In considering the subject of my address,[58] I have been confronted
by this difficulty--that in the sections which regulate the order of
our proceedings, we have a list of papers that range over all the
principal religions, ancient and modern, that have existed and still
exist in the world. They are to be treated and discussed by experts
whose scholarship, particular studies, and close research entitle them
all to address you authoritatively. I have no such special
qualifications; and in any case it would be most presumptuous in me to
trespass upon their ground. All that I can venture to do, therefore,
in the remarks which I propose to address to you to-day, is to attempt
a brief general survey of the history of religions from a standpoint
which may possibly not fall within the scope of these separate papers.
The four great religions now prevailing in the world, which are
historical in the sense that they have been long known to history, I
take to be--Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Having regard
to their origin and derivation, to their history and character, I may
be permitted, for my present purpose only, to class the two former as
the Religions of the West, and the two latter as the Religions of the
East. These are the faiths which still maintain a mighty influence
over the minds of mankind. And my object is to compare the political
relations, the attitude, maintained toward them, from time to time, by
the States and rulers of the people over which these religions have
established their spiritual dominion. The religion of the Jews is not
included, though its influence has been incalculable, because it has
been caught up, so to speak, into Christianity and Islam, and cannot
therefore be counted among those which have made a partition of the
religious world. For this reason, perhaps, it has retained to this day
its ancient denomination, derived from the tribe or country of its
origin; whereas the others are named from a Faith or a Founder. The
word Nazarene, denoting the birthplace of Christianity, which is said
to be still used in that region, was, as we know, very speedily
superseded by its wider title, as the Creed broke out of local limits
and was proclaimed universal.
There has evidently been a fore-time, though it is prehistorical,
when, so far as we know, mankind was universally polytheistic; when
innumerable rites and worships prevailed without restraint, springing
up and contending with each other like the trees in a primeval forest,
reflecting a primitive and precarious condition of human society. I
take polytheism to have been, in this earliest stage, the wild growth
of superstitious imagination, varied indefinitely by the pressure of
circumstance, by accident, by popular caprice, or by the good or evil
fortunes of the community. In this stage it can now be seen among
barbarous tribes--as, for instance, in Central Africa. And some traces
of it still survive, under different pretexts and disguises, in the
lowest strata of civilised nations, where it may be said to represent
the natural reluctance of the vagrant human fancy to be satisfied with
higher forms and purer conceptions that are always imperfectly
assimilated by the multitude.
Among primitive societies the spheres of human and divine affairs
were intermixed and identical; they could not be disentangled. But
with the growth of political institutions came gradual separation, or
at any rate the subordination of religion to the practical necessities
of orderly government and public morals. That polytheism can exist and
flourish in the midst of a highly intellectual and civilised society,
we know from the history of Greece and Rome. But in ancient Greece its
direct influence upon political affairs seems to have been slight;
though it touched at some points upon morality. The function of the
State, according to Greek ideas, was to legislate for all the
departments of human life and to uphold the moral standard. The law
prohibited sacrilege and profanity; it punished open impiety that
might bring down divine wrath upon the people at large. The
philosophers taught rational ethics; they regarded the popular
superstitions with indulgent contempt; but they inculcated the duty of
honouring the gods, and the observance of public ceremonial. Beyond
these limits the practice of local and customary worship was, I think,
free and unrestrained; though I need hardly add that toleration, as
understood by the States of antiquity, was a very different thing from
the modern principle of religious neutrality. Under the Roman
government the connection between the State and religion was much
closer, as the dominion of Rome expanded and its power became
centralised. The Roman State maintained a strict control and
superintendence over the official rituals and worships, which were
regulated as a department of the administration, to bind the people
together by established rites and worships, in order to cement
political and social unity. It is true that the usages of the tribes
and principalities that were conquered and annexed were left
undisturbed; for the Roman policy, like that of the English in India,
was to avoid giving offence to religion; and undoubtedly this policy,
in both instances, materially facilitated the rapid building up of a
wide dominion. Nevertheless, there was a tendency to draw in the
worship toward a common centre. The deities of the conquered provinces
were respected and conciliated; the Roman generals even appealed to
them for protection and favour, yet they became absorbed and
assimilated under Roman names; they were often identified with the
gods of the Roman pantheon, and were frequently superseded by the
victorious divinities of the new rulers--the strange deities, in fact,
were Romanised as well as the foreign tribes and cities. After this
manner the Roman empire combined the tolerance of great religious
diversity with the supremacy of a centralised government. Political
amalgamation brought about a fusion of divine attributes; and latterly
the emperor was adored as the symbol of manifest power, ruler and
pontiff; he was the visible image of supreme authority.
