“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men
unto myself.”
—ST. JOHN’S GOSPEL, xii. 32.
Interesting phases of that divided mind—homage to Christ, resentment towards His disciples—may be found on opposite sides of the great continent of India. In Bengal, a not-infrequent standpoint of Brāhmas in reference to Christ is that they are the true exponents of Christ’s spirit and His teaching. Western Christian teachers, they say, are hidebound by tradition; and the ready-made rigidity of the creeds of the Churches is no doubt a factor in the state of mind we are describing. Looking back as far as to 1820, we see in The Precepts of Jesus, published by the founder of the Brāhma Samāj, that standpoint of homage to Christ and dissent from accepted views regarding Him. Illustrative of that Brāhma standpoint, we have also the more recent book, The Oriental Christ, by the late Mr. P.C. Mozumdar, the successor of Keshub Chunder Sen. But the attitude is by no means limited to Brahmas. “Without Christian dogmas, cannot a man equally love and revere Christ?” was a representative question put by a senior Hindu student in Bengal to his missionary professor. In South India, Mahomedans sometimes actually describe themselves as better Christians than ourselves, holding as they do such faith in Jesus and His mother Mary and His Gospel. The case of Mahomedans is not, of course, on all fours with that of Hindus, since Mahomedans reckon Christ as one of the four prophets along with their own Mahomed. In Bombay province, on the other side of India from Bengal, we find Mr. Malabari, the famous Parsee, pupil of a Mission School, doubting if it is possible for the Englishman to be a Christian in the sense of Christ’s Christianity, the implication being that an Indian may. What element of truth is there in the idea, we may well ask? From Indian Christians, be it said, we may indeed look for a fervency of loyalty to Christ that does not enter into our calculating moderate souls; and from India, equally, we may look for that mystically profound commentary on St. John’s Gospel which Bishop Westcott declared he looked for from Japan. But to return. About Mr. Malabar! himself, his biographer writes: “If he could not accept the dogmas of Christianity, he had imbibed its true spirit,” meaning the spirit of Christ Himself. “The cult of the Asiatic life” is the latest definition of Christianity given by a recent apologist of Hinduism, one of a small company of Europeans in India officering the Hindu revival. Crossing India again and going south, we find the late Dr. John Murdoch, of Madras, an eminent observer, adding his testimony regarding the homage paid to the Founder of Christianity. “The most hopeful sign,” he writes, “is the increasing reverence for our Lord, although His divinity is not yet acknowledged.” [98] And of new India generally, again, we may quote Mr. Bose, the Indian historian. “The Christianity [of North-western Europe] is no more like Christianity as preached by Christ than the Buddhism of the Thibetans is like Buddhism as preached by Gautama.” Take finally the following sentences from a recent number of a moderate neo-Hindu organ, the Hindustan Review (vol. viii. 514): “Christ, the great exemplar of practical morality …; the more one enters into the true spirit of Christ, the more will he reject Christianity as it prevails in the world to-day. The Indians have been gainers not losers by rejecting Christianity for the sake of Christ.” [99]
Another phase of that same divided mind, acknowledging Christ and resenting Indian discipleship, may be perceived in the willingness to discover Christian ideas in Hindu Scriptures, and Christ-like features in Hindu deities and religious heroes. To express it from the Indian standpoint,—they see Christ and Christianity bringing back much of their own “refined and modernised.” In a sense, as a Bengali Christian gentleman put it, Christ and Christianity have become the accepted standards in religion. [100] Again we quote from the same page of the Hindustan Review: “A revival of Hinduism has taken place…. It [Christianity] has given us Christ, and given us noble moral and spiritual lessons, which we have discovered anew in our own Scriptures, and thereby satisfied our self-love and made our very own.” We have mentioned how missionaries used to find the doctrine of the atonement in the name of the Indian God Hari; the argument has now in turn been annexed by Hindus, and employed as an argument in their favour. Within the last twenty years, there has been a great revival of the honouring of Krishna among the educated classes in Bengal and the United Provinces. Krishna has set up distinctly as the Indian Christ, or as the Indian figure to be set up over against Christ. A Krishna story has been disentangled from the gross mythology, and he has become a paragon of virtue,—the work of a distinguished Bengali novelist. I mean no sarcasm. From the sermon of a Hindu preacher in a garden in Calcutta in 1898, I quote: “The same God came into the world as the Krishna of India and the Krishna of Jerusalem.” These are his words. From the catalogue of the Neo-Krishnaite literature in Bengal, given by Mr. J.N. Farquhar of the Y.M.C.A., Calcutta, it appears that since 1884 thirteen Lives of Krishna or works on Krishna have appeared in Bengal. Many essays have appeared comparing Krishna with Christ. There have been likewise many editions of the Bhagabat Gita, or Divine Song, the episode in the Mahabharat, in which Krishna figures as religious teacher. It may be called the New Testament of the Neo-Krishnaite. Perhaps the most striking of these Neo-Krishnaite publications is The Imitation of Sri-Krishna, a daily-text book containing extracts from the Bhagabat Gita and the Bhagabat Puran. The title is, of course, a manifest echo of “The Imitation of Christ,” which is a favourite with religious-minded Hindus. The Imitation of Buddha, likewise we may observe, has been published. About “The Imitation of Christ” itself, we quote from a Hindu’s advertisement appended to the life of a new Hindu saint, Ramkrishna Paramhansa. “The reader of ‘The Imitation of Christ,’” it says, “will find echoed in it hundreds of sayings of our Lord Sri-Krishna in the Bhagabat Gita like the following: ‘Give up all religious work and come to me as thy sole refuge, and I will deliver thee from all manner of sin.’” The notice goes on: “The book has found its way into the pockets of many orthodox Hindus.”
