Footnote 49:
Sir A. Mitchell, Rhind Lectures for 1876 and 1878, _The Past in the
Present_, pp. 207, 214; Edinburgh, Douglas, 1880.
Footnote 50:
Whately, _Political Economy_, p. 68.
Footnote 51:
Max Müller, Gifford Lectures, _Natural Religion_, p. 54.
Footnote 52:
The savagery of a great city is in some aspects more awful than that
of Africa.
Footnote 53:
T. W. Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures, p. 10.
Footnote 54:
Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, vol. i. p. 380.
Footnote 55:
Müller, _Introduction to the Science of Religion_, p. 41; _Chips from
a German Workshop_, vol. ii. p. 254.
Footnote 56:
Fairbairn, _Studies in Religion and Philosophy_, p. 13.
Footnote 57:
Baring Gould, _Origin and Development of Religious Belief_, vol. i. p.
109.
Footnote 58:
“Nations,” says Professor Goldwin Smith, “redeem each other. They
preserve for each other principles, truths, and hopes, and aspirations
which, committed to the keeping of one, might become extinct for ever.
They thus not only raise each other again when fallen, but they
prevent each other from falling.”—_Lectures on the Study of History_,
delivered in Oxford 1859-61, p. 71.
Footnote 59:
Celsus, quoting our Lord’s saying, Matt. xix. 24, and the exhortation
to forgive our enemies, Matt. v. 43, 45, alleged they were transferred
and coarsely perverted from Plato, _de Legibus_, and _Crito_.—Origen,
_contra Celsum_, Book vi. chaps. 15, 16, and Book vii. chap. 61.
Footnote 60:
_Enarr. in Psalm._ cxl. 6. Clement of Alexandria regarded Greek
philosophy as a προπαιδεία or preparatory discipline for the reception
of Christian truth, _Strom._ vi. chap. 8, and as a step to something
higher, ὑποβάθραν οὖσαν τῆς κατὰ Χριστὸν φιλοσοφίας, _Strom._ vi.
chap. 17.
Footnote 61:
Trench, Hulsean Lectures for 1846, p. 153.
LECTURE II.
THE HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS OF BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY, AND THE
EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF THEIR RESPECTIVE SCRIPTURES.
It should be an advantage to the study of Buddhism that even in its
origin it confronts us as the religion of a people sufficiently advanced
in civilisation to be able to formulate their metaphysical conceptions
and present us with their religious beliefs organised in a system. Like
Christianity it not only inherited but also produced a considerable and
very miscellaneous literature, whose contents throw valuable light upon
the past from which it emerged and upon the course which it followed,
and like Christianity it has left its stamp on most of the institutions
of the peoples among whom it was successfully propagated. When all these
sources of information have been properly investigated, we may hope that
the story of the rise and progress of Buddhism in the East will be
revealed with something at least of the clearness with which the history
of Christianity is disclosed by the literature and art of the West.
To trace, however, the dawn and spread of Buddhism with anything like
historical accuracy for the first six or seven hundred years of its
course, is a task as yet beyond the literary ability of the times. It is
doubtful whether the materials for such a work have as yet been
collected, and he would be a bold man who would claim for the task of
sifting what has already been furnished more than an earnest beginning.
Not even Saint-Hilaire would now repeat the assertion so confidently
made thirty years ago,[62] that “no new discoveries can change our
conclusions regarding it”; for during the past generation the effect of
fuller information has been not only to modify, but in several instances
to revolutionise the theories formed concerning it. Discoveries are
multiplying every year; and, though the knowledge thus acquired serves
often more to reveal difficulties than to solve them, we may be thankful
that the examination of them is engaging the attention of the highest
order of scholarship, and hopeful, yea, even confident that since so
many of the ablest and most patient minds are turned in this direction,
the aggregate of progress will speedily be immense.
All that we know of Buddhism, and all that we are likely to know of it,
is to be gathered from its own Scriptures; and a comparison of these
with the Christian Scriptures reveals at the very outset a difference
amounting to a vast contrast between them. The original Scriptures of
Christianity have been before the tribunal of the world’s keenest and
most hostile criticism for 1800 years; but we are only now beginning to
make the acquaintance of the Scriptures of Buddhism, which have hardly
been subjected to any cross-questioning worthy of the name. Those who
have ventured to assail have only published their inability to
understand them, and those most competent to criticise may be pardoned
if they handle tenderly the fragments which they are collecting and
translating for our use. The services which they are thus rendering to
religion as well as to science are very great. Previously we had only
anthologies extracted often without reference to date or authorship or
connection to judge from, but now these learned pundits are furnishing
us with books containing not only the wisdom and beauties of Eastern
literature, but its follies and blemishes as well. Omitting only what is
obscene and offensive to the moral sense,[63] they are giving us
specimens of several strata of Oriental thought and belief, vertically
and thoroughly cut, from which a correct understanding of the essential
features of this very peculiar religion may with considerable
probability be ascertained.
Only a portion of the Buddhist Scriptures are as yet available, and
these we are certainly not at liberty to place side by side as of equal
evidential value with the contents of the New Testament. It is said that
two thousand manuscripts of the New Testament, or of portions of it,
have been discovered, several of which are of great antiquity, and
notwithstanding the immense number of various readings on points of
detail, the text of the oldest corresponds substantially with that of
the books as we have them to-day. We are informed, however, on the best
authority, that “all Indian manuscripts are comparatively modern, that
no manuscript written one thousand years ago is now existent in India,
and that it is almost impossible to find one written five hundred years
ago; for most manuscripts which claim to be of that date are merely
copies of old ones, the dates of which are repeated by the
copyists.”[64] It is admitted, moreover, that the literary honesty of
these Indian translators and copyists is very questionable, that the
books of the Buddhists have undergone wholesale textual alterations,
that none of the Sanskrit works as yet known to us are unadulterated
specimens of transmitted doctrines, that the oldest and most reliable
authorities for the life of Buddha exaggerate greatly events which are
said to have happened, and ascribe to him long discourses of which the
writers themselves were the composers.[65] In respect, therefore, of
literary accuracy and faithfulness of purpose, these old compilers and
re-editors of the Buddhist books are far below the standard which
criticism has inexorably applied to the versionists of the Christian
Scriptures.
The faithfulness of our English versions is vouched for by the names of
the translators, and yet they admit that their translations are only
approximations.[66] From the very nature of the case they must be so.
The East is very far distant from the West; its ways are not our ways;
its thoughts are not our thoughts. Some one has said that “the _Iliad_
is separated from the _Rig Veda_ by an interval of several
civilisations”; and if so, how vast must be the gulf separating Vedic
and even Buddhist metaphysicians from the British philosopher of to-day!
It is simply impossible for the most impartial translator to put himself
in the place of the ancient Indian sage, and to prevent his own
preconceptions from insinuating themselves among the data with which he
has to deal. He has to express, as we have been reminded, “a lower order
of ideas in a higher order of terms, and use words suggesting a wealth
of analysis and association quite foreign to the thought to be
reproduced. Translation from a lower to a higher language is thus a
process of elevation.”[67] In reading these translations and the books
founded upon them, we have constantly to guard against giving to such
terms as “sin,” “lust,” “salvation,” “law,” “church,” and many others,
our Christian conceptions of them. We are often perplexed whether the
phrases employed, and even the very titles of the treatises, be really
the equivalents of the ancient texts and titles, or nineteenth century
conceptions of what they may be made to mean. A European scholar
inheriting the results of ages of Christian culture may be more likely
to interpret the reach of an old Buddhist expression than the monk who
first used it; but he is always in danger of confounding that reach with
his own firm grasp of truth, and of expressing his conceptions by
phraseology which, if it could be explained to the ancient, would be
rejected by him as inconsistent with his original meaning.
Another strong contrast between the two sets of scriptures emerges when
we attempt to fix the dates at which the earliest Buddhist works were
produced. The New Testament is admitted by authorities who cannot be
accused of prejudice in favour of Christianity and even by antichristian
critics, to contain the actual writings of some of the original
disciples of Jesus. The very latest of the books which compose it was in
circulation within a century after His death, while the great bulk of
them were accepted before half a century had passed as the testimonies
of those who were eye-witnesses of the rise of our religion.[68] M.
Renan admits that the three Synoptical Gospels are the “tender
remembrances and simple narratives of the first and second generations
of Christians, written in substantially their present form by the men
whose names they bear.”[69] The epistle of St. James and several of the
epistles of St. Paul are almost now unanimously accepted as the products
of the first generation. Mons. E. Burnouf therefore may safely aver that
“the history of Christian doctrine and worship bears the crown over all
others in respect that its records are complete.”[70] What of these
records are comprised in the New Testament, though tried by the severest
of tests, continues to-day as they were eighteen centuries ago delivered
to the Church. Though the various readings in the mss. are said to be
counted by 200,000, hardly one of them can be said to affect a
fundamental doctrinal or historical statement; and so outstanding and
distinct is their canonical character that it requires no external
authority, but only comparison with them, to disclose what of early
Christian literature is to be regarded as apocryphal.