This _regime_ was easily accepted by the simple unsophisticated
paganism of Europe. The Romans, with all their statecraft, had as yet
no experience of a high religious temperature, of enthusiastic
devotion and divine mysteries. But as their conquest and commerce
spread eastward, the invasion of Asia let in upon Europe a flood of
Oriental divinities, and thus Rome came into contact with much
stronger and deeper spiritual forces. The European polytheism might be
utilised and administered, the Asiatic deities could not be
domesticated and subjected to regulation; the Oriental orgies and
strange rites broke in upon the organised State worship; the new ideas
and practices came backed by a profound and fervid spiritualism.
Nevertheless the Roman policy of bringing religion under
authoritative control was more or less successful even in the Asiatic
provinces of the empire; the privileges of the temples were
restricted; the priesthoods were placed under the general
superintendence of the proconsular officials; and Roman divinities
gradually found their way into the Asiatic pantheon.
But we all know that the religion of the Roman empire was falling into
multitudinous confusion when Christianity arose--an austere exclusive
faith, with its army of saints, ascetics, and unflinching martyrs,
proclaiming worship to be due to one God only, and sternly refusing to
acknowledge the divinity of the emperor. Against such a faith an
incoherent disorderly polytheism could make no better stand than
tribal levies against a disciplined army. The new religion struck
directly at the sacrifices that symbolised imperial unity; the passive
resistance of Christians was necessarily treated as rebellion, the
State made implacable war upon them. Yet the spiritual and moral
forces won the victory, and Christianity established itself throughout
the empire. Universal religion, following upon universal civil
dominion, completed the levelling of local and national distinctions.
The Churches rapidly grew into authority superior to the State within
their own jurisdiction; they called in the temporal government to
enforce theological decisions and to put down heresies; they founded a
powerful hierarchy. The earlier Roman constitution had made religion
an instrument of administration. When one religion became universal,
the churches enlisted the civil ruler into the service of orthodoxy;
they converted the State into an instrument for enforcing religion.
The pagan empire had issued edicts against Christianity and had
suppressed Christian assemblies as tainted with disaffection; the
Christian emperors enacted laws against the rites and worships of
paganism, and closed temples. It was by the supreme authority of
Constantine that, for the first time in the religious history of the
world, uniformity of belief was defined by a creed, and sanctioned by
the ruler's assent.
Then came, in Western Europe, the time when the empire at Rome was
rent asunder by the inrush of barbarians; but upon its ruins was
erected the great Catholic Church of the Papacy, which preserved in
the ecclesiastical domain the autocratic imperial tradition. The
primacy of the Roman Church, according to Harnack, is essentially the
transference to her of Rome's central position in the religions of the
heathen world; the Church united the western races, disunited
politically, under the common denomination of Christianity. Yet
Christianity had not long established itself throughout all the lands,
in Europe and Asia, which had once been under the Roman sovereignty,
when the violent irruptions of Islam upset not only the temporal but
also the spiritual dominion throughout Western Asia, and along the
southern shores of the Mediterranean. The Eastern empire at
Constantinople had been weakened by bitter theological dissensions and
heresies among the Christians; the votaries of the new, simple,
unswerving faith of Mohammed were ardent and unanimous. In Egypt and
Syria the Mohammedans were speedily victorious; the Latin Church and
even the Latin language were swept out of North Africa. In Persia the
Sassanian dynasty was overthrown, and although there was no immediate
and total conversion of the people, Mohammedanism gradually superseded
the ancient Zoroastrian cultus as the religion of the Persian State.
It was not long before the armies of Islam had triumphed from the
Atlantic coast to the Jaxartes river in Central Asia; and conversion
followed, speedily or slowly, as the direct result of conquest.
Moreover, the Mohammedans invaded Europe. In the south-west they
subdued almost all Spain; and in the south-east they destroyed, some
centuries later, the Greek empire, though not the Greek Church, and
consolidated a mighty rulership at Constantinople.
With this prolonged conflict between Islam and Christianity along the
borderlands of Europe and Asia began the era of those religious wars
that have darkened the history of the Western nations, and have
perpetuated the inveterate antipathy between Asiatic and European
races, which the spread of Christianity into both continents had
softened and might have healed. In the end Christianity has fixed
itself permanently in Europe, while Islam is strongly established
throughout half Asia. But the sharp collision between the two faiths,
the clash of armies bearing the cross and the crescent, generated
fierce fanaticism on both sides. The Crusades kindled a fiery militant
and missionary spirit previously unknown to religions, whereby
religious propagation became the mainspring and declared object of
conquest and colonisation. Finally, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries the great secession from the Roman Church divided the
nations of Western Europe into hostile camps, and throughout the long
wars of that period political jealousies and ambitions were inflamed
by religious animosities. In Eastern Europe the Greek Church fell
under almost complete subordination to the State.
