That Buddha and Brahm are words of cognate if not of the same signification; that Buddhism is nevertheless essentially opposed to Brahminism, seeing that it denies the existence of a priestly caste; that the Buddhists are scattered over many lands, and have adopted various forms of belief and opinion; that their universal characteristic is reverence for the human intellect, which they think of as one, though diffused through many persons, and as having its central manifestation in the Lama; that Buddhism exists in China, beside two other forms of opinion with which it does not combine, I have explained in my third Lecture. It is now our business to inquire whether this system has any or what affinities with Christianity. If the inquiry is conducted fairly, it must satisfy these conditions. The resemblance which we detect, must be not in the superficial accidental parts of either faith, but in their radical and essential characteristics; these must not be assumed by the inquirer on his own authority, but must have some clear voucher that they are recognised as radical and essential characteristics by Buddhists and Christians respectively; the likeness must not be in that side of Buddhism in which it coincides with Hindooism, otherwise we shall only be repeating the last Lecture, but in that which is opposed to it.
The festival of Whitsuntide is observed in all parts of Christendom; here in England, among the Protestants in the north of Europe, by the Romanists in the south, by Greeks and Armenians, by the descendants of English, French, Spanish, settlers in North and South America. It is felt by all these to commemorate a great event, the event which marks the establishment of the Christian Church in the world. They derive their notion of this event from the record of it in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. There we are told, that on a certain day which had long been kept as a festival day among the Jews, numbers of them were gathered from various countries of Asia, Africa, and Europe, in the city of Jerusalem. In that city dwelt a body of priests, divinely called, as its inhabitants believed, to this office, members of a priestly family. There were also authorised doctors or interpreters of the law, whose words were received by the great mass of the people as oracles. On the day of Pentecost, says the writer of the Acts, a great body of the inhabitants of the city, of the strangers from other lands, were drawn to a place near the temple, because they were told that a set of men, not priests, not doctors of the law, but inhabitants of the most despised part of Palestine, themselves of the lowest caste, Galilean fishermen, were speaking in different tongues the wonderful works of God. This power the Scripture declares was given them from on high. The Spirit of God had descended upon them; they spake with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. To the body thus endued it is said a multitude joined themselves. They were regarded with more and more jealousy by the priests and doctors of the Jews. But they spread themselves through Palestine; they went into other lands. Everywhere, they declared that they came in the power of the Spirit, who had thus broken down the barriers of language and national distinction; everywhere they said that this Spirit would be given to those who believed their message.
Are we to conclude from this story that the Christian faith broke loose from the Jewish faith, as Buddhism broke loose from Brahminism; that in each case there was a vehement reaction against caste narrowness and local boundaries; that in each case this reaction was associated with the recognition of a spirit dwelling in men? There may be much plausibility in such a notion; for many reasons it would commend itself to certain modern philosophers. Only they would say, ‘In order to make out this resemblance, it is necessary to divest the scriptural story of its halo of mystery and marvel. Take it as it stands, and all you learn from it is, that on a certain occasion a particular miracle was performed, unlike any that had previously occurred, or was to occur again, at variance with the constitution of man and the dealings of his Creator. In that form it offers only a seeming analogy between the Christian and the Buddhist doctrine; seeing that the latter assumes the presence of a divine and diffusive spirit to be the proper characteristic of humanity, at least, in its noblest state, and that on this ground it oversets the caste principle, not for a particular emergency, but altogether. If, however, you are inclined to admit that this is merely the narrative of a remarkable epoch in Jewish history (and indeed, in the world’s history) when there was awakened in the nation, or in a part of it, the consciousness, previously slumbering, of a capacity in men generally for that knowledge which had been confined to the priests; a narrative surrounded, as all Hebrew narratives are, with a divine machinery, we will admit that you have established your case.’