The evidence on which Orientalists have to rely in fixing the date of
the Buddhist scriptures is confessedly such “that we must not be
surprised if those who are accustomed to test historical and
chronological evidence in reference to Greece and Rome declined to be
convinced by it.”[71] For centuries after the death of Buddha his
followers assure us that they had no written books constituting their
rules of faith and manners. The earliest written collection of which in
their own records we have any historical trace is that of Ceylon, and
all that can be said of it is “that there is nothing improbable” that
part of it may have been reduced to writing about the first century
B.C., but the whole was only fixed about 420 A.D. The Nepaulese
collection is said to date only from the first Christian century; but it
is not alleged that the whole of the works now in it were even then in
existence. According to their own tradition, they had no written
biography of Buddha till about the first century of our era, and no one
who has examined that narrative or read the opinions expressed by
Orientalists as to the date when it was produced—opinions so divergent
as to indicate a difference of several centuries—would ever dream of
employing it as evidence of what is alleged in it to have happened. It
is simply impossible, therefore, to regard the Buddhist’s Pitakas as if
they were of similar authoritative value with the New Testament, for, in
fact, in respect of canonical worth they do not deserve to be ranked
with much of our later patristic literature.
A very high antiquity, however, is claimed by Buddhists for these
collections. According to the Dipavanso, their earliest available
chronicle, dating only from the fifth century A.D., the doctrines orally
communicated by Buddha to his disciples were by them immediately after
his death revised and classified under the three divisions of Vinaya,
Abhidharma, and Sutta, in which they have always since then been
preserved. This collection having passed through the crucible of a
council held at Vaisali a hundred years later, was fixed as canonical at
another held in the reign of Asoka about 242 B.C. It is urged that a
canon, to be authoritative, does not require to be written, and that
Indians claim for one orally transmitted higher authority than for one
transcribed. The art of writing was probably unknown in India in
Buddha’s time, and so, thrown back upon their resources, memory was by
the Indians cultivated to an extent which enabled them to dispense with
methods deemed by nearly all other peoples to be essential to accuracy.
Eminent Orientalists therefore, while regarding the account of the first
council as apocryphal, are yet inclined to admit—from the identity of
the threefold division in all the schools that have been tested, from
the similarity of the titles of the contents of all the various
collections, and especially from the quality of the writings
themselves—that the tradition recorded in the Dipavanso is well founded,
and that considerable portions of the Vinaya and Sutta literature may
date from a hundred years after the death of Buddha.
In assuming so much, however, these scholars by no means believe that
they have found in these texts the actual teaching of Buddha in an
unadulterated condition. While not thinking it possible to impugn the
substantial accuracy of the Vinaya texts, though given in Pali
translations of the lost dialect in which they were originally preached,
they tell us that the oldest of the Sutta texts are “not his teachings
nor the teachings of his immediate disciples, who could not have spoken
of him in the manner in which he is there described. They are only
founded on his teachings, and record existing beliefs as to the
doctrines which he actually taught.”[72] For “the fundamental and
original doctrines they may be accepted as fairly trustworthy
authorities,” but for the facts of his life they are even at the best
very questionable guides. Nearer to the origin of Buddhism and of the
person of its founder we are not likely to get than in the book entitled
by its translator the Sutta of the Great Decease; but he confesses that
even in it we are standing on anything but solid ground, and that we are
only able to catch a distant and most uncertain glimpse of the figure of
the great Teacher as he comes out at rare intervals from the mist of
legends which, designed to adorn and magnify, have in reality diminished
and obscured his real personality.
For our knowledge of Buddhism, therefore, we have for centuries only
oral traditions to rely upon. Of these traditions only a portion may be
traced approximately to the times of Buddha, and of the fragments which
can possibly be traced not one contains a narrative nor any historical
reference to passing events. On the contrary, our knowledge of the
origin of Christianity is derived not from fragments of oral tradition,
but from a set of canonical writings, many of them traceable close to
the generation that witnessed Christ’s death, in which the story of His
ministry is set in historical relation to the age in which He appeared,
and His peculiar doctrines are so fixed that any addition to them is at
once recognised as spurious. Between the extremes of criticism as to the
period covered by the life of Christ there is a difference of only half
a dozen years; but there is a difference in Buddhist traditions of more
than a thousand years as to the date of Buddha’s birth, and even
European scholars, after carefully sifting traditions and writings, have
only been able approximately to fix dates for his death ranging over a
period of 175 years.[73]
For historical accuracy, therefore, the traditions are as worthless as
they are for any photographic presentation of the various persons who
figure in them. In truth we have in them neither chronology nor
biography. Events and actors are equally indistinct; we have only a
background without any perspective, and pasteboard puppets projected
against it which might be designated by any name whatever. Even in
respect of transmission of doctrine, oral tradition was found very early
to have failed. The reason given in their chronicles for resorting to
writing is confession sufficient that they considered that method of
preserving the deposit of the faith a safer one.[74] So divergent had
the renderings and so corrupt had the texts become—“for even the monks
of the great council were blamed for turning the religion upside down,
for distorting the sense and teaching of the five Nikayas, for casting
aside that Sutta and Vinaya, and making imitations of them changing this
to that[75]—that the profoundly wise priests, foreseeing the perdition
of the people (from the perversion of the doctrines), and in order that
the religion might endure for ages, wrote the same in books.”[76] Before
this time the many schisms which had arisen were powerful illustrations
of the evils which the “profoundly wise” transcribers deplored, and of
that falling away from the original creed which this religion had
already suffered for lack of a secured basis of faith.[77]
For the want of an authoritative standard told very severely against the
early history of Buddhism. Its rapid and widespread extension was due,
not so much to the natural development of its own principles as to its
assimilation of the external and foreign influences with which it came
in contact. Its advance was the result more of compromise than of
conquest.[78] It welcomed or tolerated, at least it could not or did not
defend itself against the introduction of many parasitical germs which
were destined to arrest its growth and pass into its life. As the ivy
covers and adorns the oak only to suck away with its million mouths its
strength, so the popular beliefs which Buddhism incorporated from
without, as well as the defections from the original teaching which took
place within it, produced very soon upon it alterations so extensive
that its founder would have disclaimed or would have been really unable
to recognise it as his own.
No temptation happened to Buddhism, however, but such as is common to
all the higher religions. As far as observation and experience go, the
lower types of religion continue unchanged; but those that confront us
upon a higher level are in a perpetual flux, in which change does not
always indicate progress. Instead of tracing their path by the
superstitions which they have outgrown, their course may be indicated by
those which they have incorporated. Man, in his exodus of faith, is
always tempted to go back to the condition from which he has emerged, or
to fall away to the religions by which he is surrounded. Mosaism and
Christianity had to pass through this trial, and certainly they did not
pass through it unscathed. They suffered from the corruption of popular
superstitions and of Pagan rites, all of which, as in the case of
Buddhism, were defended by an appeal to tradition. Just as every
Buddhist innovator was ready with some forgotten saying or Sutta alleged
to have been delivered by the “Blessed One,” sometimes miraculously
preserved through the ages till the necessity for the revelation arose,
so the Popes and the Fathers of Christendom were never at a loss for
authorities when, professing to develop and define, they in reality were
adding to the faith and the worship and the claims of the Church.