The history of Europe and Western Asia records, therefore, a close
connection and community of interests between the States and the
orthodox faiths; a combination which has had a very potent influence,
during many centuries, upon the course of civil affairs, upon the
fortunes, or misfortunes, of nations. Up to the sixteenth century, at
least, it was universally held, by Christianity and by Islam, that
the State was bound to enforce orthodoxy; conversion and the
suppression or expulsion of heretics were public duties. Unity of
creed was thought necessary for national unity--a government could not
undertake to maintain authority, or preserve the allegiance of its
subjects, in a realm divided and distracted by sectarian
controversies. On these principles Christianity and Islam were
consolidated, in union with the States or in close alliance with them;
and the geographical boundaries of these two faiths, and of their
internal divisions respectively, have not materially changed up to the
present day.
* * * * *
Let me now turn to the history of religion in those countries of
further Asia, which were never reached by Greek or Roman conquest or
civilisation, where the ancient forms of worship and conceptions of
divinity, which existed before Christianity and Islam, still flourish.
And here I shall only deal with the relations of the State to religion
in India and China and their dependencies, because these vast and
populous empires contain the two great religions, Hinduism and
Buddhism, of purely Asiatic origin and character, which have
assimilated to a large extent, and in a certain degree elevated, the
indigenous polytheism, and which still exercise a mighty influence
over the spiritual and moral condition of many millions.
We know what a tremendous power religion has been in the wars and
politics of the West. I submit that in Eastern Asia, beyond the pale
of Islam, the history of religion has been very different. Religious
wars--I mean wars caused by the conflict of militant faiths contending
for superiority--were, I believe, unknown on any great scale to the
ancient civilisations. It seems to me that until Islam invaded India
the great religious movements and changes in that region had seldom or
never been the consequence of, nor had been materially affected by,
wars, conquests, or political revolutions.
Throughout Europe and Mohammedan Asia the indigenous deities and their
temples have disappeared centuries ago; they have been swept away by
the forces of Church and State combined to exterminate them; they have
all yielded to the lofty overruling ideal of monotheism. But the tide
of Mohammedanism reached its limit in India; the people, though
conquered, were but partly converted, and eastward of India there have
been no important Mohammedan rulerships. On this side of Asia,
therefore, two great religions, Buddhism and Brahmanism, have held
their ground from times far anterior to Christianity; they have
retained the elastic comprehensive character of polytheism, purified
and elevated by higher conceptions, developed by the persistent
competition of diverse ideas and forms among the people, unrestrained
by attempts of superior organised faiths to obliterate the lower and
weaker species. In that region political despotism has prevailed
immemorially; religious despotism, in the sense of the legal
establishment of one faith or worship to the exclusion of all others,
of uniformity imposed by coercion, of proselytism by persecution, is
unknown to history: the governments have been absolute and personal;
the religions have been popular and democratic. They have never been
identified so closely with the ruling power as to share its fortunes,
or to be used for the consolidation of successful conquest. Nor, on
the other hand, has a ruler ever found it necessary, for the security
of his throne, to conform to the religion of his subjects, and to
abjure all others. The political maxim, that the sovereign and his
subjects should be of one and the same religion,[59] has never
prevailed in this part of the world. And although in India, the land
of their common origin, Buddhism widely displaced and overlaid
Brahmanism, while it was in its turn, after several centuries,
overcome and ejected by a Brahmanic revival, yet I believe that
history records no violent contests or collisions between them; nor do
we know that the armed force of the State played any decisive part in
these spiritual revolutions.
I do not maintain that Buddhism has owed nothing to State influence.
It represents certain doctrines of the ancient Indian theosophy,
incarnate, as one might say, in the figure of a spiritual Master, the
Indian prince, Sakya Gautama, who was the type and example of ascetic
quietism; it embodies the idea of salvation, or emancipation
attainable by man's own efforts, without aid from priests or
divinities. Buddhism is the earliest, by many centuries, of the faiths
that claim descent from a personal founder. It emerges into authentic
history with the empire of Asoka, who ruled over the greater part of
India some 250 years before Christ, and its propagation over his realm
and the countries adjacent is undoubtedly due to the influence,
example, and authority of that devout monarch. According to Mr.
Vincent Smith, from whose valuable work on the Early History of India
I take the description of Asoka's religious policy, the king,
renouncing after one necessary war all further military conquest, made
it the business of his life to employ his autocratic power in
directing the preaching and teaching of the Law of Piety, which he had
learnt from his Buddhist priesthood. All his high officers were
commanded to instruct the people in the way of salvation; he sent
missions to foreign countries; he issued edicts promulgating ethical
doctrines, and the rules of a devout life; he made pilgrimages to the
sacred places; and finally he assumed the yellow robe of a Buddhist
monk. Asoka elevated, so Mr. Smith has said, a sect of Hinduism to the
rank of a world-religion. Nevertheless, I think it may be affirmed
that the emperor consistently refrained from the forcible conversion
of his subjects, and indeed the use of compulsion would have
apparently been a breach of his own edicts, which insist on the
principle of toleration, and declare the propagation of the Law of
Piety to be his sole object. Asoka made no attempt to persecute
Brahmanism; and it seems clear that the extraordinary success of
Buddhism in India cannot be attributed to war or to conquest. To
imperial influence and example much must be ascribed, yet I think
Buddhism owed much more to its spiritual potency, to its superior
faculty of transmuting and assimilating, instead of abolishing, the
elementary instincts and worships, endowing them with a higher
significance, attracting and stimulating devotion by impressive rites
and ceremonies, impressing upon the people the dogma of the soul's
transmigration and its escape from the miseries of sentient existence
by the operation of merits. And of all great religions it is the least
political, for the practice of asceticism and quietism, of monastic
seclusion from the working world, is necessarily adverse to any active
connection with mundane affairs.
