English
It is very sad to see throughout India men and women bowing down to idols, or setting up dimib stones as objects of worship. But what is still more sad is, to find learned Brahmans often en- courage, or at least palliate it, by arguments drawn from this very theory of yours about the Universal Spirit. Thus they carry out your doctrine to the worst side of its results. The world and all its parts, they say, are only the embodiment of TEMPTATIONS OP PANTHEISM, 225 Brahm&'s thought; nay, they are his body; therefore, why not worship him in that stone, where he is present, as well as anywhere else ? But what an infatuated materialism is this I I feel confident, you did not resolve everything into spirit, for the sake of having God thus resolved into brute matter. I do not myself even think that the omnipresence of God should be understood to imply local ubiquity, in such a sense that the very Being of the most High can be said to reside in stones. For omnipresence, as we ascribe it to the Deity, seems to mean the embrace of all things within the providential will of an overruling and clear intelligence; whereas, ubiquity, such as the defence of idol-worshippers implies, would make the Deity dwell in everything senseless, unhappy, and unclean. But at all events I am certain that the making of a thing by our thought does not convert that thing into our body ; or else you might as well pray to the ragged coat of a soldier in a dust- closet, as present a petition to the Governor General of India, by whose orders probably the soldier's uniform was made some years before. But in fact, when you called the world the body of Brahm^, you could only mean it properly as a metaphor; it was a figurative way of saying, that the world shews us in a visible shape the Divine design. Yet the application of your doctrine by those who encourage idol-worship, may shew that I was not without reason in noticing the materialistic tinge in your language ; nor perhaps even they who impute such mate- rialism to the old Vedic text." " But we are not justly responsible," here interposed Vidy- dchdrya, " for the way in which ignorance perverts our doctrine." " That depends partly," answered Blancombe, " upon how far the practice blamed flows naturally out of your language, and partly upon the pains you may take to prevent the practice, whether it be a perversion or a natural consequence. You re- member what your doctor Sancara said about the necessity of suffering people to worship all kinds of deities, whether truly conceived, or wrongly. Even you have yourself spoken with M. P. 15 226 MORAL WEAKNESS OF HINDUISM. some indifference on that point; although you have said no- thing in praise of idolatry. But I could wish you not to be indifferent about who is the true God, and by what name He is most rightly called ; for then perhaps you would be better able to aid me in rooting up all perversions of His truth. The plan of Sancara appears from experience to be so far from wise, that it suffers many thousands of human beings to make their very religion a mean of moral debasement ; while it often repels the more intelligent by a sort of recoil into utter disbelief of all religion. This is the penalty of teaching men falsely with good intentions; they reject the falsehood, and then cast away the truth with it. Thus, in fact, the common sort of people give practically the lie to whoever says that wisdom could not be imparted to them; and some such result for evil might have been predicted from any plan which began with doubting either the truth or charity of God, or the great brotherhood of mankind. How far what I am saying has actually taken place in India, you all are better judges than I am. But at least it seems as if there was great difficulty in reconciling the higher education which your countrymen are in many places receiving, with any real respect for the popular wor- ship, either of idols, or other things of the kind. Nor does it seem as if there would be any remedy in such a metaphysical spiritualising of the common worship as learned Hindds are apt to substitute; for, in fact, the esoteric pantheism and the common polytheism {all in together like two sides of one system. They are as two faces of one wandering from the living God. Thus on the whole, while simple piety of the more intelligent kind is repelled, the metaphysical searchers entangle themselves in a system so shadowy that it is apt to end in the very opposite of what they intended ; and again, with bad men, who rather seek encouragement for their vices, the end of attempting to behold God in every part of nature is, that they obey and fear Him nowhere. The endeavour to deify the world ends rather with sensualising the Deity as j^Uy4. DOCTRINAL WANTS. 227 " Whereas, on the contrary, I think happier results might have been predicted, if instead of letting men set up idols, you had been able to persuade them to set ever before their minds the image of a spiritual Father. Not that I ipean this, as if the mental picture of a God could, as some of your books seem to teach, save us, unless the true God in Himself correspond. But if we had any knowledge from without, such as is properly termed revelation, of the Supreme Ruler of the world being one to whom we are personally responsible, then we should seem to have a great safeguard over our secret actions ; or if we were to con- ceive of Him as a friend, that might be a great encouragement in our distress ; or again, if He could be known to have exhi- bited any lively likeness of Himself, as for instance, if the Divine wisdom had taken body and dwelt among us, giving us thereby an example of life, and a personal assurance of the Divine sympathy with all our struggles and experiences; or even if we had any certain hope of an appointed mode in which we might lay down our sins mentally, and be cleansed from the penal memory of the past, as well as strengthened with exceed- ing might against temptations for the future, such a religion would supply some deep wants which your subtle theories leave in the heart, and would correspond to those yearning anticipations in the better instinct of humanity, which I have insisted upon in arguing with Dr Wolff, as a kind of pro- phecies of some faith to be. But you imderstand me all along, as not meaning that such things are good, if they are imaginary, but that they would be very good if we could be satisfied by clear witness of their reality. " Here then I should not have been displeased to find you lay more stress upon those old stories of the Deity becoming incarnate, which in some form or other have been prevalent in India. For it is quite conceivable that by exhibiting the Divine thus clothed in humanity the supreme Iswara might have given us such an image of Himself, as would be a true medium of conceiving EUm, and a most blessed substitute for the idolatry 15—2 228 INCONSISTENCIES. which degrades. Only I should not be quite satisfied, if such incarnations were supposed to have taken place in the form of a lion, or of a dwarf, or even of a great conqueror ; for neither as bestial, nor as 4warfish, nor even as delighting in bloodshed, can we holily conceive of God. It may indeed be said that conquest becomes sometimes a removal of greater evils, as a tempest may be of pestilence ; yet it is not as imaging his power in the storm, nor yet as giving free range to the terrors of the sword in necessary war, that we find the Deity most attractive to our affections, or most powerfiil to touch the conscience of man with that thrill of love which passes into meek obedience. Unless therefore your Indian stories of incarnation are some- what better than the sort of things I have alluded to, they ought hardly to satisfy us ; yet some idea of the kind, if it could be substantiated by historical experience, might be full of com- fort and instruction. " You have not however attempted to apply such an idea. You have alluded to your own sacred books ; but it is evident even from your indirect admissions, that there is a vast discre- pancy between divers portions of those books. Above all, it is impossible to doubt that the worship described so far as it is embodied in the hymns of the Vedas, which are the earliest and most sacred of your books, was very different from the metaphysical cosmogony which you have been good enough to explain to-day.