But Christianity from the very earliest possessed what Buddhism for a
long period lacked. In its canonical writings it conserved not only a
check upon this apostasy, but a security for reformation. Mechanical
though it seems, there was a providence in the early committal to
writing of such books as compose our Bibles. In the fact that their
successive disclosures of truth were thus registered there is more
significance than at first appears. It is admitted by all that man’s
progress depends in no small degree on his ability to secure and hand
down the treasures of his wisdom and experience. The art of writing is
thus recognised to be one of the most moving powers in the world. The
nations that have depended upon it for the transmission of knowledge
inherited or acquired, have certainly made more progress in religion and
civilisation than those that have neglected or despised it. It is
significant that the writers of the Bible have all recognised this
condition of human progress, and that many of them have represented
themselves as instructed by the Divine authority, from whom they profess
to have received their communications, to make them permanent in popular
language and in plain written form.[79]
In the history of the Hebrews there is not a single recorded instance of
religious reformation in which the law and the testimony, or the scrolls
of the prophets, did not play an important part. In like manner the New
Testament, which embodies the ideals and perpetuates the standard which
is to regulate its course, not only saved Christianity from the perils
which threatened its earliest spread, but has often rescued it from the
degradation into which it has fallen. Canonical books may only give, as
it has been said, “the reflected image of the real doctrines of the
founder of a religion, an image always blurred and distorted by the
medium through which it has to pass”;[80] but in the case of the New
Testament the Church has never developed, or thought it possible to
develop, a purer reflection. Advance as it may, the Church never can
outgrow the ideals of its youth, and change what it pleases, it never
can improve them. Whenever the Church assumed supremacy over its law,
and whenever tradition superseded its testimony, it yielded to the
disintegrating influences of heathenism. It was rapidly lapsing into
polytheism when Mohammed rose with a spurious and mutilated version of
the Scriptures to recall it to the witness of true Scriptures to the
unity and sovereignty of God. Later on, when sinking through formalism
into superstition and sorcery almost as degrading as any Indian, Luther,
by the re-discovery of the Greek Testament, brought about a reformation
which not only saved Europe, but has created a new Western and Southern
world. In every revival and every advance which has taken place since
then there may be traced, directly or indirectly, the regenerative
influences of the Christian originals. On its human side the Christian
Church will always be in danger of losing its pure conceptions and noble
aims in grosser forms of belief and in lower ambitions; but high over
all its degradation towers in its early Scriptures the majesty and
spirituality of its Divine authority, and we have only to look up to be
first convicted, then attracted and redeemed. The purest sections of the
Christian Church, the surest and the first to outgrow all unworthy
expressions of Christianity, are those which adhere most closely to the
original rule of faith and worship. It is quite possible that we “may be
only too apt to make a fetich of our sacred books”;[81] but somehow the
Christian communities that most revere their sacred books show that they
are least likely to fall into this danger. The more we obey the
Scriptures, the less likely are we to idolise them. The New Testament,
so far from attaching any mystical or talismanic value to its contents,
tells us that the letter killeth, and the spirit alone giveth life. It
is otherwise with the Buddhist Tripitaka. Its authors claim meritorious
efficacy not only for the repetition of its sentences, but for the very
sound of its words, “as if they were capable of elevating every one who
hears them to heavenly abodes in future existence.” Sir Monier Williams
has illustrated this by a legend long current, not in northern Buddhist
countries, but in Ceylon, where a purer Buddhism prevails. According to
it, two monks were heard by five hundred bats reciting in a cave the law
of Buddha, and they by merely hearing gained such merit that in death
they were re-born as men, and ultimately through successive re-births
were raised to the fellowship of the gods.[82] Of course this is simply
a legend, a thing of hay or straw that has got mixed with the purer
primitive faith; but it indicates that the course of the current flows
in quite an opposite direction from the faith which allows itself to be
dominated and guided by the canon of Holy Scriptures.
The quality of the contents of the two sets of writings is not under
discussion, but we cannot help remarking one characteristic of the
Christian Scriptures which is not likely to emerge in our longest
acquaintance with the Buddhist books. No one ever expects that the
genuineness of the contents of the Tripitaka will ever be discussed with
anything like the intensity and acerbity with which we have discussed
the genuineness of the books of the Bible. The long and fierce
contendings that have been waged over each portion of the Gospels will
never take place over any of the Suttas. We have been working for five
centuries to secure a proper English translation of the Holy Bible, and
we are not satisfied with it yet: does any one expect a similar
expenditure of labour to secure a proper version of the Tripitaka? It is
possible that scholarship will by and by exhaust this particular field
of Oriental research, and “having catalogued its discoveries will put
them aside and proceed to more interesting studies”; but though men have
quarrelled about and questioned the Holy Scriptures for eighteen
centuries they are not likely to come to a term of their hostility or
curiosity. The ceaseless endeavour to disprove, refute, shows that we
cannot get rid of them. There must be something either in the history of
their production or the quality of their contents, or the range of their
influence, which separates them from all sacred books of the type of the
Buddhist Tripitaka. Certainly we cannot conceive it possible that any of
these so-called Bibles of other religions will ever among any civilised
people supplant the Christian Bible. “One chapter of Isaiah,” says
Quinet,[83] “has more in it than a whole Republic of Plato.” One Psalm
of David will outweigh all the religious lore of the Vedas. One sentence
of Moses, “The Lord our God is one Lord: I the Lord am holy,” is worth
all the speculations of the devout and learned authors of the
Upanishads. Not that the Republic, the Vedas, the Upanishads are to be
despised. On the contrary, the more they are studied the more likely is
the Bible to be revered, for the truth that is in them is only prophetic
of truth which could not then be revealed and received. We may outlive
and outgrow the teaching of these wise ancients, but we have not yet
transcended the originals of Christianity, and it is not at all likely
that we ever shall. There is an end to the perfection of all other
systems, but here is “a commandment exceeding broad,” “whose line has
gone through all the earth, and its word to the end of the world.”
From this slight notice of the literature which Buddhism has produced
let us proceed to glance at the literature which it inherited, with the
view of catching a glimpse of the conditions out of which it arose. As
with man’s language, so is it with his other distinctive birthright: we
can only understand a religion when we have ascertained its antecedents.
Christianity emerged from a previous religion of which it professed to
be the complement. Our Lord appeared among a people whose spiritual
history extended over several thousand years. They had a sacred canon,
professing to register the successive Divine revelations made to their
ancestors, which was fixed as we have it now at least two, and perhaps
more, centuries before He came. Instead of breaking with the past He
acknowledged and appropriated it; instead of abrogating their law, He
fulfilled it; instead of disowning their prophets He claimed them as His
witnesses. In prosecuting His mission He brought upon Himself the fierce
antagonism of the existing Church, whose leaders in less than three
years succeeded in having Him crucified; but His constant appeal was to
their ever-venerated Scriptures. His apostles again record and expound
the incidents of His ministry and His death as realising the
pre-intimations of their ancient rites, and as fulfilling all their
prophecies; and all along faith in the Divine origin of Christianity is
never supposed to be weakened but to be greatly confirmed by an appeal
to the religion which it annulled and supplanted.
Now Buddhism grew out of Brahmanism, but however divergent their
relations eventually became, it was originally accepted as a natural
consequence of it. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, there was for long
no trace of serious antagonism between the Brahmans and many generations
of the successors of Buddha. Brahmans formed a considerable portion of
his followers, and in regard to his teaching, his doctrines, where not
identical, were not likely to offend them. St. Paul scandalised the
Pharisees by preaching that outward Jewish connection marked by the seal
of circumcision profited nothing, but long before Buddha’s time Brahman
teachers had declared, as he did, to that most exclusive of the Indian
elect, that the true Brahman was not a person born within the sacred
caste, but only the thoughtful and self-controlled man:[84] that a bad
mind and wicked deeds are what defile a man, and that no outward
observances can purify him.[85] Buddha has been designated as the best
and wisest and greatest of Hindus; “a reformer of Hinduism who ignored
its superstitions and follies, and sought to elevate and refine its
dogmas.”[86] It is now considered very questionable whether the
difference between the two systems ever grew into hostility involving
persecution of the new religion by the old. The two streams of Hindu
belief seem for long in their course in India to have flowed peaceably
side by side, and if Buddhism eventually disappeared from India as a
separate and distinct system, it was not altogether because it was
crushed by persecution, but because it returned to enrich and modify the
religion from which it originally parted.[87]
Buddhism was thus an offspring of Brahmanism, but Brahmanism was itself
the product of a religion older still. Behind Buddhism lies a great and
undefined past, a past with no history in the proper sense of the word,
and absolutely without chronology; but out of this vast and nebulous era
there has been extracted a rich traditional literature, and Oriental
scholars working on principles similar to those by which geologic
periods are determined,[88] are endeavouring by an examination of the
various civilisations reflected in that literature to establish the
leading stages in the growth of prehistoric Indian thought. The sacred
books of India disclose sufficiently in outline the social and religious
progress of the people from a period of great antiquity. No one can tell
when the oldest fragments of them were originally composed, but some of
them are said to have been in circulation among the Aryans when one
immigrant contingent of them had arrived at the confluence of Jumna with
the Ganges,[89] and if so, they image for us the life and beliefs of a
people who must have been contemporaries with Moses some fifteen
centuries at latest before the coming of Christ.
It is now asserted that this Aryan immigration had been preceded from
the same quarter by an earlier one, in a past so very remote that the
Indians had lost completely the memory of it, and that by the time this
second wave had reached the north-west Gangetic tracts, the first had
pushed its way as far east as the delta, where first vanquishing it
finally amalgamated with the aboriginal tribes. It is supposed that from
out of this earliest section arose the natural ancestors of Buddha,
while in the second and intellectually superior section we must look for
the religious teachers from whom his spiritual lineage is to be
traced.[90] For with them were introduced the Vedas, revealing the
earliest forms of civilisation and religion in that great section of the
human family to which we ourselves belong. We see pictured in the
Rig-Veda a people who, in complexion, manner, and rites, were at first
as distinct from the native Indian races as were the Israelites from
those of Canaan. Patriarchal in their institutions, pastoral or
agricultural in their pursuits, they confront us as a primitive but
certainly not a barbarous folk. Nurtured by the invigorating climate and
magnificent scenery of an ancestral home “on the very roof of the
world,” they had reached a social condition in which, in a language
fitly called “polished,” or “carefully made” (Sanskrita), they were as
fitly called “Aryan” or “noble.” They practised the arts of Jabal and
Jubal, venerated their sages and poets, and called their wives and
daughters by names of beauty and grace like that of Naamah. Their
religion, though polytheistic, was not inspired by dread of evil spirits
or awe of ancestral shades, but by wonder of the world around them and
their own awakening instincts. Man in these ancient fragments, as in the
first pages of our Bible, is evidently a creature transcending the
savage, and made in a diviner image than the type from which it is
maintained he must have sprung. Instead of consorting with or
worshipping the animals, he exercises dominion over them; he questions
himself and the heavens and the earth concerning their origin and
author, and with some divine authentic instinct which he has never lost,
he seems to be growing into the feeling that not only the trinity of
supernatural powers which he worshipped, but his very self, are the
children of some primordial and eternal Dyaus, the father of all.
