BR HHC5 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GIFT OF Alfred C. Bgrnes Date Due una NOf^ tWntP ' Bpji 4-lQ"?^ ¥ PRINTED IN U. S. A. £**f CATl NO. 23233 Cornell University Library BR121.H17 C5 Christ and the human race: or The attit olin 3 1924 029 192 783 The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029192783 48oofcs &p diaries Cntljbcrt |)aU CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE, nmo, $1.15, rut. Postage 12 cents. INTO HIS MARVELLOUS LIGHT. Studies in Life and Belief. 2d Thousand. Crown 8vo, $1.50. DOES GOD SEND TROUBLE? An Earnest Effort to Discern between Christian Tradition and Chris- tian Truth. Crown 8vo, $1.00. THE CHILDREN, THE CHURCH, AND THE CO M M U N I O N. i6mo, 75 cents. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, Boston and New York. CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE El cognoscetia veritatem, et VERITAS liberabit vos CHRIST AND THE HUMAN EACE OR THE ATTITUDE OF JESUS CHRIST TOWARD FOREIGN RACES AND RELIGIONS BEING THE i©iJliam 2&eftien l^ofile %tttutt$ FOR 1906 BY CHARLES CUTHBERT HALL, D. D., LL. D. PRESIDENT OF UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY NEW YORK BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY COPYRIGHT I906 BY CHARLES CUTHBEHT HALL ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published December tqob THIRD IMPRESSION THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE LECTURES This Lectureship was constituted a perpetual foundation in Harvard University in 1898, as a memorial to the late William Belden Noble of Washington, D. C. (Harvard, 1885). The deed of gift provides that the lectures shall be not less than six in number, that they shall be delivered annually, and, if convenient, in the Phillips Brooks House, during the season of Advent. Each lecturer shall have ample notice of his appointment, and the publication of each course of lectures is required. The purpose of the Lecture- ship will be further seen in the following citation from the deed of gift by which it was established : — " The object of the founder of the Lectures is to continue the mission of William Belden Noble, whose supreme desire it was to extend the influence of Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life ; to make known the meaning of the words of Jesus, 'I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.' In accordance with the large interpretation of the Influence of Jesus by the late Phillips Brooks, with whose religious teaching he in whose memory the Lectures are established and also the founder of the Lectures were in deep sympathy, it is intended that the scope of the Lectures shall be as wide as the highest in- terests of humanity. With this end in view, — the perfection of the spiritual man and the consecration by the spirit of Jesus of every department of human character, thought, and activity, — the Lectures may include philosophy, literature, art, poetry, the natural sciences, political economy, sociology, ethics, history both civil and ecclesiastical, as well as theology, and the more direct interests of the religious life. Beyond a sympathy with the purpose of the Lectures, as thus denned, no restriction is placed upon the lecturer." tEo grrnnt mn Shitme tyttnbt te of tyarbart Wnibtteity toljo sfyall enter ttflje Cijristtan flpintflfttE in t&e ©erp spirit of / PREFACE From time to time, in the history of the English-speaking races, it becomes neces- sary to reopen the question: What shall be the religious attitude of the West toward the East ? In the age of the Crusades, the answer was given in terms of the sword. Saul of Tarsus, thinking to do God service by stamping out the sparks that Christ had kindled, was not more devout in his reli- gious hatred than the Knights Crusaders, who sought to quench in blood the unhal- lowed fires of Islam. In the age of the English Reformation, when commercial companies were formed to compete with Dutch and Portuguese adventurers in ga- thering the wealth of the Spice Archipelago and the treasures of the Indies, economic considerations abroad and dogmatic con- flicts at home drove into the background questions of religion, as between West and East. In the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, far- x PREFACE spreading reactions from the Wesleyan re- vival stirred the conscience of Great Britain and awoke to action the Christian life of New England. The cry of the non-Chris- tian world seemed to ascend into the ears of God. The obligation of the Church to evangelize Oriental races pressed heavily upon the heart of English-speaking Chris- tianity. It was apprehended as an obliga- tion toward the utterly ignorant, debased and helpless heathen world. Little was known of the East. Its religions were as- sumed to be wholly vile and foolish, un- worthy of serious consideration, — the vaga- ries of backward and inferior races. The devotion of the early Protestant mission- aries to Oriental communities was magni- ficent, and cannot be depreciated by the fact that its sublime condescension was, in a measure, founded on erroneous estimates of value. The entire Western attitude toward the East was gravely erroneous, and, by necessity, communicated itself somewhat to the apostles of English Chris- tianity. The religious assumption was that the East must depend on the West for salva- tion, and that that salvation could be re- PREFACE 3d ceived only by entire renunciation of its own religious inheritances. At that time, Oriental studies being yet in their infancy, it had scarcely occurred to Occidental Christians that the viewless spirit of God had also been preparing a way in the Oriental consciousness, whereby ultimately to express truths as yet largely unrealized in Anglo-Saxon religious experience. Meanwhile, we have passed into a new century. Its religious outlook is problem- atical. The churches of the Western world certainly have not attained a maximum of religious power. A general solicitude is felt for their purification in practice, their intensification and deepening in faith and insight. It is considered to be of vital im- portance that the Christian ministry of the future shall attract and win the service of the strongest, the purest, the most chival- rous men. This good result is not probable unless the vision suggested to such minds by the Christian ministry be at least as broad and winsome as that offered by other social enterprises of the altruistic age. That it is, in fact, more broad and winsome than any of these I believe, and, in these xii PREFACE lectures, have attempted to show. Once more have the English-speaking races reached a point where it becomes necessary to reopen the question: What shall be the religious attitude of the West toward the East? The fascination of the present answer consists in combining the most ad- vanced position reached by modern know- ledge of the Oriental world, with a simple restatement of the attitude of Jesus Christ toward the human race. Never was there an age, since Christ Himself was on earth in visible form, when the simple univer- sality of His love for mankind was more clearly understood or more deeply felt. And never has there been an age in which the West has apprehended so clearly, al- though as yet inadequately, the presence in the soul of the East of unmeasured re- serves of power, one day to be liberated, in blessing or in peril, upon the rest of the world. By men choosing public affairs as their life-work, the Christian ministry must henceforth be regarded in its large relation to the world. In these lectures I have at- tempted so to regard it; believing that such a view of the vocation immediately insti- PREFACE jrfii tuted by Jesus Christ qualifies one to be- hold the dignity and importance of that vocation and to fulfill it more worthily at home and abroad. As we get a broad view of the world, this question arises in thoughtful minds : What is our relation, as Christian men of liberal education, to the non-Christian religions, and especially to those to whom those re- ligions are precious ? It is a question that has to do with our own religious efficiency, as much, perhaps, as with the welfare of the world. Can the faith of a Christian be made more real, intelligent, and effective by gaining knowledge of the lines, outside of Christian thinking, on which the world is seeking after God ? Can we, who have the Christian faith, do better service to our brothers outside of the Christian lines, by attempting to understand the things that are precious to them, and the ways in which they are trying to meet the cravings of the religious nature, and to answer the im- portant questionings of the soul ? The fact that such inquiries seem to us natural and timely marks an immense advance in en- lightenment, as well as in appreciation of xiT PREFACE the mind and temper of Jesus Christ. The time was when such inquiries would have been reckoned anti-Christian; when the beliefs of the non-Christian world were scorned by Christians as unworthy of con- sideration, or were branded as wholly instigated by the devil and produced by