"heathen Hindu," and thus to save him! Aye, to save him. Your poor peasants, your earnest women, and your generous millionaires raise millions of dollars every year to be spent on foreign missions. Little, how little, do you ever dream that your money is expended in spreading abroad nothing but Christian dogmatism and Christian bigotry, Christian pride and Christian exclusiveness. I entreat you to spend at least one-tenth of all this vast fortune on sending out to our country unsectarian, broad-learned missionaries that will spend all their efforts and energies in educating our women, our men, and our masses. Educate. Educate them first, and they will understand Christ much better than they would do by being "converted" to the narrow creed of canting Christendom. The difficulties of social reformers in India are manifold. Their work is most arduous. The work of engrafting on the rising Hindu mind the ideals of a material civilization, such as yours, without taking in its agnostic or atheistic tendencies, is a task peculiarly difficult to accomplish. Reforms based on utilitarian and purely secular principles can never take a permanent hold on the mind of a race that has been essentially spiritual in all its career and history. Those who have tried to do so have failed. The Brahmo-Somaj, or the Church of Indian Theism, has always advocated the cause of reform, and has always been the pioneer in every reform movement. In laying the foundations of a new and reformed society the Brahmo-Somaj has established every reform as a fundamental principle which must be accepted before anyone can consistently belong to its organization. Acting on the model of ancient Hindu society, we have so proceeded that our social institutions may secure our religious principles, while those principles regulate and establish every reform on a safe and permanent footing. . Social reform merely as such has no vitality in our land. It may influence here and there an individual; it cannot rear a society or sway a community. Recognizing this secret, the religion of the Brahmo-Somaj has, from its very birth, been the foremost to proclaim a crusade against every social evil in our country. The ruthless, heartless practice of suttee, or the burning of Hindu widows on the funeral pile of their husband, was abolished through the instrumentality of the great Raja, Ram Mohun Roy. His successors have all been social reformers as much as religious reformers. In the heart of the Brahmo-Somaj you find no caste, no image worship. We have abolished early marriage, and helped the cause of widow's marriage. We have promoted intermarriage; we fought for and obtained a law from the British government to legalize marriages between the representatives of any castes and any creeds. The Brahmos have been great educators. They have started schools and colleges, societies and seminaries, not only for boys and young men, but for girls and young women. In the Brahmo community you will find hundreds of young ladies who combine in their education the acquirements of the East and the West; Oriental reserve and modesty with Occidental culture and refinement. Many of our young ladies have taken degrees in arts and sciences in Indian universities. The religion of the Brahmo-Somaj is essentially a religion of life-the living and lifegiving religion of love to God and love to man. Its corner-stones are the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and the sisterhood of woman. We uphold reform in religion and religion in reform. While we advocate that every religion needs to be reformed, we also most firmly hold that every reform, in order that it may be a living and lasting power for good, needs to be based on religion, These are the lines of our work. We have been working out the most intricate problems of Hindu social reform on these lines. We know our work is hard, but at the same time we know that the Almighty God, the Father of nations, will not forsake us; only we must be faithful to him, his guiding spirit. And now, my brethren and sisters in America, God has made you a free people. Liberty, equality and fraternity are the guiding words that you have pinned on your banner of progress and advancement. In the name of that liberty of thought and action for the sake of which your noble forefathers forsook their ancestral homes in far-off Europe, in the name of that equality of peace and position which you so much prize and which you so nobly exemplify in all your social and national institutions, I entreat you, my beloved American brothers and sisters, to grant us your blessings and good wishes, to give us your earnest advice and active coöperation in the realization of the social, political and religious aspirations of young India. God has given you a mission. Even now he is enacting through your instrumentality most marvelous events. Read his holy will through these events, and extend to young India the right hand of holy fellowship and universal brotherhood. THE EIGHTH DAY. THE SYMPATHY OF RELIGIONS. BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON, OF CAMBRIDGE, MASS. The first Parliament of Religions in this country may be said to have been simultaneous with the nation's birth. When in 1788 the Constitution of the United States was adopted, and a commemorative procession of five thousand people took place in Philadelphia, then the seat of government, a place in the triumphal march was assigned to the clergy; and the Jewish rabbi of the city walked between two Christian ministers, to show that the new republic was founded on religious toleration. It seems strange that no historical painter, up to this time, has selected for his theme that fine incident, It should have been perpetuated in art, like the Landing of the Pilgrims, or Washington crossing the Delaware. And side by side with it might well be painted the twin event which occurred nearly a hundred years later, in a Mohammedan country, when in 1875, Ismail Pacha, then Khedive of Egypt, celebrating by a procession of two hundred thousand people the obsequies of his beloved and only daughter, placed the Mohammedan priests and Christian missionaries together in the procession, on the avowed ground that they served the same God, and that he desired for his daughter's soul the prayers of all. During the interval between those two great symbolic acts, the world of thought was revolutionized by modern science, and the very fact of religion, the very existence of a Divine Power, was for a time questioned. Science rose, like the caged Afreet in the Arabian story, and filled the sky. Then, more powerful than the Afreet, it accepted its own limitations and achieved its greatest triumph in voluntarily reducing its claims. Supposed by many to have dethroned religion forever, it now offers to dethrone itself and to yield place to imaginative aspiration—a world outside of science-as its superior. This was done most conclusively when Professor Tyndall, at the close of his Belfast address, uttered that fine statement, by which he will perhaps be longest remembered, that religion belongs not to the knowing powers of man, but to his creative powers. It was an epoch-making sentence. If knowing is to be the only religious standard, there is no middle ground between the spiritual despair of the mere agnostic, and the utter merging of one's individual reason in some great, organized authoritative church-the Roman Catholic, the Greek Catholic, the Mohammedan, the Buddhist. But if human aspiration, or, in other words, man's creative imagination is to be the standard, the humblest individual thinker may retain the essence of religion, and may moreover, have not only one of these vast faiths, but all of them at his side. Each of them alone is partial, limited, unsatisfying; it takes all of them together to represent the semper, ubique et ab omnibus. Among all these vast structures of spiritual organization there is a sympathy. It lies not in what they know, for they are alike, in a scientific sense, in knowing nothing. Their point of sympathy lies in what they have sublimely created through longing imagination. In all these faiths are the same alloy of human superstition; the same fables of miracle and prophecy, the same signs and wonders, the same preternatural births and resurrections. In point of knowledge, all are helpless; in point of credulity, all puerile; in point of aspiration, all sublime. All seek after God, if haply they might find him. All, moreover, look around for some human life, more exalted than the rest, which may be taken as God's highest earthly reflection. Terror leads them to imagine demons, hungry to destroy, but hope creates for them redeemers mighty to save. Buddha, the prince, steps from his station; Jesus, the carpenter's son, from his; and both give their lives for the service of man. That the good thus prevails above the evil is what makes religion, even the conventional and established religion, a step forward, not backward, in the history of man. Every great medieval structure in Christian Europe recalls in its architecture the extremes of hope and fear. Above the main doors of the Cathedral of Nôtre Dame, in Paris, strange figures imprisoned by one arm in the stone strive with agonized faces to get out; devils sit upon wicked kings and priests; after the last judgment, demons like monkeys hurry the troop of condemned, still including kings and priests, away. Yet Nature triumphed over all these terrors, and I remember that, between the horns of one of the chief devils, while I observed it, a swallow had built its nest and twittered securely. And not only did humbler nature thus triumph beneath the free air, but within the church the beautiful face of Jesus showed the victory of man over his fears. In the same way a recent English traveler in Thibet, after describing an idol-room, filled with pictures of battles between hideous fiends and equally hideous gods, many-headed and many armed, says: “But among all these repulsive faces of degraded type, distorted with evil passions, we saw in striking contrast here and there an image of the contemplative Buddha, with beautiful, calm features, pure and pitiful, such as they have been handed down by painting and sculpture for two thousand years, and which the llamas (priests), with all their perverted imagination, have never ventured to change when designing an idol of the great incarnation." The need of this high exercise of the imagination is shown even by the regrets of those, who, in their devotion to pure science, are least willing to share it. The penalties of a total alienation from the religious life of the 1" Where Three Empires Meet," by E. F. Knight. London. Longmans, 1893. |