While the earliest light that falls upon our ancestors reveals them as a
religious people, whose worship, simple and rudimentary as it was,
indicated a sense of inferiority, and also, as one who ought to know
informs us, “some sense of flaw in the relationship, some concept of sin
and guilt,”[91] to the deities worshipped, it is to be noted that gods
and men were felt to be too much akin to allow of spiritual aspiration,
or of high moral significance in man’s religious acts. The ethical or
rather spiritual elements so vital to the Biblical conceptions of
religion may not be quite foreign to the earliest Veda, but they are
scantily, if at all, represented in it. No prayer can be said to have
ever been directed to obtain forgiveness, or growth in goodness, in the
Bible sense. The sinner was for the most part only a defaulter in
respect of offerings, and his guilt was that of a person who refused to
render homage. That the gods might be able to watch over and enrich
mankind, they had to be fed and sustained. The worshipper was thus in a
certain degree necessary to the worshipped. The sense of submissive
gratitude to the Deity which meets us in the earliest fragments of the
Bible is not expressed, for religion was conceived of as a kind of
exchange in which men purchased a right to divine help by service
rendered, and “each man satisfied his higher instinct according to his
own conception of the character of the being on whose favour his welfare
was thought to depend.”[92]
Centuries later, in another strata of sacred literature, composed in
prose, dogmatic and liturgic in character, and designated Brahmanas,[93]
we behold the same branch of the Aryan family in a further stage of
their history. Their patriarchal age has vanished, and their heroic
seems passing into the aristocratic and hierarchic. Caste has appeared
as the invariable attendant upon conquest, when the victor is separated
from the vanquished by language, complexion, and religion. It is not so
much caste, however, in the ordinary sense of the word, as class,
sternly prohibiting marriage not only with the aboriginal tribes, but
between persons of unequal rank, and anticipating the organisation of
European society in the middle ages. In the nobles, who were subordinate
only to the Church, the burghers or merchants socially distinct from and
inferior to the nobles, and in the villeins or serfs of the conquered
territories, we have an exact parallel to the old Indian system, in
which Sudra, Vaisya, Kshatrya, all formed steps in a social pyramid, on
the top of which the Brahman was throned.[94]
Thus early in the history of the Indian people emerged that sacerdotal
institution which was to exercise so powerful and eventually so sinister
an influence upon their religious progress. In Vedic times the father of
the family and the rajah of the clan were the celebrants of the
religious rites, but as life became more complicated ceremonies became
more laborious, and men who had preserved the knowledge of the old
hymns, and the religious formularies which had died out from the common
people, gradually took the rajah’s place. As thought widened, men
refused to be satisfied with guardian deities that could be fed with
rice and butter. The sense of human law reflected itself in the
conception of divine rulers governing men, and penalties inflicted by
man for wrong-doing suggested expiation for the infringed laws of deity.
This idea of sacrifice, of which there is said to be no trace in the
flesh feasts of earlier times, becomes prominent in the offerings of the
period. “The shedding of blood, the burning of a limb of the victim in
the fire, by some at least was believed to atone for transgression, and
it is probable that at one time the religious instinct expressed itself
in human sacrifice.[95]” In any case, the development of the idea of the
great efficacy of sacrifice as a means of compelling the gods to do the
will of the worshipper—yea, of elevating the worshipper to their
privileges and rank,—must soon have had the effect of making a
priesthood, at first only helpful, to be necessary as the sole agents
between man and deity. By preserving the memory of what had faded from
the vulgar, by transmitting to their families a lore which became the
more sacred the more it was forgotten, the professional liturgists or
sacrificers, at first satirised by the poets as was the Romish friar by
the minstrel in the middle ages, imperceptibly grew into an order whose
privileges were more exclusive and whose pretensions were higher than
were ever asserted in Israel by the descendants of Aaron. Among the
Hebrews the priesthood was never allowed to gain complete ascendency.
Its representatives were subordinated to the king, who was the fountain
of all law, and they were kept in check by the prophets as the ministers
of Divine revelation; but the Brahmans came to be regarded as not only
the guardians of religion, but the teachers of all knowledge and the
source of all authority. They owned no superior, were subject to no law
in the state: each one was a pope in himself, more independent of the
crown and the commonwealth than a Christian pope ever pretended to be,
and had a faith in his personal infallibility which no Christian pope
affected to have. In India there resulted from the ascendency all the
evils that were manifested in Judaism and in Latin Christianity; and in
India far worse results were produced. For, left to themselves as
superior beings apart from the actual world, who never could err, they
gave their minds that licence which too often in the history of thought
has been confounded with liberty, and, as always happens when
self-restraint is disregarded, the result in this instance was the
production, not of a system of philosophy, but a crude conglomerate of
incongruous phantasies more resembling a chaos than a cosmos.[96]
Let us not suppose that the Brahmans were originally, or even
eventually, the vain and greedy and self-seeking bigots which the name
unfortunately suggests to a European. They gained the ascendency because
they cultivated the power to rise; they represent what many are inclined
to revere as the ideal aristocracy, that of Intellect. They were not
ignorant priests, but learned philosophers, from whom sprung again and
again the reformers who headed the revolt from an overdone ritual, and
from a faith which expressed itself wholly in metaphysical speculations.
By them were excogitated the Upanishads and the laws of Manu, two of the
most wonderful literary productions of mankind. From there too came the
great epic poems of the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata, poems in some
respects equal to the Homeric, and in cleverness of purpose, which is
said to be that of arresting the progress of Buddhism, equalling
anything which the Society of Jesus ever produced to counteract the
Reformation. In its complexity and adaptability and many-sidedness
Brahmanism is unrivalled by any human system, and the men who first gave
it expression and directed its earliest movements must rank among the
most original and daring of thinkers.
But they were Indians living in the period beginning about the tenth
century B.C., in a land as completely cut off from the rest of the world
as they were severed from the practical life of their countrymen. They
had the same earnest and inquisitive mind which their westward-moving
kinsmen had inherited with them from their trans-Himalayan ancestors,
but in them it had to work out its advances in more adverse conditions.
The tribes that went westward marched along the uplands, in zones of
climate and through scenery and conditions stimulating effort, both
mental and physical. Consequently they went on improving their beliefs,
till they apprehended the truth which lies at the base of all true
systems of faith, the immortality of the soul, and developed a
philosophy which represents man’s most successful attempt to grasp that
divine unity after which man in his polytheism is ever feeling. It was
otherwise with the branch that went southwards. They had to live under
physical conditions not conducive to energy, under burning skies which
repressed, and on soils which rendered industry unnecessary. As they
gained ascendency over the aborigines the vices of the vanquished race
told fatally upon them. Their sensual worship, customs like polygamy and
sutteeism, ascetic practices and sorcerous rites, took possession of
them; and, most marked of all, a belief very widely spread among the
lower tribes of mankind so terribly bewitched them that to this day the
Indian mind has never been able to break away from its fascination.
This belief in transmigration, with the pessimism which is its
inevitable concomitant, was wholly absent from their ancient Vedic
faith. At intervals from the times of Pythagoras it has infected the
religion and philosophy of the Western Aryans, but never to any extent
or with any serious result. Its true habitat and breeding-place, like
that of the cholera, is among the degraded and broken-down populations
of the East. It was communicated from the native Indian races to the
Hindus, who unfortunately were prepared to receive it through the
depressing and degenerating influences of tropical life on a
northern-born family. Anyway, while their more fortunate brethren were
eagerly groping after, in their westward progress, the truth of
immortality, and thirsting for more life and fuller, they in their fat
Gangetic plains, wearied of life as something not worth having, yet
dreading death because it was appointed unto man not once but many times
to die, were seeking some way of deliverance from this inherited curse.
And the Brahmans professed to point to it. Their earliest popular
conception of deliverance was simply that of re-birth in a happier
world, perchance secured by sacrificial rites and religious acts, but
such a conception could not long satisfy, and eventually it gave way in
the higher class of minds to nobler views. In India, as elsewhere, men
soon became conscious of the more solid security of merit procured by a
life of justice and mercy. Man’s future was in his own and not in the
hands of a priest: its happiness or misery would be no accident, but the
sure result of good or evil done here and now. Therefore the wise man
endeavoured laboriously and continuously to collect merit by good deeds,
“as the white ant builds her house, for with these as his guide he could
hope to traverse a gloom hard to be crossed.”