devilish imaginations. The time may be near at hand, when scarcely anything shall seem so interesting, so rational, so neces- sary for Christians to know, for the balan- cing of their own faith and for the intelli- gent presentation of Christ to the Oriental world, as the real meanings and the real religious values that lie in the substance of faiths older than Christianity, yet still ex- isting in power two thousand years after Christ. The time may be near when we shall ask if those faiths could so long have survived Christ's awful surrender on the Cross and Christ's spiritual influence in the world, if at the bottom of them there are not elemental operations of the Spirit and elemental portions of truth, which God purposes to use for His glory. The question to be discussed in these lectures is chiefly a question of mental at- PREFACE xv titude : How shall a Christian man of cul- ture reach an intellectual and religious position with relation to non-Christian re- ligions, which shall be justified by the pre- sent state of knowledge, while in full accord with the example and spirit of Christ? The answer to this question cannot be an answer of prejudice, or of unreasoning impulse. One must look backward, even to the Judaism out of which Christianity came, and see how the plan of God has unfolded from a time when the very life of truth seemed to depend on uncompro- mising hatred of the faiths of others, to this present time when the life and victory of truth seem to require the most careful study of non-Christian faiths, to see how much in them may be of God, breathed into the Oriental races by His Spirit, mak- ing a basis on which the chief corner- stone, which is Christ, can be laid; creat- ing a religious consciousness into which the distinctive essence of Christianity can be assimilated. If young men of culture and earnestness in our American universities will break from the bonds of race prejudice, ignore traditional Anglo-Saxon notions of xvi PREFACE superiority, and face the world of to-day in the spirit of the all-encompassing human- ism of the heart of Jesus Christ, they will find in the Christian ministry, whether at home or abroad, a vocation great enough to satisfy the loftiest ambitions and to em- ploy the most statesmanlike powers. If their life-work in the ministry be at home, they will learn that all men possessing this broader vision are needed to arouse the Church from routine, to lift it above con- troversy, to revive its apostolic spirit. And if, as may well be desired, for our strongest men, the call of the East shall come to them, they will find, as they answer that call, how much vaster than they dreamed is the scope of the religion of the Son of Man; how universal, how flexible, how Oriental, as well as Occidental, is the faith which once they held provincially as the religion of the West. They will read, as it were in a new language of race significance, the Gospel of the Incarnation and the Gospel of the Divine Sacrifice. Bethlehem, Cal- vary, the garden of the resurrection, the hill of Bethany, long dimmed by the earth- born mists of selfish, partial, sectarian in- PREFACE xvii terpretation, will stand forth in new and unimagined glory, " in sunny outline, brave and clear." And this also: they will learn how the Spirit of the living God is now at work, in the heart of all the Oriental religions, preparing a way through darkness for the rising of the Sun of Righteousness, with healing in His wings. They will begin to measure and comprehend those spiritual yearnings with which the East is filled; yearnings that admit of but one interpre- tation, that they are mysterious movements of God Himself, preparing the Eastern religious consciousness to advance through pantheism into theism, and through theism into the Christian heritage and the Chris- tian peace. Charles Ctjthbert Hall. Synton, Westport Point, Massachusetts. 1 July, 1906. CONTENTS PAGE I. Jesus Christ and World-Sympathy .... 1 II. The Larger Meaning of the Incarnation . . 49 III. The Essential Unity op the Human Race . . 90 IV. Temperamental Contrasts between East and West 134 V. Religious Insight and Experience outside op Christianity 179 VI. Christian Missions and the Modern World . 283 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE LECTURE I JESUS CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY Professor Allen, in "The Life and Let- ters of Phillips Brooks," describes the William Belden Noble Lectureship as "a special endowment, connected with [Phillips Brooks House] a foundation for perpetuating the influence of Jesus, as Phillips Brooks proclaimed it, in all the comprehensiveness of its scope." The founder of the Lectureship informs us, in her deed of gift, that it was the mission and supreme desire of William Belden Noble to extend the influence of Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life; to make known the meaning of the words of Jesus, "I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly." I cannot ex- pect to add anything to those aspects of 8 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE thought and life that have been discussed by my predecessors. It is my hope to supplement what they have done by an attempt to present the influence and spirit of Jesus Christ in relation to a field of ex- perience not particularly considered in the foregoing courses of Noble Lectures. My subject is: " The Attitude of Jesus Christ toward Foreign Races and Religions." I shall undertake to show that that attitude was impartial, without prejudice, unham- pered by traditional limitations, cosmopol- itan. A majestic simplicity of intention toward the world reflected itself in a ma- jestic indifference toward distinctions of race and religion. Knowing what was in man, undeceived by the pretenses of ortho- doxy, unrepelled by the aberrations of paganism, steadfastly set to give His life for the life of the world, the world-sympathy of the mind of Christ was absolute. No experience in the life of Phillips Brooks more deeply interested him than did his visit to India in the cold season of 1882-1883. The mystery of the Oriental world broke upon him with peculiar force. At times he seemed to see deeply into the CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY S heart of the East and to apprehend it with- out experiencing those involuntary repul- sions that have limited most Western observers. At other times he was baffled by theories of being and of conduct per- vading Oriental society that, to his ethical sense, seemed inadmissible and grotesque. His letters from India are a curiously blended network of impressions. But, as years passed, and that incomparable expe- rience fell into place in the perspective of his religious thinking, he learned to organ- ize his contradictory judgments of the Oriental consciousness under the all-em- bracing breadth of the mind of Christ. Proof of this is found in a letter written five years after his return from India to the Rev. G. A. Lefroy, then a member of the Cambridge Mission at Delhi, now the Anglican Bishop of Lahore (a most gallant and large-minded Churchman, whom I have had the honor to meet in the Pan jab) . Writing from North Andover in July, 1888, Phillips Brooks says: "My dear Mr. Lefroy: That you in your good work should care anything about my books touches me very much indeed. They were 4 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE written for my people here, and nothing was farther from my thought than that they should be read by the Jamna and the Ganges. But how simple it all grows as we grow older ! The whole of what we personally have to live and what we go out to preach is loyalty to Christ. It is nothing but that. All truth regarding Christ and all duty toward His brethren is involved in that and flows out from it. To teach Him to any one who never heard of Him is to bring a soul into the sight of Him and His unspeakable friendship. To grow stronger and better and braver ourselves is to draw nearer to Him and to be more absolutely His. And this seems to take off the burden of life without lessening its duties. He is behind all our work. It is all His before it is ours and after it is ours. We have only to do our duty in our little place, and leave the great results to Him. We are neither impatient nor reluctant at the thought of the day when we shall have finished here and go to higher work. But dear me ! what right have I to say all this to you, who know it so much bet- ter, who are putting it so constantly and CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 5 richly into your life and work? I grow stronger for Boston when I think of Delhi ! " Between, rather than on, the lines of this letter one reads that which, in this, as in every other sphere of thinking, was the final conclusion of Phillips Brooks; namely, the determining authority of the attitude of the mind of Christ toward all men and all races of men. He conceived of Christ's knowledge of the human heart as absolute, and of Christ's attitude toward the total religious experience of the world as the ultimate example to