I do not know that the mysterious disappearance of Buddhism from India
can be accounted for by any great political revolution, like that
which brought Islam into India. It seems to have vanished before the
Mohammedans had gained any footing in the country. Meanwhile Buddhism
is said to have penetrated into the Chinese empire by the first
century of the Christian era. Before that time the doctrines of
Confucius and Laotze were the dominant philosophies; rather moral than
religious, though ancestral worship and the propitiation of spirits
were not disallowed, and were to a certain extent enjoined. Laotze,
the apostle of Taoism, appears to have preached a kind of
Stoicism--the observance of the order of Nature in searching for the
right way of salvation, the abhorrence of vicious sensuality--and the
cultivation of humility, self-sacrifice, and simplicity of life. He
condemned altogether the use of force in the sphere of religion or
morality; though he admitted that it might be necessary for the
purposes of civil government. The system of Confucius inculcated
justice, benevolence, self-control, obedience and loyalty to the
sovereign--all the civic virtues; it was a moral code without a
metaphysical background; the popular worships were tolerated,
reverence for ancestors conduced to edification; the gods were to be
honoured, though it was well to keep aloof from them; he disliked
religious fervour, and of things beyond experience he had nothing to
say.
Buddhism, with its contempt for temporal affairs, treating life as a
mere burden, and the soul's liberation from existence as the end and
object of meditative devotion, must have imported a new and disturbing
element into the utilitarian philosophies of ancient China. For many
centuries Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism are said to have
contended for the patronage and recognition of the Chinese emperors.
Buddhism was alternately persecuted and protected, expelled and
restored by imperial decree. Priesthoods and monastic orders are
institutions of which governments are naturally jealous; the
monasteries were destroyed or rebuilt, sacerdotal orders and celibacy
suppressed or encouraged by imperial decrees, according to the views
and prepossessions of successive dynasties or emperors. Nevertheless
the general policy of Chinese rulers and ministers seems not to have
varied essentially. Their administrative principle was that religion
must be prevented from interfering with affairs of State, that abuses
and superstitious extravagances are not so much offences against
orthodoxy as matters for the police, and as such must be put down by
the secular arm.
Upon this policy successive dynasties appear to have acted
continuously up to the present day in China, where the relations of
the State to religions are, I think, without parallel elsewhere in the
modern world. One may find some resemblance to the attitude of the
Roman emperors towards rites and worships among the population, in the
Chinese emperor's reverent observance and regulation of the rites and
ceremonies performed by him as the religious chief and representative
before Heaven of the great national interests. The deification of
deceased emperors is a solemn rite ordained by proclamation. As the
_Ius sacrum_, the body of rights and duties in the matter of religion,
was regarded in Rome as a department of the _Ius publicum_, belonging
to the fundamental constitution of the State, so in China the ritual
code was incorporated into the statute books, and promulgated with
imperial sanction. Now we know that in Rome the established ritual was
legally prescribed, though otherwise strange deities and their
worships were admitted indiscriminately. But the Chinese Government
goes much further. It appears to regard all novel superstitions, and
especially foreign worships, as the hotbed of sedition and disloyalty.
Unlicensed deities and sects are put down by the police; magicians and
sorcerers are arrested; and the peculiar Chinese practice of
canonising deceased officials and paying sacrificial honours to local
celebrities after death is strictly reserved by the Board of
Ceremonies for imperial consideration and approval. The Censor, to
whom any proposal of this kind must be entrusted, is admonished that
he must satisfy himself by inquiry of its validity. An official who
performs sacred rites in honour of a spirit or holy personage not
recognised by the Ritual Code, was liable, under laws that may be
still in force, to corporal punishment; and the adoration by private
families of spirits whose worship is reserved for public ceremonial
was a heinous offence. No such rigorous control over the
multiplication of rites and deities has been instituted elsewhere. On
the other hand, while in other countries the State has recognised no
more than one established religion, the Chinese Government formally
recognises three denominations. Buddhism has been sanctioned by
various edicts and endowments, yet the State divinities belong to the
Taoist pantheon, and their worship is regulated by public ordinances;
while Confucianism represents official orthodoxy, and its precepts
embody the latitudinarian spirit of the intellectual classes. We know
that the Chinese people make use, so to speak, of all three religions
indiscriminately, according to their individual whims, needs, or
experience of results. So also a politic administration countenances
these divisions and probably finds some interest in maintaining them.