From Krishna we turn to Chaitanya, surname Gauranga, the fair, a religious teacher of Bengal in the fifteenth century, who is also being set up as the Christ of Bengal, in that he preached the equality of men before God and ecstatic devotion to the god Krishna. A Christ-like man, indeed, in many ways, Chaitanya was, and the increased acquaintance of educated Bengal with Jesus Christ naturally brought Chaitanya to the front. The new cult of Chaitanya and his enthronement over against Jesus Christ are manifest in the titles of two recent publications in Bengal, the first entitled, Lord Gauranga, or Salvation for all, and the other, Chaitanya’s Message of Love. Chaitanya and his two chief followers, it should be said, were called the great lords (prabhus) of the sect, but the title “Lord Gauranga” is quite new, an echo of the title of Jesus Christ. With regard to the new power of Christ’s personality, it should be noted that the author of Lord Gauranga strongly deprecates the idea that his desire is to demolish Christianity, or other than to extend the kingdom of Jesus Christ. He declares that Jesus Christ is as much a prophet as any avatar of the Hindus, and that Hindus can and ought to accept him as they do Krishna or Chaitanya. This is in accord with the spirit of Hinduism—namely, the fluidity of doctrine, and the free choice of guru or religious teacher, as set forth in a previous chapter—although it is still an advanced position for a Hindu to take up publicly.
Could we observe the course of evolution down which a species of animals or plants has come from some remote ancestry to their present form, with what interest would we note the specific characteristics gathering strength, as from generation to generation they prove their “fitness to survive”! The whole onward career of the evolving species would seem to have been aimed at the latest form in which we find it. Yet quite as wonderful phenomena as the species that has survived are the many variations of the species that have presented themselves, but have not proved fit to survive. One species only survives for hundreds of would-be collaterals that are extinct. The religious evolution that we have been observing is the growing power of Christ’s personality in New India; and now, as further testimony to its power, a number of collateral movements, similarly inspired yet eccentric and hardly likely to endure, attract our attention. In these eccentric movements the power of Christ’s personality is manifest, and yet it appears amid circumstances so peculiar that the phenomena in themselves are grotesque.
Three of these strange movements let us look at as new evidence of the power of Christ’s personality in India. All three occur in still another province than those named, the Punjab, a province sui generis in many ways. Within a generation past, at least two men have arisen, either claiming to be Christ Himself come again, or a Messiah superior to Him. A third received a vision of “Jesus God,” and proclaimed Him, wherever he went, as an object of worship. Of the first of the three leaders, Sir Alfred Lyall tells us, one Hakim Singh, “who listened to missionaries until he not only accepted the whole Christian dogma, but conceived himself to be the second embodiment [of Christ], and proclaimed himself as such and summoned the missionaries to acknowledge him.” It sounds much like blasphemy, or mere lunacy; but in India one learns not to be shocked at what in Europe would be rankest blasphemy; the intention must decide the innocence or the offence. Hakim Singh “professed to work miracles, preached pure morality, but also venerated the cow,”—strange chequer of Hindu and Christian ideas. [101] The second case is the better known one of Mirzā Gholām Ahmad, of Qādiān, who sets up a claim to be “the Similitude of the Messiah” and “the Messiah of the Twentieth Century.” As his name shows, he is a Mahomedan, but the assumption of the name “Messiah” also shows that it is in Christ’s place he declares himself to stand. At the same time, his appeal is to his fellow-Mahomedans; for he explains that as Jesus was the Messiah of Moses, he himself is the Messiah of Mahomed. His superiority to Christ, he expressly declares. ” I shall be guilty of concealing the truth,” he says in his English monthly, the Review of Religions, of May 1902, “if I do not assert that the prophecies which God Almighty has granted me are of a far better quality in clearness, force, and truth than the ambiguous predictions of Jesus…. But notwithstanding all this superiority, I cannot assert Divinity or Sonship of God.” He claims “to have been sent by God to reform the true religion of God, now corrupted by Jews, Christians, and Mahomedans.” Doubly blasphemous as his claims sound in the ears of orthodox Mahomedans, who reckon both Christ and Mahomed as prophets, his sect is now estimated to number at least 10,000, including many educated Mahomedans. Whatever its fate—a mere comet or a new planet in the Indian sky—it indicates the religious stirring of educated India in another province, and the prominence of Christ’s personality therein. Mirzā Gholām Ahmad himself recommends the reading of the Gospels. As to Christ’s death, Mirzā Gholām Ahmad has a theory of his own. The Koran declares, according to Mahomedan expositors, that it was not Christ who suffered on the cross, but another in His likeness. Mirzā Gholām Ahmad teaches that Jesus was crucified but did not die, that He was restored to life by His disciples and sent out of the country, whence He travelled East until He reached Thibet, eventually arriving at Cashmere, where He died, His tomb being located in the city of Srinagar. [102] According to the latest report of this reincarnation, he now claims to be at once Krishna come again for Hindus, Mahomed for Mahomedans, and Christ for Christians.
The third movement is that of the Chet Ramis, or sect of Chet Ram, whose strange history may be found in East and West for July 1905. Chet Ram was an illiterate Hindu, a water-carrier and then a steward in the Indian army that took part in the war with China in 1859-1860. Returning to his native district not far from Lahore, Chet Ram, the Hindu, came under the spell of a Mahomedan ascetic Mahbub Shāh, left all and followed him as his “familiar” disciple. How this relationship between Hindu and Mahomedanism is quite possible in India, we have already explained on pages 163-4; Mahbub Shāh’s strange combination of religious asceticism with the consumption of opium and wine, it takes some years’ residence in India to understand. Then Mahbub Shāh died, and the disciple succeeded the master. According to one account, Chet Ram made his bed on the grave in which his master lay; according to another, for three years his sleeping place was the vault within which his master was buried. It was at this time that he had the vision of “Jesus God,” already referred to, between the years 1860 and 1865. Like Caedmon, he has described his vision in verse—“Upon the grave of Master Mahbub Shah
Slept Sain Chet Earn.
A man came in a glorious form,
Showing a face of mercy.
Sweet was his speech and simple his face,
Appearing entirely as the image of God.
He called aloud, ‘Who sleeps there?
Awake, if thou art sleeping.
Thou art distinctly fortunate,
Thou art needed in the Master’s presence.’
‘Build a church on this very spot,
Place the Bible therein.’
Then said that luminous form,
Jesus, the image of Mary:
‘I shall do justice in earth and heaven,
And reveal the hidden mysteries.’
Astonished there alone I stood,
As if a parrot had flown out of my hands.
Then my soul realised
That Jesus came to give salvation.
I realised that it was Jesus God
Who appeared in a bodily form.” [103]
Whence came the Christian seed of Chet Ram’s vision? His master Mahbub Shah was a Mahomedan, and Jesus Christ is reckoned one of the Mahomedan prophets. But it is the Christ of Christianity, not of Mahomedanism, that Chet Ram saw in his vision of the glorious form showing the face of mercy, at once the dispenser of justice, the revealer of mysteries, and the giver of salvation. Whatever the source of the vision, Chet Ram saw and believed and began to hold up Jesus Christ before other men’s eyes, and Chet Ram himself thus became the guru or religious teacher of what may be called an indigenous Christian Church. A moderate estimate reckons the Chet Ramis at about five thousand souls, the religious force of the sect being represented by the Chet Rami ascetics, who go about making their gospel known and living on alms. Chet Ram himself died in 1894, and at the headquarters of the sect at Buchhoke, near Lahore, his ashes and the bones of his master Mahbub Shah are kept in two coffins, which the faithful visit, particularly on certain Chet Rami holy-days, on which fairs are held. In keeping with the command of the vision, several copies of the New Testament and one complete Bible were also on view when the writer of the article in East and West visited the sanctuary in 1903. The Census Report for 1901 sums the Chet Ramis up by saying that “the sect professes a worship of Christ,” and that is our present point of view. But we cannot leave them without noticing also how Indian they are in their unwillingness to define their thought, and in their readiness to enthrone a holy man and his relics. Undefined thought we see expressed in symbol. There are four doors to the sanctuary at Buchhoke,—the fakiri [Chet Rami ascetics’] door, the Hindu, Christian, and Mahomedan doors—expressing the openness of the Chet Rami sanctuary to all sects. Their theology is a corresponding conglomeration. It includes a Christian trinity of Jesus Son of Mary [the Mahomedan designation of Christ], the Holy Spirit, and God; and a Hindu triad of the world’s three potencies, namely, Allah, Parameswar, and Khuda, a jumble of Hindu and Mahomedan names, but representing the Hindu triad of the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer.
In respect of the phenomenon of the homage shown to Christ over against the hostility shown to His Church, the second, third, and fourth centuries in the history of the Church present a striking parallel to the nineteenth century in India. Steadily in these centuries Christianity was progressing in spite of contempt for its adherents, philosophic repudiation of the doctrines of the superstitio prava, and official persecution unknown in British India at least. Then also, as always, Christ stood out far above His followers, lifted up and drawing all men’s eyes. Such in India also, in the nineteenth century, has been the course of Christianity; parts of the record of these centuries read like the record of the religious movements in India in these latter days. Describing the Neo-Platonists of these centuries, historians tell us that at the end of the second century A.D. Ammonius of Alexandria, founder of the sect, “undertook to bring all systems of philosophy and religion into harmony, by which all philosophers and men of all religions, Christianity included, might unite and hold fellowship.” There are the four doors of the Chet Rami sanctuary. There also we have the Theosophical Society of India, professing in its constitution to be “the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, representing and excluding no religious creed.” Ammonius, founder of the Neo-Platonists, was a pantheist like the present leader of the Theosophical Society, Mrs. Besant, and like her too, curiously, had begun as a Christian. [104] We recall that of Indian Theosophy in general, in 1891, the late Sir Monier Williams declared that it seemed little more than another name for the “Vedanta [or Pantheistic] philosophy.” Exactly like the earlier theosophists also, Ammonius, the Neo-Platonist, held that the purified soul could perform physical wonders, by the power of Theurgy. In its constitution the Theosophical Society professed “to investigate the hidden mysteries of nature and the psychical powers latent in man.” Many can remember how, in the eighties, Madame Blavatsky took advantage of our curiosity regarding such with air-borne letters from Mahatmas in Thibet. Again Ammonius, we read, “turned the whole history of the pagan gods into allegory.” There we have the Neo-Krishnaites of to-day. “He acknowledged that Christ was an extraordinary man, the friend of God, and an admirable Theurgus.” There we have the stand point of the educated Indians who have come under Christ’s spell. For two centuries the successors of Ammonius followed in these lines. “Individual Neo-Platonists,” Harnack tells us, ” employed Christian sayings as oracles, and testified very highly of Christ. Porphyry of Syria, chief of the Neo-Platonists of the third century, wrote a work “against Christians”; but again, according to Harnack, the work is not directed against Christ, or what Porphyry regarded as the teaching of Christ. It was directed against the Christians of his day and against the sacred books, which according to Porphyry were written by impostors and ignorant people. There we have the double mind of educated India,—homage to Christ, opposition to His Church. There also we have the standpoint of Sahib Mirza Gholam Ahmad of Qadian. Some, we read, being taught by the Neo-Platonists that there was little difference between the ancient religion, rightly explained and restored to its purity, and the religion which Christ really taught, not that corrupted form of it which His disciples professed, concluded it best for them to remain among those who worshipped the gods. There is the present Indian willingness to discover Christian and modern ideas in the Hindu Scriptures, especially in the original Vedas that the new Ārya sect declare to be “the Scripture of true knowledge.” The practical outcome of the Neo-Platonic movement was an attempt to revive the old Græco-Roman religion,—Julian the apostate emperor had many with him. There we have the revival of the worship of Krishna in India, and the apologies for idolatry and caste. The most recent stage of the Theosophical Society in India reveals it as virtually a Hindu revival society. Finally, we read, the old philosopher Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana, and others were represented on the stage dressed in imitation of Christ Himself, and the Emperor Alexander Severus [A.D. 222-235] placed the figure of Christ in his lararium alongside of those of Abraham, Orpheus, and Apollonius. There we have the modern Indians who fully recognise Christ alongside of their own avatars. The whole parallel is complete. [105] In spite of the feebleness and, it may be, unworthiness of His Church, through the force of Christ’s personality, the Roman history of the second, third, and fourth centuries has been repeating itself in India in the nineteenth and twentieth, and unless the force of Christ’s personality be spent, the parallels will proceed.
From new reasonings about God, her new monotheism, New India has been brought a stage farther to actual history. From theologies she has come to the first three Gospels. New India has been introduced to Christ as He actually lived on earth before men’s eyes; and to India, intensely interested in religious teachers, the personality of the Christ of the Gospels, of the first three Gospels in particular, appeals strongly. To the pessimistic mood of India He appeals as one whose companionship makes this life more worth living; for Christ was not a jogi in the Indian sense of a renouncer of the world. His call to fraternal service has taken firm hold of the best Indians of to-day. Of the future we know not, but we feel that the narrative of the first three Gospels naturally precedes the deeper insight of the fourth.