But by and by even this belief ceased to satisfy them, for how could man
hope to liberate himself from the bondage of endless change as long as,
seeking only a happier existence, he was content to be a citizen of the
changeable? Let him seek reunion with Brahma, of which he is an
emanation. So here again, while the Westerns were finding the path which
would lead them from polytheism to theism, and were growing into nobler
conceptions of what the individual self should be, the speculative
ascetics of the East, in a life of meditation far apart, were trying to
subside rather than rise into Brahma the Absolute as a river reunites
with the ocean. In their earlier Brahmanas their fathers knew nothing of
Brahma as deity, and at no time did Brahma mean to the Indian what deity
meant to the Western Aryan. Polytheism in India never became theism in
the old Greek sense, nor even Pantheism in our nineteenth-century sense.
The mysterious all-pervading Presence was indeed early detected by the
Indians as the “Breath” of all things, but the name employed by them to
distinguish it signified only the universal self. In no sense was it the
conscious author, but only the irrepressible source of things because
reflected upon by illusion. Brahma Atman was neither the infinitely
intelligent nor the perfectly blessed, in our sense of the word. It was
simply thought without cognition, beatitude without consciousness. “The
Hindu never thinks of asserting that Brahma knows or even has
consciousness, but always that Brahma is knowledge.” “It is simply
impersonal being, absolute unity contrasted with disruption, from which
existence, as an emanation wholly and only evil, because originating in
a mistake, must move through endless cycles of change, until the way of
escape be discovered and followed by which the erratic spark may be
absorbed in the central fire.”[97]
Such a speculation was manifestly an advance upon Vedic materialism,
which sought to bring down the gods to the side of man as useful
guardians, and upon early Brahmanism which sought by sacrifice to force
them to do man’s will, and by and by to elevate man to their level. In
endeavouring, however, to abstract its disciples from the superstitions
of the priests, it tampered with the foundations of religion. It never
attempted to propitiate the gods—for, even if superior to man, they were
as much involved in the labyrinth of transmigration as he was
himself,—but it professed in a universe of illusion to have discovered
the only real. It dared to name the Absolute; so, withdrawing from the
world, it practiced austerities for the sake of illumination, gave
itself up to meditation to reduce the personal self to an abstraction,
and endeavoured thus to escape from the necessity of existence in time
and space into “passionless, characterless being.”
All this is expounded in the Upanishads, the special scriptures of
philosophical Brahmanism.[98] Though translated by Professor Max Müller,
and lucidly interpreted by Professor Gough, readers of ordinary
philosophical culture find them very hard to understand, and in spite of
the high commendation of them by Rammohun Roy and Schopenhauer, they
will be inclined to question whether these “beginnings of thought,”
“conceptions hardly formed,” though essential to a proper knowledge of
Indian philosophy, “should be ranked among the outstanding productions
of the human mind.”[99] Throughout their long and most tedious verbiage,
however, one dominant idea is ever discoverable—that the chief end of
the wise man is to know, not the forms of things, but the great self of
all things, and seek his deliverance not by practice of religion but by
pursuit of Gnosis.[100] Religion would indeed secure rewards, but they
would only be transient; religion might regulate and modify the course
of migration, but only Gnosis could break its adamantine chain. “The
vision of Atman is the only deliverance, for by it all ties are
loosened”; “the vision of the self is the light of the world, to which
only the purest minds attain.” To reach it not only the bonds of desire
must be broken, but of ignorance too. “For Atman is highly exalted above
all reverence and effort, above holiness and unholiness.” “It, the
uncreated, is beyond all good and evil,” and upon rewards and
punishments, upon both good and evil, the sage must turn his back, for
he alone who knows the Universal is free, from Karman and from Kâma
(action and desire) which hold captive the self in the net of the
impermanent.[101]
This is said to be the last outcome of Brahmanic belief, and “indeed the
highest point reached by Indian philosophy.”[102] Manifestly, it can
never be designated a gospel. It was a deliverance impossible for the
many, and possible only for the few; a promise not to the suffering
millions, but to the mystic and the sage, and to them it came not with
the hope of a nobler character to be attained, and of a purer, higher
life to be reached, but only with that of a dreamless repose—“the sleep
eternal in an eternal night”—when the soul ceases to be soul, merged
“like the weariest river” in a shoreless and waveless sea. And this was
the system in which the wisest and saintliest in Buddha’s days were
nurtured. He was no Brahman by caste, but as pure Kshatrya he would be
instructed in his youth by Brahmans, and in early manhood he for long
consorted with them. He had mental capacity, and spiritual energy, more
than adequate to the task of comprehending as fully as they did their
very abstruse theosophies. From their speculation he derived much of his
terminology, like Karma and Nirvana; and even Buddha, words which, till
recently, it was considered he had to coin. Many doctrines which were
once regarded as peculiarly his own were taught in their jungle schools
by learned Brahmans centuries before he was born. Without the Brahmans
he could not have been produced, and yet his system will be found to be
original and distinct. They furnished the phraseology in which he
expressed himself, the methods by which he wrought, the institutions
like that of the wandering Bikkhu, by which his system was spread; but
in essentials we will find that his teaching was not only different from
but antagonistic to theirs, and that, had the principles which he
enunciated been truly accepted and consistently carried out, this
noblest of the Reformers of Hinduism would have reformed it out of
existence.
During this pre-Buddhistic era, much longer, perhaps, than is generally
supposed, another process of development was going on among one section
of the Semitic stock, in a small handbreadth of a land on the eastern
shore of the Mediterranean. The several stages of that development have
also been unconsciously recorded in a literature so peculiar in its
motive, and method, and character, as to separate it from the national
literatures of all the world. It is not that it claims to be inspired,
for the same claim is advanced by the Indian, and indeed by or for every
collection of religious writings extant; but while in the literature of
India we see represented the struggles of man to reach the Deity, that
of Palestine professes to represent the endeavour of Deity to reach and
to communicate with men. Intensely patriotic as a people, the sacred
literature of the Hebrews is essentially religious. Their historians are
not permitted to record, and the poets are not allowed to sing their own
national achievements, but only the mighty works and the praises of
Jehovah their God. The shame of their many defeats, and of their final
destruction, is ascribed always to their own sin, but any national
success or prosperity is due to the Divine favour. Alike through all
their victories and disasters, an Almighty Hand is acknowledged to be
shaping their destiny, and to be working out a purpose which, often
entirely hidden, and at best only very imperfectly understood by them,
is seen toward the close of their sad and eventful history, to
comprehend the larger destinies of mankind in a salvation of God which
“all the ends of the earth” were to see.
The relative antiquity of the Hebrew and Indian scriptures is not a
matter which we are called upon to discuss. It is possible that some
hymns in the Rig-Veda may be older than anything which we possess in the
Bible, but it is almost absolutely certain that most of the books of the
Hebrew Bible were in circulation as scriptures, and that the whole of it
was in the shape in which we have it now, before any ancient Indian
sacred book was reduced to writing. The Pentateuch, in the form in which
we have it now, is probably not the most ancient of the Hebrew writings.
It appears to be a very composite production, containing works of
different authors, written originally at different places and at
different times. The most destructive criticism, however, admits that it
embodies very ancient traditions—many of them not peculiar to the
Hebrews,—which were open to a succession of very talented narrators.
These traditions may indicate their derivation from a once common
ancestral home, or acquirement by later contact with foreign nations,
but they are in nowise incorporations; for in the Hebrew books they are
not only presented in forms far more refined, but they are employed to
suggest or to unfold a spiritual teaching quite beyond the capacity of
the peoples among whom it is alleged they originated. No one denies that
we have in the Pentateuch writings as old as the time of Moses, and
probably fragments of writings much older still. Ewald[103] ascribes an
important portion of it to the times of the later judges, another still
more important section to a priest of Solomon’s reign, and the Book of
Deuteronomy to the time of Hezekiah. Even if we are compelled to accept
later dates than these, it follows that they are older than any
Upanishad, or even any of the Brahmanas. There was a Law, a Book of the
Covenant, a Book of Origins, in currency probably before the authors of
any of the Brahmanas was born; and even if we are to regard the contents
of these works as only traditional, we may surely assume that the Hebrew
traditions are as credible as the Indian. It is quite true “that
religion exists long before it is expressed in a canon, and that law
runs and rules long before it is written in a code,”[104] but in regard
to accuracy neither suffers from being so definitely registered.
Hitherto the maxim affecting such matters has been, and for a long time
henceforth we may be certain it will be, not _litera locuta_, but
_litera scripta manet_.
Again, we are not called upon to maintain in this lecture the
chronological exactness or the historical faithfulness of the sacred
annals of Israel; all that is asserted is that in them we have as
faithful a mirror of the ages which they profess to reflect as we have
in the Indian. The characters in the scenes which they produce are
neither puppets nor shadows, but very living and substantial realities.