The morality of the people requires some religious sanction; and it is
this element with which the State professes its chief concern. We are
told on good authority that one of the functions of high officials is
to deliver public lectures freely criticising and discouraging
indolent monasticism and idolatry from the standpoint of rational
ethics, as follies that are reluctantly tolerated. Yet the Government
has never been able to keep down the fanatics, mystics, and heretical
sects that are incessantly springing up in China, as elsewhere in
Asia; though they are treated as pestilent rebels and law-breakers,
to be exterminated by massacre and cruel punishments; and bloody
repression of this kind has been the cause of serious insurrections.
It is to be observed that all religious persecution is by the direct
action of the State, _not_ instigated or insisted upon by a powerful
orthodox priesthood. But a despotic administration which undertakes to
control and circumscribe all forms and manifestations of superstition
in a vast polytheistic multitude of its subjects, is inevitably driven
to repressive measures of the utmost severity. Neither Christianity
nor Islam attempted to regulate polytheism, their mission was to
exterminate it, and they succeeded mainly because in those countries
the State was acting with the support and under the uncompromising
pressure of a dominant church or faith.
Some writers have noticed a certain degree of resemblance between the
policy of the Roman empire and that of the Chinese empire toward
religion. We may read in Gibbon that the Roman magistrates regarded
the various modes of worship as equally useful, that sages and heroes
were exalted to immortality and entitled to reverence and adoration,
and that philosophic officials, viewing with indulgence the
superstitions of the multitude, diligently practised the ceremonies of
their fathers. So far, indeed, his description of the attitude of the
State toward polytheism may be applicable to China; but although the
Roman and Chinese emperors both assumed the rank of divinity, and were
supreme in the department of worships, the Roman administration never
attempted to regulate and restrain polytheism at large on the Chinese
system.
The religion of the Gentiles, said Hobbes, is a part of their policy;
and it may be said that this is still the policy of Oriental
monarchies, who admit no separation between the secular and the
ecclesiastic jurisdiction. They would agree with Hobbes that temporal
and spiritual government are but two words brought into the world to
make men see double and mistake their lawful sovereign. But while in
Mohammedan Asia the State upholds orthodox uniformity, in China and
Japan the mainspring of all such administrative action is political
expediency. It may be suggested that in the mind of these far-Eastern
people religion has never been conceived as something quite apart from
human experience and the affairs of the visible world; for Buddhism,
with its metaphysical doctrines, is a foreign importation, corrupted
and materialised in China and Japan. And we may observe that from
among the Mongolian races, which have produced mighty conquerors and
founded famous dynasties from Constantinople to Pekin, no mighty
prophet, no profound spiritual teacher, has arisen. Yet in China, as
throughout all the countries of the Asiatic mainland, an enthusiast
may still gather together ardent proselytes, and fresh revelations may
create among the people unrest that may ferment and become heated up
to the degree of fanaticism, and explode against attempts made to
suppress it. The Taeping insurrection, which devastated cities and
provinces in China, and nearly overthrew the Manchu dynasty, is a
striking example of the volcanic fires that underlie the surface of
Asiatic societies. It was quenched in torrents of blood after lasting
some ten years. And very recently there has been a determined revolt
of the Lamas in Eastern Tibet, where the provincial administration is,
as we know, sacerdotal. The imperial troops are said to be crushing it
with unrelenting severity. These are the perilous experiences of a
philosophic Government that assumes charge and control over the
religions of some three hundred millions of Asiatics.
I can only make a hasty reference to Japan. In that country the
relations of the State to religions appear to have followed the
Chinese model. Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, are impartially
recognised. The emperor presides over official worship as high priest
of his people; the liturgical ordinances are issued by imperial
rescripts not differing in form from other public edicts. The dominant
article of faith is the divinity of Japan and its emperor; and Shinto,
the worship of the gods of nature, is understood to be patronised
chiefly with the motive of preserving the national traditions. But in
Japan the advance of modern science and enlightened scepticism may
have diminished the importance of the religious department. Shinto,
says a recent writer, still embodies the religion of the people; yet
in 1877 a decree was issued declaring it to be no more than a
convenient system of State ceremonial.[60] And in 1889 an article of
the constitution granted freedom of belief and worship to all Japanese
subjects, without prejudice to peace, order, and loyalty.
* * * * *
In India the religious situation is quite different. I think it is
without parallel elsewhere in the world. Here we are at the
fountain-head of metaphysical theology, of ideas that have flowed
eastward and westward across Asia. And here, also, we find every
species of primitive polytheism, unlimited and multitudinous; we can
survey a confused medley of divinities, of rites and worships
incessantly varied by popular whim and fancy, by accidents, and by the
pressure of changing circumstances. Hinduism permits any doctrine to
be taught, any sort of theory to be held regarding the divine
attributes and manifestations, the forces of nature, or the
mysterious functions of mind or body. Its tenets have never been
circumscribed by a creed; its free play has never been checked or
regulated by State authority.
