ASIATIC CHRISTIANITY.
ABOO KESHUB CHUNDER SEN and the Dean of West-
minster are widely different persons, but they have one remark- able idea in common,—that Christianity may possibly have lost as much as it has gained by the Western types of thought which have been engrafted upon it, and that the Christian faith may yet prove to be susceptible of a new life in a more thoroughly Asiatic form than any which it has yet received. Nay, Mr. Martineau, of whose most remarkable speech at the meeting of Wednesday we regret to see as yet no kind of report, went even further, and hinted that the Oriental restoration of the Christian faith which he antici- pated might win new triumphs not only in the East, but in the West, and conduce greatly to that reconciliation between the intellect of man and the Spirit of God, of which under the in- fluence of the modern physical science there seems just at present to be so little prospect. And undoubtedly some vague hope and anticipation of this kind was at the bottom of half the enthu- siasm with which Keshub Chunder Sen was received on Wednesday. Nothing was more curious than the absolute coldness of the audience to the eloquent Hindoo's perfectly sincere loyalty when, after enu- merating the benefits England had conferred on India, he exclaimed, "These be thy trophies, Queen of many isles l" and the enthusiasm, on the other hand, with which he was received when he descanted on the vast doctrinal divergencies of the propagandist Christian Churches in India, asked which of all these dogmatic forms the poor Hindoos were expected to embrace, declared that they were " perplexed and confounded" by the confusion of tongues, and demanded to be left alone with the Bible,—product as it was of Asiatic inspiration,--to discover and elaborate a Christianity for India which should be native to the soil as well as faithful to the ideas of its founder. No doubt a part of this enthusiasm was due to the sharp criticism of English one-ideadness and puzzleheadedness which Euglish►neu so much relish, for the eloquent speaker's attack upon our genius for advertising, and the proficiency we have attained iu the art of puffing, was received with almost equal applause. There was even a blankness and despondency in the tone of the meeting while Mr. Sen descanted on England's services to India which disappeared the moment he began his attack upon us. But after full allowance for our national tastes in this respect, it seems to us perfectly evident that the deeper interests of the meeting of Wednesday were all gathered round one thought,—the possibility that Ilindoo genius might give to the teaching of the Bible, Jewish as well as Christian, if not a wholly new develop- ment, at least an interpretation so fresh in the relative proportion of weight to be attached to different parts of its teaching, that it might attain, in the hands of educated Hindoos, a perfectly new missionary force, and possibly even, a new missionary force for the West as well as the East,—not only for India, but for our own Eng- land where, checked by the rapidly growing importance of the indus- trial arts and of physical science, the influence of the Christian faith seems to have reached a stand-still, if it has not begun in some degree to recede. Indeed, it was with great regret we heard Mr. Sen say that he had come to study not the doctrines of the differ- ent sects of English and European Christians, but the different forms of Christian life here. How can he study the one without the other ? Surely there is nothing more ►narked in the present day than the chasm between the intellectual apprehensions of the universe and the cravings of the spirit after God ? If Mr. Sen is prepared to neglect the study of the pangs which the intellect of Europe so carefully, though involuntarily, inflicts upon its soul, be may, indeed, go back to India with a rich store of encouragement for himself and his Church in their very generous and wide moral eclecticism, but he will only prepare for India at some future time the same calamity from which we are now suffering in England, a divorce between its intellect and its faith. After all, there is no such thing as a religion of mere sentiment. Though some of us are doing our best to prove that it is possible, it remains impossible for ever to pray to a God without believing in Him, or to pray to Christ without believing that He hears and answers prayer. This proposal to study religious life without reli- gious belief is a proposal to study what does not, in the strictest sense, exist in any one, and what, so far as it does really exist, is a calamity. No doubt people can if they will, and do, evade the thinking part, and feed their religious life on assumptions which they more or less question. It is a feat in which we are very skil- ful in England just now. But whatever else Mr. Son does, we trust he is not going to set us a new example of that, and to encourage us in it by his theory. Let us have an Asiatic Theism, or if it may be so, an Asiatic Christianity from him and his fellow-labourers, and we shall be most grateful. But for God's sake let it not be one of those phases of religion of which we have more than enough already, in which we call upon 'sentiment' to do for us what we have abandoned the hope of doing with full conviction. There is a sort of tone sometimes apt to pervade uusectariau meetings like this "Welcome,"—observe, by the way, our marked tendency to be a little imbecile in the sentimentality of our emphatic words, in all meetings where tl►e object is to depreciate intellectual differ- ences,—that dogmas may be neither true nor false, but, like articles of dress, simply a matter of climate. Beau Stanley in his otherwise noble and glowing speech, seemed to us in some degree open to this criticism. Now, it is, of course, perfectly true that one nation has power to see and bring out a truth which another nation has uo such power to see and bring out ; but once brought out, any dogma is either true or false, and should be so treated. And while we look with as much hope as any of the speakers at this meeting to an Asiatic Theism or Christianity, it is not at all as a mere contribution to the prismatic colours of religious effect, that we indulge this hope, but in the trust that a new aspect pf religious truth for all men may come out of it. Mr. Martineau, who evidently held that if Asiatic Christianity
could do anything in India, it might be expected to do just as mach in England, was the only one of the speakers who seemed to us clearly to apprehend this. Mr. Sen himself, in eloquently expressing his desire to see an Asiatic faith fairly developed by Asia for herself, talked a little too much the eclectic language of some of his published lectures,—the language which makes doc- trine an almost unmeaning accident,—the language which obtains its climax in that which Faust says (in his worst moral phase, by the way) to Gretchen :—
" Call it what you will,
Happiness, Heart, Love, God, I have no name for it, Feeling is all in all,— Name but an earthly smoke, Darkening the glow of Heaven."