The personages at least are men whose idiosyncrasies are sharply but
naturally defined, and whose speech, and manners, and conduct, and
beliefs, accord wonderfully well with the places and the periods in
which they meet us. We have to examine the Hebrew annals however, not to
verify the details of ancient transactions which they record, but simply
to ascertain the beliefs which they contain and illustrate. The truth or
the error of these beliefs we need not discuss, for the beliefs
themselves are facts of great importance, and so are the consequences
that flowed from them; and when we compare these beliefs with those
which we have been considering, we will find a development parallel
indeed, but of an entirely different class of ideas or religious
thoughts.
In the Rig-Veda we have reflected the immigration of a higher race into
what has been called the Holy Land of India. The Rig-Veda dates from
about the times of the Exodus or the invasion of the Holy Land of
Palestine. The Hebrew traditions, like the Indian, tell of an earlier
immigration of their fathers into the same Palestine some five centuries
previous. When we examine the narratives in which this earlier
immigration is recorded, we find the patriarchs moving along among
similar conditions, but representing a much higher level of religious
thought than the Aryans when they reached the Ganges. Though everywhere
living among nature-worshippers, and though showing the taint of that
worship in their own conduct, their religion is neither that of
physiolatry nor idolatry.[105] Abraham was not a polytheist; he came out
of Ur of the Chaldees—whether that be a designation of a geographical
region or a description of a religious state—not as one who trembled
before the forces of Nature, afraid to inquire what they meant or whence
they came; not as one who had discovered behind them the Infinite Self,
out of which, because of ignorance or illusion, he and they had
emanated, but as a man who believed in a Personal Deity who had created
and continued to control them, and who, though El-Elion and Shaddai, yet
watched over and communicated with Abraham as his best of friends. We
need not ascribe to the patriarch an intelligence which he did not
possess. God may have been in his thought too much the almighty
Protector of himself and of his descendants—for in that age the family
of the chief would be all-important, and the idea even of the nation had
not yet germinated,—but that he apprehended God under a strictly moral
aspect is vouched for by his life, as the founder of a new epoch to
which his latest descendant looked back with thankfulness.[106] We may
not be able to prove that Abraham’s conception of Deity was monotheistic
in our conception of the word. It lacked the sublimity of Isaiah’s
conception and the definiteness of that of Moses. There was naturally a
great deal of darkness clinging about it, but his ideas of duty and
religion and worship were far higher than entered the thoughts of a
Vedic or Brahmanic sage. The rite of Blood Covenant, universal in the
Semitic tribes, he felt divinely impelled to offer Godward; and the same
impulse is said to have led him to offer in proof of his allegiance to
his unseen and almighty Friend the sacrifice of his only son. But there
was unmistakably imparted by Abraham to the ancient rite of circumcision
a far higher and more spiritual idea, and it is noteworthy that while
the spiritual part of his awful sacrifice was accepted, the slaying of
the son was rejected, with the effect of stamping, in the very morning
of Hebrew history, the Divine abhorrence upon that form of propitiation
to which the unrestrained instinct of man has everywhere been prone. His
worship, his sacrifice, his whole service, instead of being regarded as
a means of making Deity serviceable to man, or of raising man to the
comfortable condition of Deity, meant the surrender of the heart and of
the whole life to His will, not as only mightier, but juster and more
merciful than he was himself, and therefore perfectly worthy of trust
and love. And so it is plain that whether the patriarchs represent a
race fallen because of sin, from purer knowledge and more intimate
communion with God, or one providentially educated from the very lowest
animalism, they indicate a religious stage to which the greatest things
became possible. They are stammering at least the glorious Name,
comprised in three letters, whose significance millennial ages of study
can never exhaust. They believe in God, who, behind and beyond Nature,
and greater than it, is revealing Himself as one infinitely worthy of
their allegiance and adoration, and their faith becomes righteousness.
When we reach the Mosaic period we find that though clouds and darkness
are round the throne of the Eternal, the light that streams from it into
the minds of men reveals, just more clearly, the same one living and
true God. According to the Book of Origins, a period of four hundred and
eighty years separated the patriarchal from the Mosaic age, and during
that period the Hebrew tribes had first been sheltered, and then for
long enslaved, by the most civilised of all peoples in the ancient
world. Astonished by the grandeur of Egypt, they at last succumbed to
its religion; and while oppression in the pent-up Egyptian cities
deteriorated fearfully their physical condition, slavery and idolatry
wrought with terrible effect upon their character. They came out of
Egypt a cowardly horde, leprous in body, childish and brutish in their
disposition. Their children however entered Palestine, more than a
generation after, a powerful and consolidated and victorious force,
whose fear was upon all the surrounding tribes; and their annals ascribe
all this to revival and reformation due to Divine revelation and
training under the plastic genius of one of Egypt’s wisest men, and one
of the greatest prophets of the human race.
The oldest Hebrew historian states that Moses wrote two tables of the
Covenant, and one entire, though small, Book of Laws besides; and though
it were proved to universal satisfaction that he never wrote anything
else than the Ten Words, and the preface[107]: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord
our God is one,” it will be admitted that no one in all the old world
has ever contributed more than he did to man’s stock of the highest of
all knowledge. The truth communicated by the patriarchs in the word
Creator was of supreme moment and promise for the human race, for by it
man was saved from the sin and folly of confounding the Deity with His
works. The idea of a Creator occurs indeed in the Vedas,[108] but not as
an idea that ever got hold of the popular mind, or ever ripened into the
conception of Creator which we have in the Bible. The Brahman expounders
of Vedic thought made deity the sum of all that is, a being that is ever
becoming, a universe that is never completed. The Hebrew, on the
contrary, conceived of the universe as God’s work—not God. It was but a
part of His ways, and as nothing before Him. In the Indian creed
emanation continues indefinitely, and their sacred books record a
never-ending genesis. In the Hebrew Bible two pages suffice to relate
the genesis of the world and man. Between the deities of the Vedas and
the Jehovah of Moses there is no natural progression, and we never in
any series, however prolonged, can reach from the one to the other. The
Indian deities are simply one with Nature, and like its forces they are
multitudinous, capricious, evanescent; but the Deity of Moses is One,
Supreme, Invisible, not to be likened to anything we can see or
hear—eternal as One who alone is, and causes to be: “I Am that I Am!”
The effect of such a belief was to raise all men who learned of Moses
above the worship and tyranny of Nature, before which so many of the
tribes of mankind have prostrated themselves. It made them regard the
animal creation especially as existing not for their adoration but for
their use; and Nature itself and all its forces as powers to be studied,
subdued, and governed. The germs of man’s faith in his own
imperishableness, implanted from the first, began to sprout the moment
he found himself capable of knowing and serving this Eternal and
Invisible One as the Author and Controller of his being.
Comparisons are often instituted between the Mosaic ethical code and
that of other religions, with the view of showing that there is nothing
peculiar in it, and that instead of being fuller it appears to be even
defective when placed side by side with some of them. The peculiarity of
the Mosaic code is in its first table, which nearly all the others lack.
The Mosaic is an interpretation of the law written in men’s hearts by
the light of religion: it is the manifestation of religious truth as the
real foundation of ethics. Morality has so long been associated with
religion in our thought that we speak at times as if it had been always
so; but among no ancient people, save among the Hebrews, did any
worshipper expect morality from their deities. On the contrary, they
conceived of them as having all their own appetites and passions and
vices, so that as civilisation advanced men were often far nobler and
purer than the gods which they worshipped. When we remember that
physiolatry, from its lowest to its highest form, tolerates and even
consecrates the vilest impurities by its worship, we can realise what a
new and creative power was communicated when the conviction had laid
hold of man that Deity is one who is Himself all that man ought to be,
one who can only be propitiated by righteousness and appeased by truth.
Human progress became not only possible then, but it was secured. So
pure an idea of God meant a loftier idea of man. It involved the poorest
and the humblest of men in vast responsibilities, and therefore it
implied for them rights and dignities equal to those of the highest of
men; for the supreme all-holy Lord God was no respecter of persons, and
the beggar on the dunghill was in His eyes as precious as the prince
upon the throne.[109]
From the period when Vedic speculation first began its course to that in
which it produced its earliest Upanishad, these moral and spiritual
truths were not kept secret among the philosophic few, but were
prophesied in the gates and streets of every Hebrew city. No one can say
that they were thankfully received and loyally obeyed by the people of
Israel; on the contrary, their whole history represents the struggle of
a stubborn and rebellious race against a revelation too pure and
spiritual to be acceptable to them. Their religion was always higher
than themselves, but while towering above them, it perpetually hovered
round them, contradicting their most cherished inclinations, and
condemning their most deeply rooted habits. The invisible God, of whom
no likeness was to be tolerated, who was not to be worshipped even in
the greatest of His works, was too far removed from their sympathies. It
took centuries of severe handling to uproot their strong tendency to
Nature-worship; yea, the Divine detestation of it had to be branded in
the national conscience by their final overthrow. Eventually, however,
the truth got rooted in the mind of a “remnant” of them that God is not
to be worshipped under any symbol, and cannot be enshrined in temples
made with hands; that the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him; that in
gifts and offerings He takes no pleasure, but that He dwells with the
meek and lowly, and finds a pleasing sacrifice in the contrite spirit
and broken heart. The divinity of the revelation seems attested by the
fact that it continued all throughout their history above them, rebuking
and condemning, but never suffering them altogether to fall away from
it. And this is still its relation to ourselves: it is a creed
contradicting our life, a Divine law in direct opposition to all that
claims to be popular; for where even yet is the Christian who can be
said fully to realise all that is summed up in the truth, “God is not to
be worshipped by man as though He needed anything;” “God is a spirit,
and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth”?