I submit that one part of this statement is quite incorrect. If I take the narration literally, I shall not merely be told, that a certain event happened at a certain time and in a certain place; I shall be told that this event was the fulfilment of a promise made to the fathers of the Jewish nation; I shall be told that it was intended for those of that generation, and for their children. These assertions, it will be remembered, are very prominent in the discourse which the writer of the Acts of the Apostles attributes to St. Peter. One therefore who believes this statement cannot look upon this descent of the Spirit, with all that was implied in the circumstances of it, as violating the laws of the human constitution, as an exception in the plan of its Creator. He must look upon it as expounding that constitution, as carrying out that plan. But on what grounds, it will be asked, can it be alleged that the principles set forth in the Jewish scriptures and the Jewish economy were asserted and realised by a transaction which seems to destroy the exclusive hierarchy, ultimately the exclusive national limitation, which lie at the root of them? The answer to this question, will I believe, shew that the affinities of Christianity with Buddhism are much closer and more extensive than they would be on the hypothesis of the former being a rebellion against Judaism; on the other hand, will explain wherein the difference between them consists, and what that ‘miraculous halo’ which is imputed to the Scripture narrative, has to do with it.
We turn to the earliest of the Jewish records, and we find it declared that God made man in his own image, and gave him dominion over all the other creatures he had formed. Before a word has been said about the difference of one people from another, here is a broad fundamental assertion respecting man as man. Perhaps you will say, ’Yes; but this is set at nought by one which immediately follows it; the fall of Adam is the real, though the creation of man may be the nominal, beginning of the history. As we are examining these records to find what they actually affirm, I consider the simplest, nay, the only honest, method is to take them, as beginning where they seem to begin, not to assume a starting-point of our own. It will then be seen more clearly whether they have a connexion with each other, or are only a collection of Sibylline leaves; whereas, if we insist that the Divine drama opens at a certain chapter, and that all which precedes is prologue, we do not find the connexion, but make it. There may be excuses in the arguments of divines for such violence upon the text; but I do not think it is ever justified by the conscience of simple and devout Christians. I believe they would be shocked to the last degree if you insisted in plain language upon their believing that the constitution of God was nullified, destroyed, or even at all affected, by the evil acts of man. Undoubtedly, there is the fullest, most immediate recognition of the fact that evil entered into the world. There is no tampering with experience, no attempt to represent the universe as something else than it is, in order to make it accord with the account of its origin. There is no hint of a golden age, during which sin and death were not upon the earth. We are told that the very first man forgot that he was made in the image of God; yielded to the temptation of an inferior creature; came under death. He denied the law after which he was created. And each of his descendants is shewn to have the same propensity to obey that which he was meant to rule; to disbelieve in Him whom he was meant to obey. But neither the first man nor any of his successors could make this degradation and disobedience anything else than an anomaly and a contradiction. The worst man in Scripture is never represented as evil in any other sense than because he fights against the law under which he exists, and of which his very transgression is the continual witness. And therefore in the Bible God is ever represented as addressing Himself to the creature whom He had formed, as awakening in him by that voice a consciousness of his right condition.
He is represented as speaking thus to Adam when he was hiding himself from His presence; as speaking thus to Cain when he was meditating his crime, and when he had committed it. In each case it is assumed that the creature addressed stood in a direct relation to the Creator, however he might be denying it, and determining to shut himself out from it. And I need scarcely remind you, that he is treated, after the fall, as well as before it, as still intended to have dominion over the earth, and the animals upon it. The ground is cursed for his sake: in the sweat of his brow he must till it; but he does till it—he does subdue it. He is continually disposed to treat it as his master, but he is compelled to act as if it were his slave—compelled at the same time to remember that its power of producing nourishment for him depends not upon himself, but upon an Unseen Will, which he is ever inclined to lose sight of. The punishment of the race when lust and violence had spread over it, the preservation of it in a family, the blessing under which the sons of Noah go forth to replenish the earth and to subdue it, the confusion of their purpose of dwelling together in one plain, when they were meant to people the earth, bear witness to the same principle. Man, the race of Man is treated as formed in the image of God, as intended for rule over the creatures.