all His disciples. If I can, although in the most distant and hum- ble way, treat my subject in the temper of Brooks's letter to Lefroy, and thereby encourage young members of the Univer- sity to consider the Christian ministry in the larger relations here suggested, I shall thank God, and shall feel that the spirit and purpose of this Lectureship have not wholly been misapprehended. The problem that I have set myself in these Lectures is the problem of a mental attitude. By this I mean a deliberate and reasoned point of view as distinguished >6 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE from the casual or involuntary movements of impulse and prejudice. The scientific significance of a reasoned mental attitude has been established by psychologists in various fields. The influence of the mind over itself, acquired by deliberate attitude; the influence of the mind over the body; the influence of one mind over another — now begins to be understood. The key to some of life's most perplexing phenomena will be found when the scientific signifi- cance of mental attitude, already estab- lished, shall have been worked out to its remotest conclusions. It is with the ethi- cal significance of mental attitude that I am concerned in these Lectures. And this within a particular field, the field of religious and racial diversity. How shall we order the mind, adjust the judgment, develop the affections with reference to races and religions not our own? That this is a question of practical importance will be denied only by those for whom races and religions other than their own are matters without significance. It is most charitable to believe that lack of knowledge is the chief cause of this CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 1 extreme localization of thought. No nor- mal mind that, by reading or travel, has gained a view of the historical develop- ment of races, and of the meaning and value of religion to those races, can retain an undisturbed indifference to the question of one's own mental attitude toward foreign peoples and their faiths. Undoubtedly we do find perfect indifference on the part of some to all that lies outside the small circle of personal experience in matters of nationality and belief; minds as completely sequestered in their own provincialism, as completely unmoved by the progress or decline of the larger humanity, as if there was no creation groaning and travail- ing in pain, and no world-soul yearning for the Absolute. In charity I attribute to ignorance an indifference which, were it coupled with knowledge, must be pro- nounced stolid and unfraternal. That un- disturbed indifference is, in itself, a men- tal attitude of high psychological interest to one who studies the causes that have imparted a tragic tone to the racial and religious history of mankind. To be com- pletely absorbed in one's own convictions 8 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE and beliefs; to have no room in the mind for consideration of the convictions of others; to press the local into the fore- ground so that one cannot see beyond it that field of religious inquiry on which races have met, grappled, parted or merged, is abnormal provincialism. In so far as it is found within Christian lines, it contra- dicts the mental attitude of Him to whom it professes strenuous allegiance, but to whom, in fact, nothing in the soul of hu- manity appealed in vain. No contradic- tion of the mind of Christ can be harmless. Persecution of the disciples of another faith is not the only method of tyranny. To be ignored may be more bitter than to be per- secuted. When the Western mind, passing from indifference to attention, has surveyed the spirit and beliefs of Eastern races, it has not been prone to take on attitudes in correspondence with the mind of Christ. Repugnance has been a frequent substitute for ignorance; hostility for apathy. The most sombre line running through history is the line of man's religious antagonisms, hatreds, and conflicts. But the student of CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 9 the philosophy of history sees that this element, regrettable in itself, cannot be waved aside as a mere ugly ghost haunting the progress of humanity. To denounce religious hostilities as, at all times, proofs of unmitigated evil and blindness in the heart of man, is to pass the most super- ficial and unreflecting judgment upon the evolution of the race, to take no account of the nature of moral conviction, to forget the urgency of conscience, to call evil good and good evil. Whatever the future atti- tude of religious inquiry may be, the best hopes of the world depend on principles that have been evolved through painful separation of the truth from error, and established after strife and sacrifice. The most signal illustration of this is the development of the religion of Israel. One does not see how the crudeness of primitive Judaism could have matured into the religious and ethical splendor of the later prophets, had the nation remained in an alliance of love with its environment. It was by separation, by the sword, by destruction of opposing interests, by abhor- rence of the gods of the nations, that the 10 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE root of Semitic monotheism, the worship of a Holy God, sprang from the dry ground into the fruitful tree of salvation. Into Christianity passed, by a species of heredi- tary necessity, many of these Semitic pre- possessions, giving it at times the aspect of Jewish separateness. It could not have been otherwise, in the nature of the case. Jesus Himself recognized it and said, "I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves." 1 "If the world hateth you, ye know that it hath hated Me before it hated you." 2 This separateness was emphasized by the persecution of Christians in the Roman era. Whatever may have been the political ground of those persecutions, as the suppression of a revolutionary tendency, it is not to be forgotten that the conflict was in fact a conflict of religions; the protest of a social order accustomed to gods and their symbols against a religion of the Spirit, a transforming Christ enthroned within the heart. This was inevitable. It was also desirable for the world's sake. It was an essential step in the evolutionary order; the birth-throe of a nobler human conscious- 1 Matt. x. 16. 2 John xv. 18. CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 11 ness. It was in accord with the mind of Christ; the natural sequence of His Cross and Passion. At length the world-scene changed in favor of Christianity. The little flock, despised and rejected of men, came to its own. Christian Emperors and Popes, intrenched in power, could dictate terms to Pagans. Then developed intolerance, the Christian perversion of the ancient separateness of Israel. The separateness of Israel was essential, in its time, to the safeguarding of the Kingdom of God. The growth of an ethical God-conscious- ness in humanity, a conception of God as righteousness, and of life as obedience, could not be had save by the segregation of a people, which, for its own education in religious ideals, should lay the unpitying axe at the root of idolatry. To the eye that sees straight down the perspective of time, there is nothing inconsistent with a God of love, in Israel's fierce antagonism of other faiths. To the ear that hears aright the movement of God's plan through the ages, there is no discord in Israel's grand contempt for idols and their devotees. 12 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE There is the sound of proud and terrible laughter in their psalmody: — " The idols of the nations are silver and gold, The work of men's hands. They have mouths, but they speak not; Eyes have they, but they see not; They have ears, but they hear not; Neither is there any breath in their mouths. They that make them shall be like unto them; Yea, every one that trusteth in them." 1 In this there is no offense against the true spirit of religion, save the offense of the plowshare, which must tear the clods of the valley that rain and sunshine and the joy of harvests may work in their order. The attitude of Israel toward other races and religions, whatever it may seem to be in the mind of a proud, self-righteous Pharisee, was, in the Divine intention, inclusive more than exclusive. The segre- gation of Israel was in order to larger ser- vice for the world. Israel was trained aloof from the world, that Israel might draw the world from idols to the Living God. Through every variation of splendid utter- ance, the prophets declare the world mis- 1 Psalm cxxxv. 15-18. CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 13 sion of Israel as the servant of Jehovah. "The people which I formed for Myself, they shall set forth My praise." 1 " Thus saith the Lord, the labour of Egypt, and the merchandise of Ethiopia, and the Sa- beans, men of stature, shall come over unto thee, and they shall be thine; they shall go after thee; in chains they shall come over: and they shall fall down unto thee, they shall make supplication unto thee, saying, Surely God is in thee; and there is none else, there is no God." 2 "Behold, My ser- vant shall deal wisely, he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. So shall he sprinkle many nations ; kings shall shut their mouths at him: for that which had not been told them shall they see; and that which they had not heard shall they understand. " 3 In all this there was no offense; not even in the proud and ter- rible laughter at the impotence of idols, matched against the strong initiative of a living Jehovah. The offense came when Jewish separatism was carried over into Christian hatred of the East, contrary to the example or spirit of Christ, to find 1 Is. xliii. 21. 2 Is. xlv. 14. s Is. Hi. 13, 15. 14 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE ghastly resurrection in the forms of Chris- tian intolerance ; in the ferocities of the Cru- sades; in the rancorous hate poured forth by Christians upon Moslems ; in the bloody reprisals extorted by Christian powers from the Jews in Europe; in the inhumanities of the Inquisition, both in Europe and the Orient; in every modern recrudescence of the old spirit of intolerance and exclusion. The modern world has come, by various lines of approach, into new relations with the East. The result is greatly increased knowledge of facts, and partial disap- pearance (I would better say partial con- cealment) of former inclination to blind and brutal antagonism. The causes of the changed attitude may be traced. Self- interest is one of them. The East is the most important commercial asset of the West, and therefore, as we are learning to our cost, is not to be trampled under foot to any extent that would damage trade. Nor can the modern East be treated as a negligible quantity in the councils of na- tions. The voice of the East speaks with authority, and may speak yet more sternly. There is a new East, on whose shield might CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 15 be inscribed a legend once supposed to belong exclusively west of Aden, — "Nemo me impune lacessit." Growth of Western culture accounts in part for the changed attitude toward the East. When the Indian Institute was founded at Oxford, side by side with the Bodleian Library, it epitomized the broad- ening of the Western mind. That building is more than a diplomatic concession to India. It stands for what became apparent when Professor Max Miiller produced his edition of "The Sacred Books of the East," the necessary inclusion of Eastern thought in any future study of the philosophy and history of religion. Growth of social ethics is another modi- fying cause. Conscience wakes at last in communities and nations. The still small voice cannot be stifled forever. Under the noises of war and trade and appeals to race prejudice, it makes itself heard in sober hearts : " Am I my brother's keeper ? " The present attitude of the West toward the East may be unsatisfactory, yet it has this to commend it : by no possibility could we go back to the attitude of one hundred 16 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE years ago. The conscience of America, I trust that I may also say of Europe, at last is stirred. I have cited self-interest, culture, and growth of social ethics as causes of the partial disappearance of former inclination to blind and brutal antagonism, in esti- mating races and religions not our own. What prevailing mental attitudes may be said thus far to have supplanted the old brutality ? For the most part they are not, I fear, such as can be described in terms of the mind of Christ. Encouraging though they may be to those who believe that the essential unity of the human race must sooner or later prove itself, they accord but indifferently with the unquali- fied breadth and comprehensiveness of that Divine Mind. They may be described by the terms " passive curiosity " and " con- temptuous interest." Curiosity is the desire to see or learn something new, strange, hitherto unknown. Passive curiosity is the cultivation of that desire, not for the sake of some construc- tive end lying outside one's self, but for the sake of the experience (usually pleasant CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 17 and entertaining) of receiving impressions produced by that which is novel. Passive curiosity is the mental attitude of the traveler in pursuit of pleasure. He wearies of the beaten paths, because they lead among familiar objects and produce sensa- tions dulled by repetition. He travels far- ther and farther afield, hoping for stimu- lating impressions from the unfamiliar. The novelties of religion are not the least fruitful sources of his entertainment. Hav- ing exhausted the picturesqueness of the Roman Mass in Italian sanctuaries, he steers his pleasure bark through the Red Sea, and makes for the Orient, that he may be amused at the Cow Temple in Benares, or diverted at the Shrine of the Sacred Tooth in Geylon. He is pleased by the romantic sound of the bronze bell among the cryptomarias of Nikko, and passes many a light-hearted hour in the priestly houses of pleasure within the precincts of Asakasa. He wanders through throngs of Oriental worshipers with a species of friendly gratitude to those whose curious customs are more diverting than a drama. He buys their temple instruments, their ? 18 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE idols, their sacred books, as treasured souvenirs of his holiday-making. He returns to his home and his Church to forget all that he has seen, save as its beguiling memories revive to brighten fes- tive hours, or its bizarre contrasts occur to him at his own worship, and he thanks God that he is not as other men are. Of many who thus glance with the eye of passive curiosity on mosque and temple and shrine of the East, it may be said that it never occurs to them to take seriously what they have seen and heard; to think of it, not as a panorama of novelties, but as a part of the spiritual yearning of the world; the same, in essence, with that in ourselves which makes life sacred and aspiration Divine. It is suggestive, to reflect how largely this spirit of passive curiosity toward foreign races and their faiths has supplanted the old antagonism that sprang from the relative ignorance of a less traveled age. It has grown with the growth of general culture, with the preva- lence of cosmopolitan intercourse, with the liberalism of an aesthetic epoch. It must also be said that the absence of serious pur- CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 19 pose from many of the sight-seeing invaders of the East shows how cosmopolitanism and sestheticism may have produced in modern Christianity profound and dangerous reac- tions from the first solicitudes of the follow- ers of Christ. When St. Paul visited Athens, he was unable to regard the forms of Greek nature worship with the eye of passive curi- osity. " His spirit was provoked within him, as he beheld the city full of idols ;" 1 — pro- voked, not with antagonism, alike unhal- lowed and uncultured, that travestied the Christian orthodoxy of a later age; but provoked with sympathies the most mag- nanimous, comprehending, fraternal. He who had seen for himself, in the glory of Divine light, a vision of the Ideal, who had heard a call from the spiritual heights, yearned for his brothers, the common off- spring of God, that they also might attain. A half-contemptuous, scientific interest in foreign races and religions is another conventional attitude of the Western mind. It differs from passive curiosity, which, as has been pointed out, is the search for the new in order to the experience of sensations 1 Acts xvii. 16. 20 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE produced by novelty. There is a scholarly interest in alien religions, maintained by a zest for knowledge, in order to scien- tific generalization. From this has come a relatively new university discipline; the study of the philosophy and history of religion. So long as this discipline is kept upon the high levels of science, and pro- tected from the influence of prejudice and contemptuous disparagement, it discharges a service of value. It collects, reports, and coordinates the facts in the religious his- tory of the race. It divides the veil of ignorance whereby the East has been hid- den from the West, and leads the mind into the presence of the Oriental con- sciousness. The unbiased historian and analyst of religion may do as much as the diplomatist to promote the entente cordial of races. He may draw the scattered brethren of humanity together, assist each to look into the heart of the other, and make mutually intelligible the differing ways in which each has wrought at the fundamental problems of the soul. There are honored names, both of the dead and the living, that stand for the scientific CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 21 study of religion by minds absolved from prejudice. Max Miiller, Deussen of Kiel, Estlin Carpenter of Oxford, Jastrow of Pennsylvania, Jackson of Columbia, Lan- man and Moore of Harvard, remind us by the dignity and depth of their effort to discover and disclose the esoteric values of religious conceptions that have little in common with the West, how much can be done by the scholar to atone for the mis- takes of the zealot and the bigot. Unhappily, the modern interest shown by Christians in the indigenous faiths of the East has not generally retained the judicial temperance of true scholarship. In some cases, it has fallen into a feeble sentimentality, an indiscriminate and un- intelligent praising of the East. But the conventional mental attitude is contemp- tuous. It is the involuntary temper in which the Anglo-Saxon examines intel- lectual products of the East. Scorn pre- cedes knowledge and follows research. Disparagement is instinctive. It becomes, too often, the atmosphere in which Chris- tian zeal undertakes to do its work. The arrow of criticism is dipped in bitterness 22 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE ere it is set to the bow. Even the lip of the evangelist curls with disdain at the folly of those to whom he essays to proclaim a better gospel. It is sixty years since John Wilson, one of the most consecrated of Scottish missionaries, desiring, with all the ardor of a noble heart, to win the Parsis of Bombay to the Cross of Christ, produced a learned book on "The Parsi Religion," upon the title-page of which he placed the following promising sentence from one of the official deliverances of the Bombay Government: "The course of argument and fair reason cannot be impeded." Having thus encouraged his intelligent and sensitive Parsi readers to anticipate a treatment of the subject most sacred to them in a spirit which I have described as "judicial temperance," Dr. Wilson opens his Preface with this formidable (though scarcely irenic) deliverance : " The religion of the Parsis, notwithstanding the pueril- ities and absurdities with which it is now associated, is substantially the same, in its general principles at the present day, that it was in the ages of antiquity. It is not without high interest in the history of CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 23 the speculations and errors of the human mind. It was perhaps inferior in its ele- ments and institutions to the forms of faith professed by at least some of the surrounding nations; but, on this very account, it merits attention; affording, as it does, an illustration of the almost un- bounded scope which the human mind will, indolently, or actively, give to the device and practice of vanity, and, I will add, folly and impiety, in connection with its professed intercommunion with the powers of the unseen world." l One needs only to read the correspond- ence that issued upon the publication of that book, to see how deeply in the tender flesh of Indian consciousness sank the arrow of Dr. Wilson's contemptuous inter- est in the Parsi religion. Sixty years have passed, but the spirit that poisoned the book still runs in the veins of some West- ern champions of Christ against the East. They cannot, apparently, discriminate be- tween the duty of promulgating the faith of their inheritance, and the impulse to dis- 1 The Parsi Religion, by John Wilson, D. D., M. R. A. S. Bombay, 1843. 24 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE parage and vilify the conceptions which they hope to displace. They cannot, apparently, look up in worship to their own Lord and Master without looking down in contempt on institutions and theories of being that have had lordship and mastery for millions of human souls through a thousand gen- erations. They may, for obvious reasons of prudence, suppress the open utterances of this contempt, yet its potency is in their hearts and lurks beneath the outward decorum of expediency. But they do not, apparently, observe how the contemptuous spirit nourished in the soul toward their brother's faith, makes hollow with pro- fessionalism the efforts to persuade and convert ; and often gives to their own pre- sentations of religious thought a barrenness and provincialism, which, to their auditors, represent the grotesque or supercilious language of aliens. It should not be in- ferred, from these remarks, that I am ignorant of those aspects of Oriental reli- gious thinking and practice which from time to time have excited the reprobation or the derision of the West. No one, famil- iar with the actual state of non-Christian CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 25 thought, both popular and philosophical, in the Orient to-day, will question that there are, in it, many things that prompt the spirit of disdain, in one who applies to the problem only the conventional standards of Western judgment. Alike in the reli- gious literature and the religious practice of the East are conditions that not only have no parallel in the West, but that contra- vene every Western tradition of intellectual efficiency and ethical propriety. Nor is it in the least surprising that those who, in either of the mental attitudes that we are now engaged in discussing, whether pas- sive curiosity or contemptuous interest, study the ritual and morale of the idol temple, or penetrate into the intellectual and ethical atmosphere of the Hindu Pu- ranas and Tantras, come back from their investigations, the one stimulated by hor- rifying novelties, the other burning with scornful denunciations. These results are to be anticipated in the nature of the case, from observations made by those who lack the necessary breadth of view, psychological insight, patient, tolerant, comprehending, Godlike love. 26 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE The question engaging us at this mo- ment, and, in fact, throughout this Lecture and this course of Lectures, is the follow- ing: Is there anywhere to be found the suggestion of a mental attitude that we may not only take into this study of non- Christian faiths but into our missionary labors among non-Christian races, superior to passive curiosity and unlike contemp- tuous interest ? Is there anywhere to be found suggestion of a view so broad, an insight so deep, a love so patient, tolerant, comprehending, Godlike, that it discerns and reveres, beneath aberrations of idol- worship, passionate cults of polytheism, and unethical reactions of a pantheistic world- order, the common soul of humanity, the imperishable seed of God ? It is my belief, and, in this Lecture my contention, that there is a higher mental attitude for the study of non-Christian religions, and that it is suggested by the temper of the mind of Christ, and particularly by His attitude toward foreign races and religions. In order to appreciate this aspect of the mind of Christ, it is not necessary to enter on what appears to some as the debatable CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 27 ground of theology, nor to raise any meta- physical question touching His Person. For our purpose it is better to escape from the perplexing regions of controversy and divergence, and to repair to that ground where all may stand together, paying homage and reverence to the mind of the incomparable Jesus. Whatever breadth and catholicity we find in Him, as a Teacher sent from God, whatever unifying view of the race, whatever appreciation of the universal in religion, as distinguished from the local and sectarian, but takes on deeper meaning and authoritative sugges- tion, if one be drawn by the evidence to regard Jesus Christ as the Image of the Invisible God. There is, one may say, an a priori inter- est awakened in respect of the attitude of Jesus Christ toward foreign races and their faiths when we reflect upon the geographi- cal location of Palestine. A cosmopolitan atmosphere pervaded the Syrian desert, and breathed from the eastward upon the hills and valleys of Palestine. This we are apt to forget. Because of the early occu- pancy of the country by the people of 28 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE Israel and the upbuilding within it of a theocratic commonwealth marked by- great exclusiveness, the mind tends to regard the scene of Christ's life and la- bors as relatively secluded from the com- mon world. Israel, in which He dwelt, and of which He was a part, seems to our thought a land isolated from other lands by religious and ceremonial walls. It is necessary to correct this impression by recalling well-known facts of history. For fifteen centuries before the time of Christ, the desert stretching eastward from Palestine had been a highway to the Orient. The tread of innumerable camels had hollowed the caravan road from Da- mascus northward through Mesopotamia to the lower Euphrates; where ships from India, creeping warily along the Asiatic shore to the Persian Gulf, dis- charged their rich freight in the marts of Chaldea, and their passengers, bound for the Mediterranean littoral and the palaces of Egypt. The lamented Sir Wil- liam Hunter, whose "History of British India" was interrupted by his too early death, has left a spirited account of the CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 29 ancient trade-routes between Southern Europe and the Asiatic peoples. The Syrian route was the oldest of these imme- morial paths of international communica- tion. The complete control of this Syrian route in the age of Solomon forms what Sir William Hunter well calls "the mer- cantile epic of Israel." "The record of the rare and costly products with which it adorned Jerusalem, and of the transit du- ties which it yielded to the king, reads like a psalm rather than a trade catalogue." 1 The pigments and precious stones, the shields of beaten gold, the traffic of the spice merchants, the apes and peacocks for the pleasure gardens, the sandalwood pillars for the House of the Lord, are flash- ing pictures of an Orientalism which abides in India to the present day. The Scrip- tures of the Old Testament breathe the poetry of the caravan route, " with its ad- vancing clouds of dust, its guards posted at night," its midday encampments, its brown mystery of spaces, its dry, delicious air. "Who is this?" cries the author of the Song of Solomon, — 1 History of British India, vol. i. p. 24. 30 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE " Who is this that cometh up out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke, Perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, With all powders of the merchant ? " 1 It was into this atmosphere of long-estab- lished cosmopolitanism that Jesus came, to teach men the truth of a world-sympathy more powerful than mercantile interest, more subtle than racial instinct. We must remember that, in His time, Jerusalem, where His ministry centred, and where it consummated itself in the final sacrifice, was as truly a meeting-place and cross- roads of alien races as Aden or Colombo to-day. Through the eyes of the narrator in the Acts of the Apostles, we look out upon the sort of scene with which Christ was familiar and the sort of audience which He addressed. "There were dwell- ing at Jerusalem," says the narrator, "men from every nation under heaven. Parthians and Medes and Elamites and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, in Judaea and Cappa- docia, in Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and 1 Song of Solomon iii. 6. Cf . for all the above, Sir William Hunter, History of British India, vol. i. pp. 23-30. CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 31 sojourners from Rome, both Jews and pros- elytes, Cretans and Arabians." * In addition to the thorough-going cosmo- politanism of the time, caused by the geo- graphical and commercial conditions of Palestine, one must remember that Jesus was born into an age from which the auto- cratic power of an independent Israel had departed, giving place to foreign military control, and all the influences, direct and indirect, that follow in the train of such a dispensation. The gilded wings of Roman eagles flashed in the Syrian sun. Roman law-givers and Roman law policed the conduct of the populace and held in leash the clerical insurrectionaries. Roman gods, Greek philosophies, irrepressible voices of other civilizations, broke in on the proud reserve of a nation whose glory was sepa- rateness, whose sanctity was Pharisaic scorn of the world. In repudiation of contacts no longer avoidable, Jewish orthodoxy made broad its phylacteries, enlarged the borders of its garments, bound on men's shoulders heavy burdens and grievous to be borne; seeking, with the bitterness of religious in- 1 Acta ii. 5-11. 32 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE tolerance, to provide an antidote for the bitterness of political humiliation. Upon this spectacle of impotent acerbity the bar- barian conquerors looked with answering scorn; their policy at once to pacify and to goad; tolerating the temple sacrifice to Jehovah, but taxing the worshipers to swell the revenues of an idol-serving Emperor. From the trampled background of these conditions, the figure of Jesus emerges and advances toward us, wearing the stainless mantle of purity and peace. No trace of contemporary bitterness is upon Him, no bond of traditional narrowness impedes the freedom of His movement. How won- derful He is when we look on Him, and on the time from which He sprang! Light against darkness, as the radiant bow against the muttering cloud. What might He not have been, as an apostle of Phar- isaic hate, with His gifts and His inher- itance ! If ever one had the impulse of hereditary provocation to despise foreign religions, it was He. Jesus Christ — be the word with reverence spoken — was a Jew. Behind Him, according to the flesh, ex- tended a pure Semitic ancestry, princely and CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 33 priestly. The blood-royal of the House of David was in His veins. King of the Jews was He, in principle, and might have been in fact. Yet His thought is unoccupied, alike by yearnings for distinction or by the political resentments of his fellow- citizens. Larger solicitudes fill His breast and pour forth beyond the boundaries of race and country: "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My bur- den is light." 1 Had there been but one such utterance from Him, it were enough to show the presence in contemporary Juda- ism of a personality absolved, in instinct, in scope of experience, in mental attitude, from ancestral limitations, and superior to current opinions. Had there been only these gracious words, they were enough to separate Him forever from all complicity with the deeds of religious oppression, racial and sectarian prejudice, ecclesias- tical ostracism wrought in His name; and 1 Matt. 23. 28-30. 34 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE to inflame all kindred spirits with desire to escape into the uncalculating world-sym- pathy of Christ, from a stunted and pro- vincialized Christianity, degenerated from its glorious prototype. It is a happy portent of the mental atti- tude in which He is to regard foreign races and their faiths, that even the manger of the infancy becomes a magnetic point, drawing the attention of the thoughtful Orient. The wise men from the East, led by influences that we may not define, seek Him at His birth, with worship in their hearts. Many a train of patient camels had moved through the Solitudo Palmyrena, and plunged into the desert again, to emerge at Damascus, with precious burdens for the merchants of Sidon and Ascalon, or the grandees of the Nile. But this camel train carries freights more precious than gold, frankincense, and myrrh, even the hopes and fears of an East that, through the ages, ever has stretched out hands of longing unto God. As He reaches manhood and enters His public ministry, no quality is more nobly displayed than loyalty to His ancestral race CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 35 and to its institutions. He has indeed come unto His own, and although His own do not receive Him, no rejection of His teach- ing, no injury done against Himself, can alienate Him from the children of Abraham. It is His devotion to the Temple and the Law that inflames His indignation against those who would defile the one and per- vert the other. To the mercenary priests, who permitted bartering and avarice to in- fest the sacred courts, He says : " Take these things hence ; make not my Father's house a house of merchandise." l To the hypocriti- cal scribes His rebuke is terrible : " Ye blind ■ guides — ye fools and blind — ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he is become so, ye make him twofold more a son of hell than yourselves." 2 By the severity of His denunciations we mea- sure the depth of His love for the things He would protect. His affection for the syna- gogue was great; His was a familiar figure in that forum of Jewish thought. He held the Sabbath in honor, and entertained the Sabbath custom as a desirable part of life's routine. He honored the teachings of the 1 John ii. 16. 2 Cf. Matt, xxiii. 15-17. 36 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE past, and commended them to the reason and conscience of His Age. "Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one i tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished." * At times His sense of loyalty to ancestral relationships became so strong it seemed like a limitation; as when, in an excursion out of Jewish territory into the Phoenician littoral, He said to the foreigner who soli- cited His aid : "I was not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel." 2 One loves to trace in Him these marks of fidelity to the local inheritance of tradition, cus- tom, and duty. It makes His example in the larger relations of service more compell- ing, because every note of patriotism and hereditary reverence for birthright obliga- tion rang true in His soul. The mental atti- tude of Christ toward Israel reminds us that world-sympathy is not attained by the surrender of natural feeling; that passion- ate love for the world at large does not imply 1 Matt. v. 17, 18. 