brahma himself was supposed to be the expression or manifestation of Brahm, who must be thought of only as Absolute, Self-existent. These two ideas are inseparable. The God is said to have sought for a companion of his throne, and having considered and rejected all animal natures, at last to have found his one adequate image in man. This thought, often strangely confounded, we saw was a pregnant one: a dualism, not of opposition but of consort, might be traced through the whole mythology.
Now, in the passage which I quoted from the Book of the Proverbs, you cannot fail to have noted the words, “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways. I was with Him as one brought up with Him.” Beneath this Wisdom, this teacher of the Sons of Men, this ruler of Princes, by whom the sea and earth have been formed, there is still a deeper and more unfathomable essence. Is this a dream, mixing inconsistently with the rest of the discourse? You cannot banish it without destroying the sense of the context. Does it stand apart from the general course and tenour of Jewish Revelation? You cannot understand the most striking, turning points of that Revelation, if you determine to pass by these words as incomprehensible or insignificant. Habitually the Jew believed that He whom he worshipped dwelt in the thick darkness; no eye had seen Him; it was unlawful to conceive any likeness of Him. But he also believed that this Lord had revealed himself to Abraham, as he sat by the tent-door in the heat of the day on the plain of Mamre; that He had been the Captain of the Hosts of Israel; that He had spoken to and by every holy seer. Do you say, “These were difficulties, they look like contradictions in the faith of this people; they seem fragments from different religions—witnesses that they were not, as you pretend, the subjects of a continuous, harmonious revelation?” I admit the difficulty; I see why those who have never discovered it in themselves, should suppose it must have arisen from the blending of two incompatible traditions. I admit, further, that the apparent contradiction could not be removed from the mind of the Jew; that it must have haunted him sometimes have tormented him; that the vision of a reconciliation will only from time to time have cheered him, in the fulfilment of lowly duties, after hours of deep sorrow, in the temple-worship; that a verbal reconciliation could not satisfy him, or any man. But a reconciliation he and the Hindoo both demand; the penalty of not finding it is—Modern Judaism, or Modern Hindooism. In that passage, which I purposely mutilated when I quoted it before, St. John says,
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.
He states broadly, and in union, the two truths which the former dispensation had beheld separately, each of which had seemed at times to stifle the other, each of which had again seemed necessary to the other. But he does not attempt to bring them together in words, until, as he believes, they had first been brought together in fact. The Word, he says, was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
IV. I would beg you to remark how the Evangelist speaks of Him here, first as a Word, then as a Son. The Hindoo dreamed of Light proceeding from a Fountain of Light; the Greek of a child springing from a Father. Naturally, and without effort, St. John recognizes both conceptions; for the divine Wisdom is with him no abstraction; the divine Son is with him no material image. Hence there is no sudden transition from the divinest part of the Christian lore to that which connects it with the popular faith of Hindooism. The Word was made Flesh. A divine Incarnation is affirmed to be the great instrument for redressing the evils of the world. It is declared that He who had held converse with holy men in their hearts, He whose life was the light of men had brought himself nigh to all, so that he could be seen with human eyes—handled with human hands.
I have said that the Scripture speaks of this Incarnation as the means for the redress of mortal evils. But if we will use its language strictly, we shall make a closer approximation to the Hindoo apprehension: we shall say that it was expressly to deliver men out of the power of the Destroyer, to break in pieces his kingdom, that the Eternal Word became one with his creatures. Nowhere more distinctly than in Christian Theology is there the recognition of the fact which the Siva worshipper perceives: nowhere less effort to make men comfortable by dissembling the fact, that misery and death have gotten hold of the earth; nowhere a more emphatic affirmation of the witness which the heart and consciences of men have borne everywhere, but with special earnestness in Hindostan, that in them, in the region of man’s inner being, is the fiercest debate with the evil which he sees without; that there, in that region, he has to encounter it in its highest form, in its most radical principle. The Gospel does not start with a philosophical lie; what man by bitter experience has discovered to be his condition, it assumes to be his condition.
V. But dare we admit the genuineness of that other page in the book of human experience which the Siva worshippers would blot out? The Incarnation answers this question; affirms the Preserver to be the Lord of all; affirms Him through the whole course of His government to have been upholding this earth and those who dwelt upon it; to have been interfering for their rescue. Here, in this very Incarnation, and that which follows from it, is the assertion of his complete dominion; the answer to the Destroyer’s claim to be in any sense the Creator, to have any dominion whatsoever over that race which has paid him such fearful homage.