The universality as well as the purity and spirituality of this
fundamental article of the Hebrew faith separates it from and elevates
it above the Indian beliefs. Nature-worship has always been local and
ethnic in its range; the gods of the hills are not the gods of the
valleys, and the deities of Assyria command no reverence in Egypt. To
the Hebrew was first communicated the catholic faith that the one Lord
over all is rich in mercy unto all. The treasure was received, it is
true, in an earthen vessel, by a people who could only apprehend as
children what we are expected to hold in the comprehensions of men.[110]
In patriarchal times by the people generally the One Lord was conceived
of too much as just the protector of the family. In Mosaic times the
great and terrible God who avenged Himself on Egypt was thought of too
much as the champion of the tribes. Under David and the kings He was too
much the sovereign of the nation and of the Holy Land; and so it was
down to the times of the Captivity. All throughout this period, however,
there were perpetual protests against this attempt to ethnicise a faith
essentially catholic. They were reminded that the Holy One was Lord over
all the earth; that though they were a peculiar people, they were not
His only people. The prophets of other nations were brought to testify
to them; their own prophets were sent to warn the heathen that they
should not die. All through their history they were admonished that
their gift was too large for their little nation to contain; that it was
theirs only in proportion as it was imparted or shared, and that as a
nation they could only exist if all nations were blessed in them.
Alas however for them, all this seemed in vain in its effect upon the
nation at large; the treasure was forgotten in their estimate of the
vessel; their own destiny loomed largest in their conceptions of
Providence. It was not the holy Lord God who was to have universal
dominion, but they His favourites, and therefore their king would reign
over all lands and keep his feet on the neck of their foes. Out of this
fatal error, and out of the childish superstition akin to it, that
material prosperity was the sole or chief reward of devotion, came all
their unbelief and apostasy, and so when the succession of prophets had
in vain testified to them that the Lord alone was to be exalted—that
before Him, not before them, must all peoples bow,—the threatenings long
uttered were fulfilled: the nation was shattered, its palladium, the
temple, was destroyed, and they were driven beyond the Euphrates.
Then however ensued a course of events which must be regarded as among
the greatest surprises of history; for just when they and their religion
might have been expected to vanish as completely as the ten tribes
previously deported had vanished, they are found to be preserved; and
the worship of Jehovah, instead of being extinguished by the dominant
worship of Babylon, is seen to emerge in the course of two generations
more vigorous and considerably purer than ever it had been before. It
was during the Exile that the real nature of the religion of Israel, as
one adapted and destined to enlighten and sanctify far more than a
single people, began to be truly discerned.[111] The Jewish people had a
great deal to learn from Babylon and Persia, and they returned to their
own land with clearer conceptions of immortality, the resurrection, the
spiritual world and judgment to come, than any of their forefathers had
gained. Scholars, however, who enlarge upon their indebtedness to their
conquerors, seem to forget how much they had to communicate to them. In
the psalms of the pre-Exilian period, and in the doctrines of Moses and
the prophets, they carried with them a treasure richer than the whole
wisdom of the East. So though they learned much from Babylon, they also
learned in it to appreciate the gifts which they had previously
despised. Sorrow and penitence helped to clear their spiritual vision,
and prepared them for the prophecies of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah.
They learned that though banished from the Holy Land they were not
thereby cast out—as their fathers imagined—from the presence of Jehovah;
that, though the temple had been destroyed and sacrifice had been
suspended, God could still be worshipped with sincerity and truth. The
teachings of their prophets brought home with conviction to them the
oracles of their earlier seers, that obedience was better than
sacrifice, and contrition than sin-offering,—“that he that doeth
repentance, it is imputed to him as if he went to Jerusalem, built a
temple and altar, and wrought all the sacrifices of the law.”[112]
With the destruction of the temple there arose the synagogue, which,
with its reading of the Law and the Prophets, its chanting of the
Psalms, its offering of prayer, and the giving heed to the voices of the
elders, represented a far higher and more spiritual service than temple
courts reeking with sacrifices and steaming with incense. It is true
that they were still fascinated by the material splendours of the former
days; for after their return they restored Jerusalem, rebuilt the
temple, and re-appointed its services. A revival led to a reformation,
which, following the old lines as closely as possible, assumed the form
of a retrogression rather than advance. The new energies of the nation
were repressed by a Levitical domination as rigid and intolerant as
Brahmanism ever was in India. It was not the spirit of the Living God
but the hand of the long dead Moses that was to rule their conscience
and mould their history. The consequence was just what might have been
anticipated. Human nature revolted from subjugation to a system which
had served its day. Religion, where it was earnest, stiffened into
formalism, and formalism in many cases congealed into hypocrisy, and, as
inevitably happens, intellect raised its protest against this
irreligious religion in many anti-religious and even atheistic forms.
Meanwhile synagogues rose all over the land, promoting doctrine rather
than ritual, stimulating rather than repressing discussion, and thus
conserving and propagating the truths that prepared the ways of the
Lord. Only a handful however, had returned; the majority of the exiles
prospered and multiplied, and, unlike the ten tribes, were not absorbed
among the Gentiles. At the beginning of the Christian era, for one Jew
living in Palestine there would be a hundred living beyond it, not only
in Babylonia, but in Greece, and Egypt, and Italy, and all over the
Empire. There were many Jews in Spain, in Britain, and in the dark
territories beyond the Danube; and though they adapted themselves to
foreign ways, and became all things to all men, in regard to their
religion and their intimate connection with Jerusalem they still
continued to be Jews.[113] As their nationality declined their faith
arose. By and by, not content with the heathen toleration for their
religion as only one of the many in the world, they began to spread it
abroad. Judaism, with the temple and the Levitical law, would in
Palestine eventually have petrified, but the Diaspora, with the
Synagogue and the Septuagint, enabled Israel to play their proper parts
as the religious teachers of mankind. Proselytism gradually became very
vigorous and successful; devout men and women everywhere, unable to find
peace of conscience in the intoxicating and demoralising rites of Pagan
temples, turned from them to take hold of the skirts of the man who was
a Jew. In a manner and to an extent which even the youthful Isaiah never
could have dreamed, Jerusalem began to attract out of every nation under
heaven the kind of people who were found in its streets at
Pentecost,—Parthians and Medes, and dwellers in Pontus and Arabia, and
the eunuch of far distant Ethiopia.[114]
As we have noticed the highest outcome of Vedic thought in pursuit of
Atman, let us also notice the highest development of Hebrew belief in
their hope of Messiah, whose germs are traceable in their faith from the
first. For example, one of the earliest and most lasting effects of
their conception of Deity was the conviction of their own unworthiness
and inability to live in the presence of the holy God. Though they were
to be a kingdom of priests for other nations, they dared not enter into
the relationship which priest implied. They required a mediator like
Moses, who could speak to the Holy One for them, and receive for them
His message. Their whole worship was based on this feeling, and the
purer and higher rose their conceptions of God, the more intense became
their self-abasement. Between Him and the noblest of His creatures there
was an impassable gulf. Though He was far, far off from them, He was far
too near—so near that they could not go anywhither from His presence,
and yet in their dread there was a yearning to come near to Him and to
see Him face to face. The Brahman aspired to lose himself in the
Absolute, in the pure light of characterless knowledge; the Hebrew,
mastered by the personality of God, longed to see Him as He is. And
never more earnest was this longing in the Hebrew to behold the beauty
of the Lord, and to be satisfied with His likeness, than in the times of
his deepest self-humiliation and keenest contrition. “I pray Thee,
pardon the _iniquity_ of Thy people;” “I beseech Thee, show us Thy
_glory_;” “and these two pangs so counter and so keen,” shame and
reverence akin to dread, aspiring love, were to prove not only the
purification of their own faith, but the birth-throe of a better hope
for the world.