2 Matt. xv. 24. CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 37 loss of interest in the world at home. Christ's zeal for Israel, undiminished by His solicitude for the world, recalls the splen- did utterance of St. Paul, the world-apostle, the most cosmopolitan of Christ's follow- ers, "If any provideth not for his own, and specially his own household, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever." x But, on the other hand, as we observe and admire in Christ this quality of loyalty whereby, though lifted in heart and mind above the Judaism of His time, He cannot, by interests without or repulses within, be alienated from His own, we mark, in His mental attitude toward foreign races and religions, a vigorous differentiation from the spirit of Israel. The essence of the spirit of Israel toward the religious and social aspirations of those outside of the circle of privilege might be expressed, with the brevity of an aphorism, in the naive admission of the Fourth Evangelist : " Jews have no dealings with Samaritans." 2 The extent to which this separation of mental attitude could be carried is indicated by Christ in His parable of the sufferer as- 1 1 Tim. v. 8. 2 John iv. 9. 88 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE saulted by highwaymen: "There came a priest, and likewise a Levite, and looked and passed by on the other side." * Loyalty to the ancestral type had bred in Israel contempt for the alien. To pass by on the other side, at first an act of duty, that the pearl of truth might be kept aloof from defilement, had become an instinct of es- trangement, a conscious withdrawal of sym- pathy, a leaving of the world to its fate. It is one of the regrettable limitations of average human nature that a conviction of truth may give birth to formidable errors. Witness is borne to this throughout the history of Christendom. By the spirit in which men have held and expressed faith, has its progress often been hindered and its nature belied. The frequent results of con- viction have been intolerance; revealed in an active form as persecution, in a passive form as self-withdrawal. The philosophy of the spirit of persecution affords one of the most interesting, as also one of the most painful, problems in the history of religion. The impulse to attack, to injure, even to destroy those of a faith contrary to one's 1 Cf. Luke x. 81, 32. CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 89 own, is not wholly inconsistent with a ra- tional mind and a high standard of moral- ity. The brilliant and ingenuous St. Paul, referring to the mental attitude fostered in him in early life by Jewish intolerance, gives this analysis of the ethics of persecution: "I verily thought with myself, that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And this I also did in Jerusalem; and I both shut up many of the saints in prisons, having received authority from the chief priests, and when they were put to death, I gave my vote against them. And punishing them oftentimes in all the synagogues, I strove to make them blas- pheme ; and being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted them even unto foreign cities." 1 It is very terrible to reflect that the conviction of truth has power under any circumstances to beget this madness, this pursuing enmity, this desire to make another human being blaspheme and for- swear the things that are sacred to him. Christ has explained how it becomes pos- sible. Forewarning His disciples of the sure approach of persecution to themselves, 1 Acts xrvi. 9-11. 40 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE He says: "They shall put you out of the synagogues : yea, the hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you shall think that he offereth service unto God." Then He gives the clue to all, " And these things will they do, because they have not known the Father, nor Me." 1 The secret of religious persecution is ignorance of God as He is ; a lack of comprehension of the spirit of Christ. Men have professed to know God, have professed to be disciples of Christ, yet have persecuted with the enmity of devils, because they knew not Him whom igno- rantly they sought to please. Whately touches this point when he says, in the course of one of his Essays: "Persecution is not wrong because it is cruel ; it is cruel because it is wrong." 2 As the softening influences of general culture affect society, persecution, which is the active form of intolerance, becomes more infrequent, and, on humanitarian grounds, generally is deplored and cen- sured. Meanwhile the passive form of intolerance, more subtle because less obvi- 1 John xvi. 2, 3. 2 Errors of Romanism, p. 144. 4th ed. 1880. CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 41 ous, more courteous but not less un-Christ- like, continues to govern the mental atti- tude of many toward races and faiths not their own. The passive form of intoler- ance is self-withdrawal — passing by on the other side; looking with more or less contempt, and leaving to their fate with more or less indifference, Eastern races and their faiths. It is the form in which intolerance secretes itself in an age boast- ful of intellectual breadth, and poisons its thinking at the heart. The pride of Anglo- Saxon culture is profound. Not without reason do we point to our achievements in the field of science and in the field of religion. We have built a glorious struc- ture, self-consistent in all its parts. We have had the courage to investigate the data of our religion in the light of history, and to record our findings impartially; we have shown energy in the study of social conditions at home, in the propagation of our religious beliefs abroad, and in mak- ing converts who renounced their Oriental- ism in religion and became Westernized. We are properly anxious to develop the strength and correct the weaknesses of 42 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE other lands and people, to cast the beam of political or financial iniquity out of our own eye that we may see clearly to cast out the mote of official wrongdoing from the eye of any of that younger brotherhood of republics for which we have assumed responsibility. We are willing to enter into commercial relations with the East, wherever the instinct of self-advantage prompts the alliance. Yet, after a hundred years of modern intercourse, the thought of the West, the sympathies of the West, the affiliative instincts of the West, have been held in reserve with a caution blended of distrust, contempt, and self-satisfaction. The military achievements of Japan have provoked admiration, but the fellowship of the heart is as yet given grudgingly by all save an enlightened few. Skilled observers describe the spiritual abyss divid- ing West from East, and account for its existence, naively. Mr. Meredith Town- send, in his brilliant paper on the " Mental Seclusion of India, " 1 bids us observe that Englishmen "dwell among these people (i. e. the Indian races), they talk their 1 Cf. Ana and Europe, pp. 146-154. New York, 1901. CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 43 tongues, they do all manner of business with them, they live by giving them advice and orders, and yet they know next to nothing about them." He proceeds to say: "In the whole century of intercourse no Anglo-Indian has ever written a book which in the least degree revealed the inner character and motives of any considerable section or any great single class, of this im- mensely numerous people. It is as certain as any fact can be, that any Anglo-Indian who wrote a book perceived to be a ' reveal- ing' book about Indians, or any section of them, would, as his reward, receive for- tune, reputation among his contemporaries, fame with posterity; and yet no Anglo- Indian has ever done it, or, so far as appears, ever will do it." When Mr. Townsend asks " What is the solution of this mystery ? " he admits that he has "no full answer to give," but conceives the best available answer to be that "the Indian himself deliberately secludes his mind from the European with a jealous, minute, and per- sistent care, of which probably no man not gifted with an insight like that of Thack- eray could succeed in giving even a remote 44 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE idea." However accurate may be this charge of voluntary mental seclusion (and so candid and honorable an observer as Mr. Meredith TWnsend is not likely to be inaccurate), the disposition which he deplores has a probable origin, not in Oriental secretiveness, but in the spirit of intolerance which, in its passive form of haughty self- withdrawal, has set the West- ern mind in a non-sympathetic attitude, prohibitive of spiritual fellowship. Those who have broken away from the Western conventionality of looking down upon the East, and of passing it by on the other side; those who have sought, not in the spirit of criticism, but in the spirit of love and respect, to enter the inner circle of the Oriental consciousness, find that the secre- tiveness of which Mr. Townsend com- plains is the result, rather than the cause, of Anglo-Saxon contemptuousness. In a later Lecture I shall recur to this subject and discuss it in detail. Meanwhile, I close the present discus- sion with one further attempt to set forth the complete exemption of the mind of Christ from the limitations that have CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 45 bound His followers, as well as from those that affected His contemporaries. If we would understand the meaning of the term "world-sympathy," we must go to Jesus Christ and learn of Him. In Him it repre- sents an atmosphere through which He saw all people and all questions; in which, if one may venture so to speak, He lived and moved and had His being. The precise equivalent of the term "world-sympathy" as the atmosphere of the mind of Christ is the title "Son of Man," evidently most dear to Him. He esteemed Himself to be in, and of, the race. The tribe, the family, the mother that bore Him, He acknowledged and He loved; but not in any sense that made the Cretan, the Arabian, the stranger from Rome, the Lybian, the dweller in Mesopotamia, less the flesh of His flesh, the bone of His bone. "Whosoever shall do the will of My Father which is in heaven, he is My brother, and sister, and mother." » He had not where to lay His head, because no domicile could hold a spirit to which all the world was home. He loved the world, lived for it, died for 1 Matt. xii. 50. 