Now, at first sight, this is not unlike the popular polytheism of the
ancient world, before the triumph of Christianity. There are passages
in St. Augustine's _Civitas Dei_, describing the worship of the
unconverted pagans among whom he lived, that might have been written
yesterday by a Christian bishop in India. And we might ask why all
this polytheism was not swept out from among such a highly
intellectual people as the Indians, with their restless pursuit of
divine knowledge, by some superior faith, by some central idea.
Undoubtedly the material and moral conditions, and the course of
events which combine to stamp a particular form of religion upon any
great people, are complex and manifold; but into this inquiry I cannot
go. I can only point out that the institution of caste has riveted
down Hindu society into innumerable divisions upon a general religious
basis, and that the sacred books separated the Hindu theologians into
different schools, preventing uniformity of worship or of creed. And
it is to be observed that these books are not historical; they give no
account of the rise and spread of a faith. The Hindu theologian would
say, in the words of an early Christian father, that the objects of
divine knowledge are not historical, that they can only be apprehended
intellectually, that within experience there is no reality. And the
fact that Brahmanism has no authentic inspired narrative, that it is
the only great religion not concentrated round the life and teachings
of a person, may be one reason why it has remained diffuse and
incoherent. All ways of salvation are still open to the Hindus; the
canon of their scripture has never been authoritatively closed. New
doctrines, new sects, fresh theological controversies, are
incessantly modifying and superseding the old scholastic
interpretations of the mysteries, for Hindus, like Asiatics
everywhere, are still in that condition of mind when a fresh spiritual
message is eagerly received. Vishnu and Siva are the realistic
abstractions of the understanding from objects of sense, from
observation of the destructive and reproductive operations of nature;
they represent among educated men separate systems of worship which,
again, are parted into different schools or theories regarding the
proper ways and methods of attaining to spiritual emancipation. Yet
the higher philosophy and the lower polytheism are not mutually
antagonistic; on the contrary, they support each other; for Brahmanism
accepts and allies itself with the popular forms of idolatry, treating
them as outward visible signs of an inner truth, as indications of
all-pervading pantheism. The peasant and the philosopher reverence the
same deity, perform the same rite; they do not mean the same thing,
but they do not quarrel on this account. Nevertheless, it is certainly
remarkable that this inorganic medley of ideas and worships should
have resisted for so many ages the invasion and influence of the
coherent faiths that have won ascendancy, complete or dominant, on
either side of India, the west and the east; it has thrown off
Buddhism, it has withstood the triumphant advance of Islam, it has as
yet been little affected by Christianity. Probably the political
history of India may account in some degree for its religious
disorganisation. I may propound the theory that no religion has
obtained supremacy, or at any rate definite establishment, in any
great country except with the active co-operation, by force or favour,
of the rulers, whether by conquest, as in Western Asia, or by
patronage and protection, as in China. The direct influence and
recognition of the State has been an indispensable instrument of
religious consolidation. But until the nineteenth century the whole of
India, from the mountains to the sea, had never been united under one
stable government; the country was for ages parcelled out into
separate principalities, incessantly contending for territory. And
even the Moghul empire, which was always at war upon its frontiers,
never acquired universal dominion. The Moghul emperors, except
Aurungzeb, were by no means bigoted Mohammedans; and their obvious
interest was to abstain from meddling with Hinduism. Yet the irruption
of Islam into India seems rather to have stimulated religious activity
among the Hindus, for during the Mohammedan period various spiritual
teachers arose, new sects were formed, and theological controversies
divided the intellectual classes. To these movements the Mohammedan
governments must have been for a long time indifferent; and among the
new sects the principle of mutual toleration was universal. Towards
the close of the Moghul empire, however, Hinduism, provoked by the
bigotry of the Emperor Aurungzeb, became a serious element of
political disturbance. Attempts to suppress forcibly the followers of
Nanak Guru, and the execution of one spiritual leader of the Sikhs,
turned the Sikhs from inoffensive quietists into fanatical warriors;
and by the eighteenth century they were in open revolt against the
empire. They were, I think, the most formidable embodiment of militant
Hinduism known to Indian history. By that time, also, the Marathas in
South-West India were declaring themselves the champions of the Hindu
religion against the Mohammedan oppression; and to the Sikhs and
Marathas the dislocation of the Moghul empire may be very largely
attributed. We have here a notable example of the dynamic power upon
politics of revolts that are generated by religious fermentation, and
a proof of the strength that can be exerted by a pacific inorganic
polytheism in self-defence, when ambitious rebels proclaim themselves
defenders of a faith. The Marathas and the Sikhs founded the only
rulerships whose armies could give the English serious trouble in the
field during the nineteenth century.