For their dread and shame sprang from their consciousness of their own
evil, and their aspiration from an instinct which whispered that evil,
though deeply ingrained in, was not essential to the being of man. Their
sense of sin was very poignant, more so than in the case of any other
people. The Hindus had a conception of merit, but a very poor and weak
conception of sin. They were more impressed by life’s suffering than by
the taint of which it was only the consequence. But the Hebrews felt the
shame and the curse of that taint as no people ever felt it. They had
quite a vocabulary to express the many shades and degrees of the feeling
of it; yet in their speculations they were led to believe that this
taint was not inherent in their nature nor ineradicable from it. There
was a time when sin was not; there might be a time when it would not be.
The dominion of evil was an interlude, and though terribly prolonged in
human experience, it might have an end. That was the central ideal of
the Fall which they pictured on the first page of their Bible, and
conserved in their seventh-day Sabbath.[115] In the fact of man’s
creation they felt that his redemption was involved, and so the Hebrew
dread of and longing for God were reconciled by a hope that though to
man belongeth shame, to God belongeth mercy as the God of salvation.
There was another and a better covenant than that which had been
concluded with their ancestors at Sinai, or with the first father of
their tribes long before. It was made not with Moses or Abraham for
Israel, but for all nations with a Divine Mediator, who, behind all that
was of man, though yet the seed of the woman, would, in a way that
neither Moses nor any of the prophets could understand, eventually make
an end of sin.
The history and the literature of the Hebrews would be a perplexing
enigma without this hope. Like their faith, it was too pure and
spiritual for them to receive, and to the very latest it always appears
with something of the defilement of their religious condition clinging
to it. During the Exile, however, this hope became purer and stronger,
and the imagery in which they embodied it became more evangelical and
spiritual than that employed by earlier poets and prophets. The section
of the Hebrews that returned to Palestine held it in increased strength,
but with the old national taint upon it. Their own restoration and the
favour of Persia kindled anew the foolish dreams of their ancestors,
and, alas! when Persia disappointed them, and its favour was supplanted
by oppression, and the kingdom, instead of rising Phœnix-like out of its
ashes, became the battlefield or the gage of foreign nations, there
broke out in Palestine the bitterest plague of unbelief and apostasy
that had ever assailed the nation. For idolatry, for overlaying or
corrupting the worship of Jehovah, their forefathers had often been
severely chastised, but no prophet had as yet complained of a temple
deserted and an altar defiled by unworthy offerings. And this was
because men professed to have discovered in the destruction of their
national hopes that after all religion was vain, and there was no profit
in serving God.
Any one who has intelligently read Malachi, or the sayings of Agur the
proverb-collector,[116] or the Book of Ecclesiastes, will see to what a
depth of scepticism, if not indeed of atheism, their perverted Messianic
hopes had brought the Jews of Palestine. We appreciate the criticism
which regards Coheleth, so alien to the healthy and joyous spirit of the
Hebrew religion, as the natural outgrowth of this period.[117] When
faith in Israel’s imperishable kingdom seemed to be completely wrecked,
when ministers of religion led the revolt from it, and unrighteous
rulers and corrupt society made life in Palestine, as in Rome in Nero’s
day, not worth the living, it is not to be wondered that this one which
has survived, but that “many books”[118] should have been written to
echo the cry, “All is vanity.” We may listen to it as a note of despair
from a pessimist in whose people religion had died, because disappointed
political ambition had shown them that “no earthly good” came of serving
God; or we may read it as the protest of some healthy-minded Jew against
that orthodox asceticism which after the Captivity invaded religion, and
led to the rise of Pharisaism and Essenism. In any case, it seems to
mark the proper close in Palestine of an age of national perverted faith
and hope. The Essenes like the Indian ascetics had hope neither for the
nation’s recovery nor for the establishment anywhere of a kingdom of
God. The Pharisees, on the contrary, had hope, but it was the old
political hope, and in them, though Egyptian and Syrian and Greek and
Roman had trodden the nation under foot, and though the Maccabees had
suffered and poured out their blood in vain, it seemed to grow stronger
and stronger. Ready to believe any impostor, and to rise at the faintest
call, their fanaticism more than once betrayed the people into
ineffectual and most sanguinary revolts; but it had one result that was
not wholly evil, for they drew after them the multitudes to the desert,
when the thunder of the Baptist’s cry reached Jerusalem, “The kingdom of
God is at hand.”[119]
So was it in Palestine; but among the Diaspora all over the Empire the
hope of Messiah assumed a purer and more catholic form. Everywhere it
was strong, but the broader horizons by which they were surrounded saved
them from the delusions which intoxicated the Palestinian Jew. In
classical literature there are tokens that it had filtered into Gentile
minds. It was undoubtedly vague and shadowy even at its brightest, but
in the Sibyl and Pollio its fulfilment signified something more
important than a successful revolution in Palestine. It meant mighty
changes impending that would bring good to all the world, the augury of
a star that would soon glimmer in the eastern horizon, and grow and
brighten till it would be seen to be not a light for Asia only, but the
Sun of Righteousness with healing in His beams for every nation under
heaven.
We have thus been following two lines of religious movement, perfectly
independent of each other, far apart geographically, still further apart
in the beliefs which inspired them. We have seen how the melody of joy
and health which the Indians brought with them from our common primeval
home ended in a sigh of despair. Individual existence, at first so full
of wonder and delight, lost soon its freshness and glory, and came to be
felt to be such a burden that emancipation from it by absorption into
the Absolute was hailed as a boon. The human mind, leaving its childhood
behind it, and advancing to question itself and the universe, after a
season of movement and sense of freedom and power, somehow lost or
missed the way. Oppressed in the toils of the jungle, and wandering ever
further from practical life as it proceeded, it lay down vanquished,
longing only to be at rest and in quiet as infants that never saw the
light.
The other line of development marks not the course of a speculation, but
the growth of a faith laying hold of mankind with creative and
transforming power. This faith, never dissociated from, but seeking to
dominate and reform actual life, condemned inertion, and fostered hope
for a race working out its salvation, because convinced that God is
working in them both to will and to do. We see a light streaming from
above into the darkness of man, paining and blinding at first the organs
which it seeks to purify. We see a struggle on the part of the creatures
to bring the Most High down to their level, and make Him their servant,
and a striving of the Divine Spirit to train them as children. We see a
mighty Hand laid ever on a peculiar people, at times so softly that they
hardly felt it, at times with conscious guiding and sustaining power; at
times chastising them sorely by the sword of the enemy and the
heart-hunger of exile, but never giving them over unto death. Not for
forty years, but for twice forty generations we see Him leading and
humbling and proving them, till in the souls of the aptest—though only
“a remnant” of them—He had rooted ideals of human destiny which never
can perish. Then, that all might be ready in the fulness of time, He
scattered them among the nations, and lo! when required they are
everywhere, crying in the crowded capitals of the East and of the West,
in the darkness of the North and the brightness of the South, “Prepare
ye in the desert an highway for the Lord.”
Footnote 62:
Introduction to _Le Bouddha et sa Religion_; Paris, 1858.
Footnote 63:
Müller, Introd. to _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. i. p. xxi.
Footnote 64:
A. Burnell, _Indian Antiq._, 1880, p. 223, quoted by Prof. Max Müller
in Introduction to vol. x. of _Sacred Books of the East_, p. xi.
Footnote 65:
Frankfurter, Appendix to Wordsworth’s Bampton Lectures for 1881; _The
One Religion_, p. 340; Eitel _Lectures on Buddhism_, p. 44; Edkins,
_Chinese Buddhism_, p. 232.
Footnote 66:
Prof. Max Müller, Introduction to vol. i. of _Sacred Books of the
East_, p. xxvii.
Footnote 67:
A. E. Gough, _Philosophy of the Upanishads, etc._, p. 5; Trübner’s
Oriental Series.
Footnote 68:
This statement is hazarded, notwithstanding the recent reply of the
author of _Supernatural Religion_ to Bishop Lightfoot’s Essays. It
will be generally conceded that he has adopted an untenable position,
and that, though his rejoinder to the learned Bishop may be a vigorous
assault, it is weak criticism. Sanday’s work on _The Gospels in the
Second Century_ is on the whole a better reply than the Bishop’s to
the allegations of the author of _Supernatural Religion_, whose
extreme scepticism of literary evidence is quite equalled by his
dogmatic extravagance of statement.
Footnote 69:
_Vie de Jésus_, Introd. pp. xv, xvii, 4th ed.; Paris, 1863.
Footnote 70:
_Science de Religions_, pp. 12, 20.
Footnote 71:
Professor Max Müller, Introd. to Dhammapada, _Sacred Books of the
East_, vol. x. p. x.
Footnote 72:
_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xiii. p. 37; Introd., vol. xi. p. xx.
Footnote 73:
Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 27.
Footnote 74:
Mahavansa, by Turnour; Dipavansa, xx. 20, quoted by Professor Max
Müller in _Sacred Books of the East_, vols. x. p. xxiv, and xiii. p.
xxxv.
Footnote 75:
_Buddhist Birth Stories_, vol. i. p. lvii; Trübner’s Oriental Series.
Footnote 76: