India's Problem, Krishna or Christ. John P. Jones
other than racial and temporary; for there is no intimation in any of them of its being a means for the spiritual uplifting, or moral regeneration, of one human soul.
There is no finality of blessing supposed to be in any Hindu incarnation; and it would be sacrilege to compare the character of any one of them with the wonderful incarnation of Jesus. It is not so much that many of them appear as fish, fowl and beast, and as such are devoid of moral aim and efficiency; [pg 096] not a few are immoral, some of them, like Krishna, representing the worst type of sensuality and moral obliquity. Such examples, in the popular mythology of the land, have done, and are doing, inexpressible harm to the people and the country. “Like God like people”; and when the god is highly popular and conspicuously immoral the result will be correspondingly great.
In connection with the doctrine of avatar has arisen the well-known bhakti marga—“the way of faith.” Many believe that the latter was the source of the former and that both were affected by Christian teaching. In any case they are closely connected. Among many this way of love and devotion to individual gods has gained preëminence over the other two ways of salvation—knowledge (gnana marga) and works (Karma-marga)—though it should not be forgotten that bhakti itself is regarded as a work of merit and is by no means synonymous with Christian faith. Yet it must be confessed, as we have seen above, that Hinduism comes nearer, at this point than at any other, to touching the religion of Jesus.
The blindness of this faith is also a serious objection to it. To the bhaktan “faith is the great thing.” It matters not how hideous, morally and spiritually, the object of faith may be, bhakti will triumphantly vindicate itself in the ultimate salvation of the soul. “Repose faith in the idols, in ceremonial observances, in ascetic performances, in all that you religiously do, and blessing will rest upon you.” This is the bhaktan's creed; it is essentially the teaching of the “Divine Song”—Bhagavad-Gita. And it is this [pg 097] which has so powerfully helped the moral and spiritual degeneracy of India during the past few centuries. Men have attached themselves absolutely to gods whose mythology, detailed in the Puranas and Tantras, is a narrative of lust and of moral crookedness, devotion to which can mean only moral contamination and spiritual death. Such a faith, in its nature and results, can only be contrasted with a loving devotion to the incomparably holy and lovely Jesus.
4. The Processes of These Two Religions.
In other words we inquire, in what manner do they propose to attain unto their respective ends?
Christianity brings man into the new, divine life through the narrow gate of a new birth. He stands justified before God and, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, he begins that course of spiritual development which steadily progresses towards perfection in truth and holiness. He, “beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord is changed into the same image from glory to glory even as by the spirit of the Lord.” And in the fullness of his acquired, or divinely bestowed, powers he passes through the gate of death, once for all, to enter upon the full glories of eternal life beyond.
In Hinduism metempsychosis is the great process. “As the embodied soul,” says the Bhagavad-Gita, “moves swiftly on through boyhood, youth and age, so will it pass through other forms hereafter.” This doctrine is universally regarded as the all-potent solvent of human ills and the process which alone can lead to ultimate rest. In transmigration [pg 098] the soul is supposed to pass on from body to body in its wearisome, dismal progress, towards emancipation. The bodies in which it is incarcerated will be of all grades, according to the character of the life in the previous births, from the august and divine body of a Brahman down to a tenement of inorganic, lifeless rock. From ancient times this weary process of working out the law of Karma has seized upon the imagination and wrought itself into the very being of the people of India; so that today it is the universal way of salvation believed and taught by the Vedantin, accepted with assurance by the idolater, and the one great bugbear in the mind of even the common coolie.
This doctrine has its roots in Vedantism and is an essential part of it. The Brahman theosophist taught that all souls emanated from Brâhm and must return to their source along the way of metempsychosis. All acts, words and thoughts find their exact reward in future births. If a man steals a cow he shall be reborn as a crocodile or lizard; if grain, as a rat; if fruit, as an ape. The murderer of a Brahman endures long-suffering in the several hells and is then born again in the meanest bodies to atone for his crime. According to Manu the soul might pass “through ten thousand millions” of births. The passageway to absorption is through Brahmanhood only. Transmigration is the doom of all others.
The prevalence of this doctrine in India is one of the saddest facts connected with its life. It is sombre and depressing in the extreme and robs the mind of a good portion of the small comfort which the idea of absorption might otherwise bring to it. [pg 099] Though the doctrine has found a footing among other nations at different periods in their history, nowhere else has it prevailed so long and exercised such a mighty influence over high and low as it has in that land.
The doctrine is based upon a hypothetical identity of soul in different successive bodies—a hypothesis which can never be proved, and which contradicts the universal consciousness. Until that erratic Englishwoman, Mrs. Besant, appeared, no one claimed to possess the first intimation, through consciousness or memory, of a previous existence in another body. Ancient rishis and a few others were said by others to have possessed it. Strange, if such a re-incarnation were a fact, that none has ever been assured of it by any other agent than the philosopher in his search after truth. Stranger still that men in such countless millions should hang their whole destiny upon so rotten a cord—so unethical a theory—as is here involved. Why should any moral being be put through a course of discipline, or be punished, for a past of which he has no knowledge? To inflict a punishment for any conduct or thought to which the memory does not bear evidence, nor conscience furnish assent, nor the whole realm of conscious experience reveal a trace, is both unethical and in violation of the deepest laws of being.
Nor does it appear how this process, as a method of discipline, can achieve what is expected of it. It is maintained that, ultimately, all the myriads of separate souls will cross over this terrible stream of human existence and reach the further shore of emancipation. But what aptitude, or efficiency, [pg 100] there can be in metempsychosis itself to reach this end is not apparent. That the soul should ultimately reach beatitude rather than absolute, irremedial, degradation through this process is merely assumed, and that without adequate foundation in reason.
In view of the well-known power of sin and its tendency to settle down, through habit, into a permanent type of character; in view of the well-attested scientific doctrine of heredity—a doctrine which easily accounts for and explains every semblance of truth in transmigration—it seems incredible that any soul in India could, through transmigration, finally emerge out of the quicksand of sin and corruption which surround and overwhelm it, especially when it is assumed that it has already passed through many births.
It should also be remembered that, at its basis, this doctrine has its face turned, with equal repugnance, against all sorts of work. Desire of every kind, good as well as evil, is to be suppressed inasmuch as it is the source of action, and action must bear its fruit, the eating of which prolongs existence which, itself, is the burden to be removed. The question is not how to become good and to overcome evil in life, but how to shake off all personality. And this is accomplished, they say, by abandoning all action and suppressing all desire whatever. How this can result in holiness and lofty character is not evident. It is true that a certain sort of “good works” have large value in this process of emancipation. But quiescence rather than character is the thing emphasized. Noble thoughts and aspirations are as fatal as are the basest to immediate deliverance—they [pg 101] all disturb that equilibrium of the soul which ushers it into its final rest. “The confinement of fetters is the same whether the chain is of gold or of iron.”
It is doubtless true that this doctrine has some elements of truth, otherwise it could not have survived and thriven as it has. It bears consistent testimony to the immortality of the