On the whole, however, when we survey the history of India, and
compare it with that of Western Asia, we may say that although the
Hindus are perhaps the most intensely religious people in the world,
Hinduism has never been, like Christianity, Islam, and to some extent
Buddhism, a religion established by the State. Nor has it suffered
much from the State's power. It seems strange, indeed, that
Mohammedanism, a compact proselytising faith, closely united with the
civil rulership, should have so slightly modified, during seven
centuries of dominion, this infinitely divided polytheism. Of course,
Mohammedanism made many converts, and annexed a considerable number of
the population--yet the effect was rather to stiffen than to loosen
the bonds that held the mass of the people to their traditional
divinities, and to the institution of castes. Moreover the antagonism
of the two religions, the popular and the dynastic, was a perpetual
element of weakness in a Mohammedan empire. In India polytheism could
not be crushed, as in Western Asia, by Islam; neither could it be
controlled and administered, as in Eastern Asia; yet the Moghul
emperors managed to keep on good terms with it, so long as they
adhered to a policy of toleration.
To the Mohammedan empire has succeeded another foreign dominion, which
practises not merely tolerance but complete religious neutrality.
Looking back over the period of a hundred years, from 1757 to 1857,
during which the British dominion was gradually extended over India,
we find that the British empire, like the Roman, met with little or no
opposition from religion. Hindus and Mohammedans, divided against each
other, were equally willing to form alliances with, and to fight on
the side of, the foreigner who kept religion entirely outside
politics. And the British Government, when established, has so
carefully avoided offence to caste or creed that on one great occasion
only, the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, have the smouldering fires of
credulous fanaticism broken out against our rule.
I believe the British-Indian position of complete religious neutrality
to be unique among Asiatic governments, and almost unknown in Europe.
The Anglo-Indian sovereignty does not identify itself with the
interests of a single faith, as in Mohammedan kingdoms, nor does it
recognise a definite ecclesiastical jurisdiction in things spiritual,
as in Catholic Europe. Still less has our Government adopted the
Chinese system of placing the State at the head of different rituals
for the purpose of controlling them all, and proclaiming an ethical
code to be binding on all denominations. The British ruler, while
avowedly Christian, ignores all religions administratively,
interfering only to suppress barbarous or indecent practices when the
advance of civilisation has rendered them obsolete. Public
instruction, so far as the State is concerned, is entirely secular;
the universal law is the only authorised guardian of morals; to
expound moral duties officially, as things apart from religion, has
been found possible in China, but not in India. But the Chinese
Government can issue edicts enjoining public morality and rationalism
because the State takes part in the authorised worship of the people,
and the emperor assumes pontifical office. The British Government in
India, on the other hand, disowns official connection with any
religion. It places all its measures on the sole ground of reasonable
expediency, of efficient administration; it seeks to promote industry
and commerce, and material civilisation generally; it carefully avoids
giving any religious colour whatever to its public acts; and the
result is that our Government, notwithstanding its sincere professions
of absolute neutrality, is sometimes suspected of regarding all
religion with cynical indifference, possibly even with hostility.
Moreover, religious neutrality, though it is right, just, and the only
policy which the English in India could possibly adopt, has certain
political disadvantages. The two most potent influences which still
unite and divide the Asiatic peoples, are race and religion; a
Government which represents both these forces, as, for instance, in
Afghanistan, has deep roots in a country. A dynasty that can rely on
the support of an organised religion, and stands forth as the champion
of a dominant faith, has a powerful political power at its command.
The Turkish empire, weak, ill-governed, repeatedly threatened with
dismemberment, embarrassed internally by the conflict of races, has
been preserved for the last hundred years by its incorporation with
the faith of Islam, by the Sultan's claim to the Caliphate. To attack
it is to assault a religious citadel; it is the bulwark on the west of
Mohammedan Asia, as Afghanistan is the frontier fortress of Islam on
the east. A leading Turkish politician has very recently said: 'It is
in Islam pure and simple that lies the strength of Turkey as an
independent State; and if the Sultan's position as religious chief
were encroached upon by constitutional reforms, the whole Ottoman
empire would be in danger.' We have to remember that for ages
religious enthusiasm has been, and still is in some parts of Asia, one
of the strongest incentives to military ardour and fidelity to a
standard on the battlefield. Identity of creed has often proved more
effective, in war, than territorial patriotism; it has surmounted
racial and tribal antipathies; while religious antagonism is still in
many countries a standing impediment to political consolidation.
When, therefore, we survey the history of religions, though this
sketch is necessarily very imperfect and inadequate, we find
Mohammedanism still identified with the fortunes of Mohammedan rulers;
and we know that for many centuries the relations of Christianity to
European States have been very close. In Europe the ardent
perseverance and intellectual superiority of great theologians, of
ecclesiastical statesmen supported by autocratic rulers, have hardened
and beat out into form doctrines and liturgies that it was at one time
criminal to disregard or deny, dogmatic articles of faith that were
enforced by law. By these processes orthodoxy emerged compact, sharply
defined, irresistible, out of the strife and confusion of heresies;
the early record of the churches has pages spotted with tears and
stained with blood. But at the present time European States seem
inclined to dissolve their alliance with the churches, and to arrange
a kind of judicial separation between the altar and the throne, though
in very few cases has a divorce been made absolute. No State, in
civilised countries, now assists in the propagation of doctrine; and
ecclesiastical influence is of very little service to a Government.
The civil law, indeed, makes continual encroachments on the
ecclesiastical domain, questions its authority, and usurps its
jurisdiction. Modern erudition criticises the historical authenticity
of the scriptures, philosophy tries to undermine the foundations of
belief; the governments find small interest in propping up edifices
that are shaken by internal controversies. In Mohammedan Asia, on the
other hand, the connection between the orthodox faith and the States
is firmly maintained, for the solidarity is so close that disruptions
would be dangerous, and a Mohammedan rulership over a majority of
unbelievers would still be perilously unstable.
I have thus endeavoured to show that the historical relations of
Buddhism and Hinduism to the State have been in the past, and are
still in the present time, very different from the situation in the
West. There has always existed, I submit, one essential distinction of
principle. Religious propagation, forcible conversion, aided and
abetted by the executive power of the State, and by laws against
heresy or dissent, have been defended in the West by the doctors of
Islam, and formerly by Christian theologians, by the axiom that all
means are justifiable for extirpating false teachers who draw souls to
perdition. The right and duty of the civil magistrate to maintain
truth, in regard to which Bossuet declared all Christians to be
unanimous, and which is still affirmed in the Litany of our Church, is
a principle from which no Government, three centuries ago, dissented
in theory, though in practice it needed cautious handling. I do not
think that this principle ever found its way into Hinduism or
Buddhism; I doubt, that is to say, whether the civil government was at
any time called in to undertake or assist propagation of those
religions as part of its duty. Nor do I know that the States of
Eastern Asia, beyond the pale of Islam, claim or exercise the right of
insisting on conformance to particular doctrines, because they are
true. The erratic manifestations of the religious spirit throughout
Asia, constantly breaking out in various forms and figures, in
thaumaturgy, mystical inspiration, in orgies and secret societies,
have always disquieted these Asiatic States, yet, so far as I can
ascertain, the employment of force to repress them has always been
justified on administrative or political grounds, as distinguishable
from theological motives pure and simple. Sceptics and agnostics have
been often marked out for persecution in the West, but I do not think
that they have been molested in India, China, or Japan, where they
abound, because they seldom meddle with politics.[61] It may perhaps
be admitted, however, that a Government which undertakes to regulate
impartially all rites and worship among its subjects is at a
disadvantage by comparison with a Government that acts as the
representative of a great church or an exclusive faith. It bears the
sole undivided responsibility for measures of repression; it cannot
allege divine command or even the obligation of punishing impiety for
the public good.
To conclude. In Asiatic States the superintendence of religious
affairs is an integral attribute of the sovereignty, which no
Government, except the English in India, has yet ventured to
relinquish; and even in India this is not done without some risk, for
religion and politics are still intermingled throughout the world;
they act and react upon each other everywhere. They are still far from
being disentangled in our own country, where the theory that a
Government in its collective character must profess and even propagate
some religion has not been very long obsolete. It was maintained
seventy years ago by a great statesman who was already rising into
prominence, by Mr. Gladstone. The text of Mr. Gladstone's argument, in
his book on the relations of the State with the Church, was Hooker's
saying, that the religious duty of kings is the weightiest part of
their sovereignty; while Macaulay, in criticising this position,
insisted that the main, if not the only, duty of a Government, to
which all other objects must be subordinate, was the protection of
persons and property. These two eminent politicians were, in fact, the
champions of the ancient and the modern ideas of sovereignty; for the
theory that a State is bound to propagate the religion that it
professes was for many centuries the accepted theory of all Christian
rulerships, though I think it now survives only in Mohammedan
kingdoms.
As the influence of religion in the sphere of politics declines, the
State becomes naturally less concerned with the superintendence of
religion; and the tendency of constitutional Governments seems to be
towards abandoning it. The States that have completely dissolved
connection with ecclesiastical institutions are the two great
republics, the United States of America and France. We can discern at
this moment a movement towards constitutional reforms in Mohammedan
Asia, in Turkey, and Persia, and if they succeed it will be most
interesting to observe the effect which liberal reforms will produce
upon the relation of Mohammedan Governments with the dominant faith,
and on which side the religious teachers will be arrayed. It is
certain, at any rate, that for a long time to come religion will
continue to be a potent factor in Asiatic politics; and I may add that
the reconciliation of civil with religious liberty is one of the most
arduous of the many problems to be solved by the promoters of national
unity.