That which meets us first in the records of the life of the Son of Man upon earth, after He had been declared to be the Son of God, is a conflict, which no human eye could behold, with the Destroyer; next, the testimony which He gave outwardly of the truth He had in that secret battle made good, by delivering the bodies and spirits of men out of their bondage to inward miseries and inward tyrants. Yet never for an instant did He speak of the claim which he put forth for the dominion of the Gracious Preserver and Father, as a new claim. Never when he spoke of setting up His Kingdom did he admit that He was not King of kings and Lord of lords before. The Jewish calling and economy had been asserting for generations the fact, that the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity, transgressions, and sin, was the one Lord; that He had taken this nation to be His, to make them witnesses of His righteousness and government; that every one who received His Revelation of Himself, submitted to Him, and trusted in Him, was thereby brought into a righteous state, was thereby enabled to understand the purpose of His government, and to receive the blessings of it.
VI. Trust in this being lay at the foundation of the Jew’s life. That trust involved Sacrifice.
They gave up themselves; so they rose out of the dominion of that Spirit of self-will to which others were paying homage; so they were able in their daily acts to resist him, and defy him, and to declare that neither in himself, nor in any of his innumerable forms, images, apparitions, had he any title to the obedience of God’s servants. The Jew was taught that he was devoted, sacrificed to this Lord, who had chosen his nation, and preserved it from generation to generation, and who exercised righteousness and judgment in all the earth. It was He who called the priest, appointed his vocation; to Him he was to bring the sacrifices for himself and his nation; to Him, and to no visible things; to Him, and to no unrighteous, hateful power. Sacrifice was the bond of the nation’s existence; sacrifice the act by which man realized his place in it, and came to understand its privileges. The meaning, the law, the ground of sacrifice was interpreting itself to the conscience and reason of the true Israelite by every step of his discipline, by every act of obedience, by his sin, by his repentance. More and more he felt it to be the law of the universe; apart from which its very existence is a contradiction; since only in perfect submission to the perfect Will can any creature attain its life and freedom. He was prepared therefore for that announcement which the Apostles of our Lord made so boldly, that He who was the Son of the Father, the Deliverer of Men, had offered himself a perfect Sacrifice to God; that He had accomplished this act by entering into all the miseries of man; that with this loving, filial sacrifice, He who was perfect Love was well pleased; that in it was the Atonement and Reconciliation of all Creation to Him, in its original Head; that in the strength of it each man might offer himself to God as a reasonable, holy, acceptable Sacrifice.
I hope I have shewn in these last hints that if the other portions of the faith of the Hindoos have that which answers to them in ours, their faith in the might and blessing of Sacrifice is one in which we are bound with all our hearts to participate. If there be any acts in past or present ages on which we can think with delight, which we can be sure had Christ’s mark upon them, which have wrought mightily, though in general secretly, for the deliverance of men from idols, from intellectual or spiritual plagues, here has been the root and spring of them. But it is just in the point of deepest sympathy with this ancient people that we arrive at the secret of our opposition. Upon the question to whom the Sacrifice should be offered, whether by it we propitiate a Siva, or surrender ourselves in faith and trust to one who cares for us and loves us; whether it is to overcome the reluctance of an enemy, or is the offering of our own reluctant wills to a Father in the name of one who has presented and is ever presenting His own filial and completed Sacrifice—upon this issue, let us understand it well, our controversy with Hindooism turns.
The idea of a Kehama obtaining a power from his gods which they cannot afterwards resist, to curse and plague his fellow-men, is involved in the one doctrine, and is ready at any moment to come forth in a form of terrific wickedness, in the likeness of some Man-God. The Agony of the Garden, the spirit of the 22d Psalm, the Cross of Him who became nothing that the power, and grace, and Wisdom of God might through them shine forth upon all creatures; here we see the Christian Sacrifice, the Sacrifice of the God-Man. This Spirit of Sacrifice He promises to all who are made the Sons of God in Him. Everything then depends in our dealings with the Hindoos—let me add, everything in our dealings with ourselves upon the degree in which we grasp this distinction, or lose sight of it. I shewed you that we are open to all Mahometan temptations. So are we to all Hindoo temptations. We may exalt a priestly caste, as if it were set up to make the rest of men Sudras; we may dwell upon the privilege of holding intercourse with the Divine Being, till we sink into self-worshippers; we may revenge ourselves for this abstract idolatry by plunging into outward idolatry; we may at last bow down before Siva, who we should have known was in all these ways drawing us into his worship, since every act of pride, spiritual, intellectual, sensual, is a mystery of his worship.