Now if this be the case with respect to the records of the period preceding the Call of Abraham, those which follow can only be understood on the same principle. The history of the chosen people does not record an outrage upon mankind for the sake of one portion of it; it is the history of men taken out of darkness into the light, made conscious of their own state, as created in the image of God and meant to have dominion over the earth. A Mesopotamian shepherd is called the friend of God—in him all the families of the earth are to be blessed. Out of his family grows a nation. It is a witness to all nations against the separate idolatrous worship which is dividing them. Its members are taught to believe that God Himself is their King—the Unseen God of all the earth. They are not in some unnatural condition because they are taken under His government; their lives are simple, natural, orderly, in proportion as they remember it; confused and irregular when they forget it. As the history of the nation goes on, there are continually new discoveries of evil tendencies, of an evil nature in the members of it. They are not different from the rest of the world; they are equally idolatrous, equally selfish, equally corrupt. Where then is their advantage? The Lord of All has revealed Himself to them; He has taken them into covenant; they may trust Him. In trusting Him they rise above these selfish and idolatrous tendencies; they become truly men. The Jewish Prophet, when he is most overwhelmed with his own evil and with the evil of his nation, obtains most apprehension of the truth that God will exhibit his perfect Image to men, in a Man, and will so confound all the images they have made. Except such an Image were really presented to them in a Man—except it were really shewn to be true that Man was made in the Image of God, and had dominion over the creatures, and that Death and Evil were not his masters, the visions of Jewish seers were delusions. But St. Peter, when he spoke to the Jews on the day of Pentecost, was firmly assured that a Man had appeared in the world who was the perfect Image of the Unseen God. He believed that this Person had been declared in the waters of baptism to be the Son of God; that the Spirit of God had descended upon Him; that in the strength of that Spirit he had exercised dominion over the powers of nature, over man’s spiritual enemies; had passed through death, had ascended to the right hand of His Father. That He should give His Spirit to men, to make them the sons of God in Him; to restore them to God’s Image; to give them power over the earth; to constitute them the masters, and not the subjects of visible things;—this seemed to him the right and reasonable fulfilment of express promises which were contained in the Jewish Scriptures, and of all their meaning.
With equal certainty he said, that the promise would be to them and to their children. He was sure that the Spirit of God had taken possession of the powers, and energies, and speech of men. He was sure that in yielding to that Spirit he was obeying no strange, unnatural impulse, but was yielding to his proper guide and teacher, to the Author of all order, and peace, and unity. More than this, perhaps, he may not have perceived. To see in this gift the witness for a great human fellowship; to see all that it implied respecting man’s creation and his redemption, was perhaps reserved, more perfectly, for another Apostle. Through intense personal humiliation and suffering did the Apostle Paul learn that Christ by His death, and resurrection, and ascension, had justified man before God; that the Spirit of God was given, not only as the fulfilment of all promises which had been made to the fathers of the Jewish nation, but as the fulfilment of the original law of his creation, when He made all things in Christ Jesus, with the intent of finally gathering them all together in Him. In his Epistles we find him brought into contact with men of different habits, philosophies, and educations. The old mythologies had prepared them very readily to recognise an inspiration from God. The sages very readily recognised the worth of the individual soul in man; but the inspiration which the first admitted was sudden and casual, the honour which the other paid to the soul was solitary, exclusive, self-exalting. He spoke of a Spirit of God as given to dwell continually in man; to be the source in him of all knowledge, faith, love; the strength for all ordinary toils, the comforter in all sorrows, the power of exploring the unseen and the future. He spoke of this Spirit as calling forth a spirit in man, in the individual man, which lifts him above himself, which he cannot call his own, which belongs to him as the child of God, the member of a universal family—“the spirit of a man which is in him.”
That profound feeling of reverence for the human spirit, then, which we have discovered in the Buddhist, his belief in the mighty capacities of this spirit, his determination to recognise these capacities as belonging to the race, not to some one section or class of it, his assurance that the spirit in man cannot be circumscribed by the limits of time or space, or by the measures and conditions of individual feeling and consciousness, his conviction that this human spirit must, in some mysterious manner, be divine, has its full justification in Christianity. And every subordinate idea which has grown out of these in the mind of the Buddhist has that which answers to it in the Gospel. He believes that it is the privilege of the divine man to contemplate the Divinity in His purity. The highest view which St. Paul takes of the powers of Christian men, in consequence of the gift which had been bestowed upon them, is that they might know God; his most earnest prayer, that they might increase in this knowledge. The Buddhist believes that, in order to the attainment of such knowledge, the mind must be separated from outward, sensual things. Sanctification, the deliverance of the heart and mind from earthly, temporal things, that they may enter into the enjoyment of that which is unseen and eternal, is the very work which the writers of the New Testament, with one accord, attribute to the Holy Spirit who had been given them. The Buddhist however, feeling that he must, in some way, study the universe, and account for the facts which he observes in it, was led to perceive the necessity of a power which originates or begets, a capacity which receives, a bond which unites them. The Scriptures, too, suppose a power which creates, a power in the creature which receives; the Scriptures contemplate the union and co-working of these powers as the condition of health in all that exists; they shew how all destruction in the human, voluntary creature has come from his will not yielding itself to the divine, creating, inspiring Will; how all restoration comes from their being again brought into accordance. They speak of the deepest ground of all things being the awful union of the Father with the Son in the Spirit.
Again, we heard of holy men appearing as benefactors of different portions of the globe; their footsteps traced upon earth, yet their home seeming to be somewhere else. What they are is known chiefly by what they have done; their acts are palpable; a mystery hangs about themselves. They are called Buddhas; though they appear in places and times far apart, the same wisdom, the same power dwells in them all; they must be the wisdom and power of Buddha; they can belong to no other. Even thus do Christians speak of those who in far-off ages, in various latitudes, have shed light into the hearts of men, have cheered the poor in the midst of their sore trials with help for the present, hope for the future; have restrained triumphant evil, and laboured that righteousness and truth might flourish. These we hold to be all partakers of the self-same Spirit; in their words and acts they manifest its presence; care not to be great in themselves, but do homage to a mysterious Greatness, from which all that seems such in themselves is derived; shew that they have their work on earth, their citizenship in the heavens. Once more, the Buddhist affirms that there must be some person, and that a human person, in whom the perfect wisdom resides. He need not in his earthly appearance be glorious; he may wear the form of a child, but the Power must be within, and must so reveal itself that men shall see the Divine Priest is there. Even thus is it the clearest, most invariable proclamation in the Gospel, that each man, in his best, purest estate, does but utter some portion of the Divine Mind, does but exhibit some one partial image of the Divine Character; that there is one perfect Utterance of that voice, one perfect Image of that substance, one in whom the Fulness pleased to dwell, one who humbled himself to the cradle of Bethlehem, to the Cross of Calvary; who in that cradle, and on that Cross, shewed forth the Divine glory: and who, because he humbled Himself, has been exalted to be the High Priest of our race for ever.
But as we have seen this relation between Buddhism and Christianity coming out before us with increasing brightness, we must, I think, have become also more and more conscious of some difference, which, whatever it be, is a deep and radical one. The philosophical objectors told us that if we could separate the story of Pentecost from its ‘mythical’ accidents, the sound of the rushing mighty wind, the cloven tongues, the notion of a particular endowment bestowed by Jesus Christ at that particular moment on His disciples, we should arrive at an intelligible result, which might throw some light upon Buddhist and other history. I complained of this statement so far as it represents the events of that day as isolated, as inconsistent with principles recognised in the Jewish economy, as importing that the indwelling of a Spirit in man is not implied in his original constitution. Subject to these remarks, I now admit that they are right in looking upon these miraculous circumstances as indicative of the difference between the Scriptural and the Buddhist conception of the spiritual endowments of human creatures. The Buddhist starts from the human ground; assumes the existence or possibility of certain qualities and attributes of a divine nature in man; supposes the man, in virtue of these, to hold intercourse with the divinity. The Scripture starts from the divine ground; assumes that man, according to his constitution is nothing but an image; denies that he can originate anything; sets forth a revelation of His Creator to him as the foundation of his knowledge of his life; represents all faculties, powers, energies of the creature as gifts of the Creator. Upon this difference every other depends. If the first view be the right one, there can, of course, be no divine manifestation, for there is nothing to manifest. The Creator does not witness to men by visible signs that He is the Author of these gifts, for He is not the Author of them, or He does not design to make them know that He is. If the other view be true, these (so-called) miracles, these exercises of power, these signs of a Presence, are precisely the methods which commend themselves to the conscience and reason of mankind as the most fitted—I had nearly said as the only possible—witnesses of a truth, which, when it has been once testified of in this way, can hereafter be held as certain and abiding though there be no signs of it at all.
Now, as Buddhism and Christianity are the respective exemplifications of these two methods, it may be well to compare the practical results of each. You will see, I trust, my object. I do not desire to make out a charge against Buddhism on the ground of its moral deficiencies; but, I want to ascertain how far these deficiencies are or are not owing to this characteristical feature of it, that more than any other system the world has ever seen, it makes the belief of a Divine power working in man its ground, and ascends from that ground to any apprehension it may entertain respecting the divinity Himself.
I. One leading contrast offers itself instantly to our notice. The Buddhist believes that a Divine wisdom and power dwells, or may dwell, in human beings, and that its dwelling constitutes them exalted, heroic spirits—saintly men. The New Testament begins with teaching us what kind of Spirit this must be; what manner of Being He is from whom this Spirit proceeds; what must be the manner of His working in creatures who submit to His government. It speaks of the Spirit of Him who had declared Himself for ages to the Jews as the God of Truth and Righteousness; it speaks of the Spirit of Him who gave His Son for men. It sets forth the character of this Spirit by His life, in whom it is said to have dwelt without measure. If Holiness was more characteristic of Him than power, the Spirit of holiness is the name by which we are taught to express it most uniformly and perfectly. If meekness, humility, gentleness, were the essential qualities of His life, the Spirit is known as the Spirit of meekness, humility, gentleness: these are declared to be the fruits of its operations. If His whole life was an act of self-sacrifice, His Spirit is set forth as the power whereby man is able to offer himself a sacrifice. If love was the spring and end of His sacrifice, it is the Spirit of Love which He promises to those who obey Him. Not that these assertions in the least interfere with that other equally prominent one, which declares Him to be the Spirit of Truth and Knowledge; which speaks of all powers and exercises of mind, and all the directions which are given to them as from Him. No one brings out that assertion more clearly and mightily than St. Paul; but he winds up the enumeration of all gifts and powers in these words: “And yet I shew you a more excellent way. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” Love is in his teaching, as in his life, the highest manifestation of the presence of the Spirit, because God, from whom it proceeds, is Love.
All this difference, you see, is grounded upon the difference between the naked idea of a Spirit dwelling in man and identical with himself, and that representation of Him as given to men by the Eternal God through His Son. Look now at the difference as to another point, the estimate of human creatures. To the Buddhist those whom he believes thus endowed necessarily become gods, they can be nothing else. And thus, he who starts with throwing off an hereditary priesthood as an intolerable yoke, because men, as men, have the capacity of seeing God and worshipping Him, becomes the poor servant and tool of a priesthood. All who can exhibit the intellectual power which he half feels is meant for himself, and yet which he is conscious does not belong to him, must be objects of his obedience and his worship. He has no standard with which he can compare what they are and what they do; he is sure that intercourse with the unseen world must be a privilege of men, that there must be some who exercise it; they cannot tell him what the exercise means, what the result of it is, how he can be the better for it. They seem to say, some of them actually say, and wish him to understand that, at all events, they are marking out a ne plus ultra to his enquiries, “Beyond us lies a void of Nothingness.” Into that void the listening disciple has no temptation to enter. Yet he must satisfy his craving for the Infinite. What can he do but accept these finite temporary priests as the best substitutes for that which he cannot obtain? They at least keep alive the appetite, they save him from utter despair. Such is the condition of those who can only contemplate the Spirit which they rightly feel is meant for man as in man. The Christian is taught that he is to think of this Spirit as of God, as coming forth from Him. He is taught that he may ask God continually for the quickening and renewing of it in himself, and in all the family to which he belongs. He is told that when the Comforter comes He shall convince the world of Sin, of Righteousness, of Judgment; that He shall not become identical with the man himself; but shall shew him his evil; shall raise him out of that evil into a Righteousness which is above him, which is in one who is gone to the Father; shall give him the continual assurance of a final separation between that which is true and that which is false within him.
Thus the promise of the Spirit is the promise of an ever clearer and growing perception of distinctions, of a power to overlook our own mind, to judge its acts and movements, to know what in it requires to be cut off, what is wrought in God. Every human heart is to be the subject of it; no creature that carries evil within it and belongs to the race for which Christ died, is meant to be defrauded of this mighty illumination. But no one who receives it can pretend to be thereby exalted above his fellows; his knowledge is the knowledge of his own individual abasement; of that glory which he shares with his race in Christ. And therefore the Scripture, in strict conformity with this idea, represents all intellectual gifts as bestowed, not to raise one man above another, but simply, that men may be enabled to serve each other. The Highest of All is the servant of all. He who holds his gifts under this condition, and confesses his unfitness for the use of them, is a fellow-worker with the Divine Spirit. He is doing that which he was sent here to do. He who uses them for any other end, holds them on any other condition, practically disowns the blessing which has been granted to him, and its Author. The priest and the prophet come especially under this rule. They especially are to look upon themselves as called by Him who came to deliver men out of their confusions and darkness, to an office under Him, as endowed with powers by Him to fulfil this office. So far as the priest or the prophet looks upon all the ability he possesses as a gift, the object of which is determined by the character of the giver, and the nature of His work, so far he is a true priest and true prophet; assuming his ability as his property, as his title, he becomes a false priest, a false prophet; in the language of Scripture a wolf, and not a shepherd, a destroyer of men, not their deliverer.
But the Buddhist’s conception of the Lama supplies us with the most perfect illustration of the difference I am endeavouring to point out. In him is gathered up that spirit of humanity which the Buddhist worships, and from which he deduces his divinity. The Christian affirms that He in whom the priesthood of the universe rests is the eternal Son of God, that He took human nature, united it to God, endued it with that Spirit which dwelt without measure in Himself. He, they declare, is the Head of many members, through each of which, so long as it abides in Him, the same life-blood is transmitted. The former notion, grounded upon a true and deep feeling that there must be a centre, or that there can be no fellowship, assumes the centre anywhere, in a child or old man, and demands implicit faith that in him all intelligence rests. The other, starting from the fact that humanity has a centre above itself, declares how He who claimed to be this centre, in poverty, weakness, contempt made good his title, by proving that He could deliver the spirit of man out of its fetters, that in owning Him to be its Lord it attained the freedom it was sighing for. The one notion, glorifying the intellect and spirit of man, insists upon their doing homage to the meanest object which they create for themselves to worship; the other, humbling the intellect and spirit of man before one who they feel and confess to be their master, offers them an expansion and exaltation of which the knowledge and love of an absolute and perfect Being are the only limits.
In one word, the society of the Buddhist has no bond except the existence of something mysterious in the creatures who belong to it; feeling this to be insufficient, he invents an external supremacy, and endues it with attributes which he knows it does not possess; he makes a lie, and the lie avails him nothing, for the 300 millions which own it compose only a mass of atoms without any principle of cohesion, though ever seeking one. The Christian Ecclesia confesses by its very name that its existence has its ground in the call of an Almighty Being; that it stands only by His will; that it is distinguished from the world to be a witness of that true glory which man possesses when he looks upward, not downwards, to a Master, not to himself; that, having such a call and being such a witness, it is baptized with a Spirit of power, and truth, and love, that it may bring all men into the divine fellowship, from which no people, or tongue, or kindred, no creature bearing the nature which Christ redeemed from death and sin, can, except by an act of self-will, be excluded.
I might perhaps leave the comparison here drawn to work its way upon the consciences and hearts of all who love truth and freedom and their kind, in deed more than in word. But the subject is so transcendently important at this time, that I must present it still in one or two other lights. The first is this. Buddhism, you see, necessarily excludes Mahometanism and Hindooism. It is the direct contradiction of the former; Mahometanism basing the universe upon the distinctness and absoluteness of God. Its antipathy to the second is the great fact of its history, the explanation of its existence. It denies the reality of that distinction which is involved in the doctrine of the twice-born man, as opposed to the ordinary man. And now we find it cannot sustain those pretensions to spirituality, on account of which it is at war with the unspiritual Mahometan, or that pretension to humanity and freedom from priestcraft, on account of which it is at war with the exclusive Brahmin. It sets their ideas at nought; it utterly fails in realizing its own. But we have been led to think that ideas which have exercised such a sway over multitudes of human beings from generation to generation, must be realized in some way. Our philosophers have taught us to pay this homage to the ideas of our fellow-men; we bless them for the lesson; we are ashamed of not having learnt it sooner, of not having rather imparted it to them. I beseech you seriously to ponder this question. How may these ideas be realized? How may they be reconciled? And if you should, after much thinking, find that this ancient Revelation which you were going to cast aside as one of the false and worn-out systems of the world, supplies that realization and reconciliation—supplies them because it is a revelation,—on that ground, and no other—then be sure that if you do cast it aside, or wish to prove it something else than a revelation, the reason is not that you care for what is expansive and comprehensive, that you hate what is formal and narrow; this is not any longer the ground of your opposition. Will you then with great earnestness ask yourselves, what it is?
Perhaps, however, we have been speaking only of a verbal reconciliation; you want one which shall be practical; one which may bear to be tried on a great scale. Let us see then whether the case of China, a country which you will allow to be practical at least in its aim, to offer quite sufficient room for a large experiment, may not supply what you require. If you did hear of a people which had had for ages the strongest conviction that the authority of the Father was the one foundation of society, but had never been able to connect this conviction with the acknowledgement of anything mysterious and divine; of a society which for ages had not been able to prevent a certain body of its subjects from dreaming that there is a mysterious and divine word or reason speaking to the wise man, out of which dream, however, no fruits had proceeded, but impostures and delusions; if you were told, that into the heart of this society Buddhism had come, with its strange testimony of a spirit or intellect in the human race, the ordinary manifestations of which are seen in very ignorant priests, its perfect manifestation often in an infant; if you heard that these doctrines had never been able to combine, and yet that no one could succeed in banishing the other from an empire in which order and unity are prized as the highest blessings of all, nay, that experience had proved to reluctant sages, that none of these elements of discord could safely be extinguished, that each was in some strange way needful to the permanence of that which it seemed to undermine:—and if after this you heard of a faith which assumed that the ground of all things and all men is a Father; that He has spoken and does speak by his Filial Word to the hearts and spirits of men, so making them wise, and separating them from what is base and vain; that this Filial Word has been made flesh and dwelt among men, and has given them power to become sons of God, and that through Him a Spirit is given to dwell with men, to raise up a new spirit in them, to unite them to each other, to make them living portions of a living body; that men are actually admitted by a simple rite into a Name expressive of their adoption by the Father, separation by the Word, their inspiration by the Spirit; that in this Name stood a universal fellowship, which upheld the authority of earthly fathers upon the ground of the divine relation, asserted the distinction of wise and foolish, good and evil men, upon the ground of their following or disobeying the monitions of that filial teacher, from whom all right human instructors sought the power whereby they were able to make good and useful scholars, maintained the intercourse and communion of human beings upon the ground of their obedience to the Spirit of order and harmony;—if, I say, these two sets of facts were presented to you side by side, would not you feel there was some strange adaptation in the one to the other; that there was in the last the secret principle and power for which it was evident from the former that China had through centuries been asking in vain?
But why do I speak thus? does it not sound like the idlest of all visions to talk of our converting Buddhists, when judging from various indications, they are far more likely to convert us? I have not disguised from you the Buddhist side of Christianity; I have rejoiced to set it forth, as I rejoiced to set forth the Mahometan and Hindoo side of it. But, as we saw that either of these elements might in any age become the predominant, almost the exclusive one, it is needful that we should consider well how this third doctrine may have in former days, may now in our own, extinguish every other. Assuredly, there are very distinct traces of prevalent triumphant Buddhism in the Christian Church of periods gone by. The history of Orders rising up first to reform society, to rebuke organized priesthoods for their selfindulgence, coldness, exclusiveness, to assert the rights of the poor, to maintain that every member of Christ’s flock has a calling to benefit the rest; beginning thus nobly, and then sinking into more intolerable despots than those against whom they protested, self-exalted in their gifts, their knowledge, their ignorance, or their poverty; deceiving, and being deceived; drawing all reverence to their own persons on the score of their humility, holding down the poor in slavery, whom they came to deliver; this history contains one class of such phenomena. In the history of Mysticism and Quietism, telling how men have begun to seek God with deep, earnest hearts, to denounce the sensual, idolatrous notions others had formed of Him, to retire into the secret chamber that there might be no hinderance from outward things to the clearness of the vision, to mortify their flesh, that it might not stand in their way, have gone on till their hearts grew puffed up and proud; till they began to boast of wonderful discoveries vouchsafed to them alone; till they became the subjects of all nervous impressions, fantasies, disorders, as sensual as those whom they ever charged with being so; until at last they gazed on vacancy, and felt, if they had not honesty to say, ‘The vision is gone, we see nothing:’ here we find Christian Buddhism in another manifestation. And the lessons which these two records supply are not obsolete; either of these temptations may assault any of us again; in some form is perhaps assaulting all of us.
But chiefly should we be careful to note what common principle it was which in each of these cases turned so much seeming truth into a curse; for it is of that we have need to beware in whatever dress it may come, or if our especial work should be to encounter it in its nakedness. Unquestionably the member of the order and the solitary mystic alike yielded to the feeling, ‘It is this power in me, this faculty of government, this faculty of vision, which is the great thing of all. How glorious to belong to this great society, for which I am ready to live and die; how glorious to have this capacity of conversing with the Infinite, for the sake of which I have cheerfully resigned all things!’ Who could think that the deadliest poison was lurking in such words as these; that there could be the essence of all pride in such self-sacrifice? But what if men should say boldly, ‘It is this power in me which is really the great power of all; it is this eye in me which creates the object it seems to behold. I will acknowledge nothing else, worship nothing else.’ What if this should be the language which men lisped a few years ago, and now begin to speak distinctly? Then surely there will gradually appear most of the other signs which we have traced in Buddhism, and many which could not appear in it, or in any other heathen system. First, the formation of an intellectual priesthood more utterly without the sense of a vocation, more simply glorying in its powers, therefore more intolerant, exclusive, oppressive, than any other with which this earth has ever been cursed. Next, the consciousness in that exclusive priesthood of an utter want of sympathy with actual men, notwithstanding their boast of humanity in the abstract; therefore an attempt to supply this want, as it always has been supplied, by devices to meet the taste of the vulgar, by prodigies, portents, sorceries; mysteries of science being called in as a compensation for the absence of the divine mysteries, and science being degraded into an instrument of all imposture. Finally, intellectual worship after giving birth to all forms of empiricism, ending at last in the elevation of some merely brute power to the throne of the universe; a power which will prove by his triumph, that if intellect, freedom, humanity, have no better protectors than themselves, they must be trampled down; will prove, as we are well assured, by his ultimate discomfiture, that they have another Protector, Him from whom all good and perfect gifts have come.
But it will avail little to call up such visions as these, however certain we may feel, from the testimony of history, that they will one day shew themselves to be realities, if they lead us only to the denunciation of others, to a dread of the words which they speak, or of the acts which they do. Oftentimes I fear such denunciations and such dread conceal a very shallow faith in ourselves; oftentimes they indicate that we are sadly beset with that pride in our own intellectual powers which we attribute to others. It is ourselves we need to suspect; it is our own half conscious belief in the truths of which we talk most loudly, our own readiness to substitute the conclusions of our understandings for the divine teaching, which we ought to confess and to repent of. If we do so heartily, we shall not speak less of the operations of the divine Spirit, because some seem to contemplate them exclusively; we shall not be betrayed into the vulgar and deceitful policy of underrating the reason and faculties of men, because some seem to overvalue them; we shall not fancy that we show great dexterity and piety when we force a feeling in one direction, because its natural growth seems to be in another.
Rather, we shall regard all the tendencies of particular periods with reverence as indications of God’s will, however perverted by man’s ignorance and selfishness. When we meet with a fanatical exaltation of spiritual emotions, excitements, ecstasies, we shall be most anxious to assert the reality of spiritual communications, not for one time, but for all; to place them on their deepest ground, to shew how utterly dreary man’s condition would be without them. When we see a fanatical exaltation of human faculties and organs, then most shall we be eager to assert their worth and sacredness; to vindicate them from all aspersions grounded upon the confusions incident to their imperfect exercise, to show that they belong to every human creature and that they cannot have too noble a cultivation. And that both these truths may be vindicated we shall bring them into fellowship. The communication of the divine Spirit we shall believe to be the only means whereby the Reason, the Heart, the understanding, are enabled to perform their rightful functions to be vigorous, calm, pure, in harmony with the mind of the Creator, and with all that is truly human. Holding all power as a trust, every office as a stewardship, believing that the divine Spirit itself who dwells with us is the greatest trust, the most awful stewardship of all, we shall feel more the glory of our race because we feel more our own insignificance; shall be more really men, because we walk more humbly with our God.