Not, of course, that we in the least attribute any of this deliberate depreciation of the religious work of the intellect to Mr. Sen.
Only his professed indifference to the intellectual forms of English Christianity, and his apparent hope that Asiatic Christianity may have an indigenous flavour which is to spring from the soil rather than from the Hindoo power to discover aspects of truth at pre- sent hidden from Europeans, and which is, moreover, to keep the forms of European dogma at arm's length,—seems to point a little too much in the direction of this danger.
But in what directiou may we look for a new aspect of truth
from an Asiatic Church, whether of Theists or, if it should so prove, of Christians ? Of course, if we could distinctly see the direction and recognize our own failure, we should hardly need an Asiatic
religious community to set us right. But this much at least is evident,—that the East has a great deal more of the original patience and lowliness of spirit in which Christ founded His Church than the 1Vcst, and of all those intellectual qualities which spring out of them.
The East can brood and burn and bend, where the West only fidgets and chafes and fights. The depth of feeling which made it so easy for one of the apostles, or ic may be some later disciple, to answer the despairing cry, " Where is the promise of His coming, for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation ?" with the calm words, " Beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise as some men count slackness, but is long-suffering,"--the spirit of that answer, we say, coming from the heart of a genuinely disappointed hope, is not of the West, but of the East. The spirit that meets disappointment with new faith, that meets an array of hostile facts with beaded head, the spirit delineated in the lines,—
" The East bowed low before the blast, In patient, deep disdain,
Sho lot tho legions thunder past, Then plunged in thought again,"
is surely not one without bearing even on the intellectual apprehension of a true religious philosophy and faith. Let us give one simple illustration of what we mean. Keshub Chunder Sen, in the most beautiful passage of his published lectures,—a passage in the lecture on regeneration,—has illus- trated Christ's meaning in comparing the regenerate heart to that of a child, from children's complete inaccessibility to worldly and artificial estimates of thiugs,—from the fact, for instance, that they will "sport with riches as with toys," that they are " unaffected and unsullied amid all that we call temptation." " You can never tempt a child " [of course Mr. Sen means by temptations which are inappropriate to its age], " sin has no power over its innocent nature ;" and his drift is, of course, that, with perfect knowledge,—that spiritual knowledge which includes God,—the same state of mind comes back ; the riches, though we know what they mean, mean as little compared with the love of God as they did to the child who played with them as with toys ; temptation has lost its relative power as completely as over the child for whom it had no meaning ; the inward spiritual knowledge has so eaten out the superficial attraction that the latter, relatively at least, has disappeared. Now, suppose the Eastern Church to make such a conception as this, as it were visible to us, by producing a type of goodness so inward, so full of brooding fire, so strong in its weakness, so imagi- native in its indifference to the temptations of the world, so utterly unable to institute any serious comparison between a splendid temptation and the love of God, that the moral miracles of the first days of Christianity, when ' the weak things of the world confounded the mighty,' seemed to return. Would that have no effect on the intellect of Europe and the canons of moral and spiritual evidence ? Suppose for a moment we had a Christian Church able to enter with so much passion into the very essence of our Lord's passion, as to be visibly able, in moments of trial, to say with Him, "Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour,' yet for this cause came I to this hour ; 'Father, glorify Thy name,"---would such a spirit,—Oriental, by the way, as well as divine, in its very essence, for the Western mind is hardly capable of believing that any hour of trouble comes upon it for any purpose but that of being either strenuously resisted or vehemently conjured to depart,—have no effect, shall we suppose, on the philosophy of the age? What importance would the most irrefragable proof of the Darwinian theory have in the face of such faith as that ? Why do men visibly shudder when the horse is shown to be descended from the hipparion in the "upper Miocene," and the hipparion again from that anchitherium in the lower Miocene which had three toes, instead of the single hoof of its descendant ? Because,— by " natural selection," apparently, or unnatural selection, perhaps,—the force of divine influence has so dwindled in this gritty and advertising and puffing life of ours, on which Mr. Sen complimented us, that every sign which Nature makes to us tends to obliterate our small reserve of accessibility to the signs of God. A Church really able to live in God, a Church incapable of being hustled, and bustled, and tempted, and telegraphed, and dined, and feted, and advertised out of its tranquil communion with God and its depth of life in Elia perfection, would, we venture to think, tend to revolutionize the laws of evidence on spiritual things, no less than to do a good deal towards revolu- tionizing the laws of earthly life. Will Keshub Chunder Sen help us, no less than his own people, to such an Asiatic type of strength in weakness as this? If he does, he will after all have taught us a great deal more than he has much chance of learning from us. But let him not suppose that he can teach us even this much, without studying the thoughts as well as the hearts of religious Englishmen.
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