These dangers have discovered themselves in former periods of the world; seeing that they appertain to human nature, we may be as liable to them as those who lived in any country or age. Is it an escape from them to deny the existence of a priesthood, to say that intercourse with heaven is a dream, to scoff at all popular feelings, to maintain that the conscience of evil is nothing, that sacrifices are a mockery? Or, rather to maintain that a priesthood exists for the purpose of raising men above animal degradation, as a witness of the great rights of humanity; that, because intercourse with heaven was intended for the spirit of man, and has been made possible for men, therefore lowliness and self-abasement are our most proper and reasonable conditions; that poor and rich, priests and Sudras, have been alike looked upon, sympathized with, redeemed, raised to human privileges by Him who took the nature of all; that the man may be delivered from an evil conscience, that he may renounce and scorn the authority of the evil spirit, that he may offer himself in Christ’s name to God? This is the alternative for India and for England. In other words, the question is, whether we hold a system of opinions or a revelation from God? All Brahminical acts, services, sacraments, imply an effort or scheme on the part of the creature to raise himself to God. All Christian acts, services, sacraments, imply that God has sought for the creature that he might raise him to Himself. The difference in our thoughts of God, of the priest, of the sacrifice, all go back to this primary difference. When we get into the region of conceptions and speculations, all our views of that which is divine will be fragmentary; some of them will be very dark, because they are derived from our own experience; either these become predominant, or in seeking to rid ourselves of them, we deny facts and extinguish great portions of our own being. To believe really, practically, that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all, we must believe that He has caused this light to arise and shine; we must seek to walk in it, and to see all things in it.
In my second Lecture, I referred to the state of the Britons, who had parted with their original faith and had received Roman civilization, when they were no longer protected by Roman arms. I said the example was one which the statesmen of British India would do well to ponder. To abolish human sacrifices is good; but a blank will be left in the nation’s heart even by the loss of such practices as those, which must be filled up, or we shall impoverish those whom we seek to reform. But there is another, sadder side of this history, one which refers not to the conquered, but to the conquerors. Britain uttered her groan because Rome could no longer send forth its legions. The hundred hands which had been stretched from east to west, from north to south, were palsied; for the giant who moved them had become a child. And whence came this decay of strength? All the signs of it still belonged to Rome. From the city of Jerusalem to the city of York she had traversed the earth with her roads; within her own walls were the mightiest trophies of art over nature. Her history told by what wonderful agencies human and natural, by how evidently divine an ordinance, her glory had been achieved. And to the gloss of civilization had been added the gloss of Christianity. The Emperor had believed when other help was failing, that in the might of the Cross he might still conquer. The sign was indeed there, but it was marked upon the standard, not written upon the hearts of those rulers of the world. They saw not what it meant; how it interpreted and crowned all that had been great in their history hitherto; how it separated the real great from the real little; how it sanctified all those feelings of obedience, duty, reverence for unseen law, self-devotion, by which the city had risen from nothing; how it poured contempt upon dominion, except as an instrument by which the highest might serve the lowest; upon glory, except as it grew out of humiliation, and was the exaltation of man above himself. The civilized Christian Roman had lost the heart, the reverence, the faith, which belonged to his rude Pagan ancestors; that Christianity and civilization might be victorious, the miserable patrons of both must be swept away.
If it be so with us; if our civilization merely consists in those outward conveniences and mechanical inventions which are the fruits of it, assuredly we shall impart but that which we have; we shall communicate only our external polish to the nations which we rule; their inward condition under our hands will become less strong, less sound, than it was before. If our belief in Christianity floats upon the surface of our minds, just keeps itself alive by a few phrases and conventions in the multitude of our pursuits; if it offers no greater evidence of its vitality than the debates and controversies which it engenders, assuredly we cannot present it to the Hindoo with the slightest hope that he will receive it in exchange for a faith which, be it good or evil, has governed his life. Only if our cultivation be of that kind which is truly human, which delights to discern the essential humanity of each nation, to honour it, to sympathise with it, shall we understand that which is peculiar in our subjects, or reform that which is corrupt in them. Only if we have received the Gospel as the answer from heaven to inward perplexities which we have a thousand times tried to stifle, but could not; only if we have learnt that these perplexities are the groans of the human spirit within us crying for deliverance; can we with honest confidence speak to that spirit in whatever region it dwells, in whatever language, clear or inarticulate, it utters its voice, as one spake to it of old, “Say not, Who shall ascend up into heaven? that is, to bring Christ down; or, Who shall descend into the deep? that is, to bring Christ again from the dead: for lo! the word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, even the word of faith which we preach.”