46 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE it. The large friendliness of His attitude is beautiful to look upon. He conceived of His own influence as designed for and capable of diffusion throughout the con- sciousness of every species, grade, and class of humanity: "I am the light of the world." * He offered Himself as an undif- ferentiated gift to humanity — a gift from the Infinite Store of Good: "The bread which I will give is My flesh, for the life of the world." 2 He conceived that by death He might best express the longing, that exceeded the capacity of life, to gain the answering love of man. "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Myself." 3 As a Jew by earthly inherit- ance, He recognized the limitations that set bounds and special values upon the salva- tion of the House of Israel, and deliberately He broke over them in a torrent of world- sympathy: "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear My voice; and they shall become one flock, one shepherd." 4 He leads His disciples, at the last, beyond 1 John viii. 12. 2 John vi. 51. 8 John xii. 32. * John x. 16. CHRIST AND WORLD-SYMPATHY 47 the walls of the city of ceremonialism and race prejudice and stands on the hill of Bethany, whence one can catch the far- beaming flash of His eye that saw to the world's end, and the pointing of His hand that stretched toward the ancient East, and swept the new-born West, as He says : "Go ye into all the world." * Nor did He lack evidence that the passion for humanity that burned within Him smote with blessed warmth that answering heart of human- ity which wakes ever, to the earth's last bound, where love lives and speaks. The alien woman of Syrophoenicia knows with a mother's instinct that a heart like this will not withhold its gift from her tortured child. The half-heathenized Samaritan finds in His majestic power of insight grace that wakes conscience from the dead. The Greeks seek Him. The Roman at the Cross salutes Him. And He, with pity in His failing eye, and charity in His invin- cible heart, prays for His foreign murder- ers, as He dies, loving in death, as He had loved in life, the world that lies beyond what men call true religion — "Father, for- 1 Mark xvi. 15. 48 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE give them; for they know not what they do." * Such is the world-sympathy of Jesus Christ. In this Lecture I have sought but to exhibit it. I have not attempted to interpret it. In my Lecture to-morrow evening I shall try to find the present mes- sage of this world-sympathy, as suggested by the Larger Meaning of the Incarnation. 1 Luke xxiii. 34. LECTURE n THE LARGER MEANING OP THE INCARNATION It lacks but a few days of sixty years since Frederick W. Robertson, of whom Stopford Brooke, his biographer, said, "The work which he has done upon human hearts is as imperishable as his own immortality in God," preached at Cheltenham, on be- half of the Hospital, his sermon on "The Human Race Typified by the Man of Sor- rows." He referred to the world-sympathy of Christ implied in His self-chosen title, "The Son of Man." He said: "There are two aspects in which we may consider the Redeemer of the world. We may think of Him as the Christ or we may think of Him as the Son of Man. When we think of Him as the Christ, He stands before us as God, claiming our adoration. When we think of Him in that character in which He so loved to describe Himself, as the Son of Man, He stands before us as a type or specimen of the whole human race. As if the blood 50 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE of the whole human race were in His veins, He calls Himself the Son of Man. There is," he continues, " a universality in the char- acter of Christ which you find in the charac- ter of no other man. Translate the words of Christ into what country's language you will, He might have been the offspring of that country. Date them by what cen- tury of the world you will, they belong to that century as much as to any other. There is nothing of nationality about Christ. There is nothing of that personal peculiarity which we call idiosyncrasy. There is nothing peculiar to any particular age of the world. He was not the Asiatic. He was not the European. He was not the Jew. He was not the mechanic. He was not the aristocrat. But He was the Man. He was the child of every age and every nation. His was a life world-wide. His was a heart pulsating with the blood of the human race. He reckoned for His ancestry the collective myriads of mankind. Em- phatically He was the Son of Man." ' In my Lecture last evening I attempted, 1 The Human Race and Other Sermons, preached at Chel- tenham, Oxford, Brighton. New York, 1881. LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 51 in the spirit of Frederick W. Robertson, to depict the characteristic mental attitude of Christ toward foreign races and their faiths, and to present it in contrast with some of the attitudes that have been taken in the course of Western civilization; the blind antagonism fostered by international ignorance and bigotry; the passive curiosity of the modern traveler in search of new sensations ; the contemptuous interest of the Anglo-Saxon specialist in the field of eth- nic faiths; the ill-considered zeal of the missionary who attempts to employ denun- ciation or derision as agents of conversion from what he describes as the follies of heathenism. I have pointed out the ex- emption of the mind of Christ from these limitations that have bound His followers. While preserving toward His ancestral race and its institutions an inalienable loyalty, His world-sympathy was as an atmosphere through which He saw all people and all questions. Love for the world took on, in Him, a character so majestic and attained a degree so absolute, that the only ade- quate symbol of it is, by common consent of twenty centuries, the Cross of Calvary. 52 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE The interpretation of the mental attitude of Christ was not attempted in the last Lecture. The time and the subject sufficed only to exhibit on the sombre background of contrast the radiant Person of the Son of Man. It is the problem of this Lecture to convey in outline the suggestion of a possible interpretation of this incomparable person. I may say that what I have seen of the world has forced me to seek some interpretation of Christ as broad and as vital as the problem of humanity. We can scarcely permit ourselves to think of Christ's life without thinking of its meaning for the world. We cannot content ourselves with merely reviewing the words and deeds of Christ, laying them away in the casket of memory with the pensive reflection that He in whom such loveliness and catholicity appeared was numbered with the dead while still bearing on His brow the youth- fulness of three and thirty years. When we attempt to describe Christ in the terms of regretful appreciation with which we speak of another who exhibited charms of character, but was snatched away by an untimely death, the lips refuse to do their LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 53 work. They are sealed by the conviction of the reason and the heart that behind and within the brief chronicle of that Life lies a permanent revelation of facts that are universal, of qualities that are infinite. Upon whatever line of personal expression we view Christ, the conviction strengthens that His local appearance upon earth calls for interpretation in the terms of the uni- versal, as a revelation given under the form of an historic event. If we take His words and ponder them, they deliver to us mes- sages, not from the limited sources of an individual experience, but from the author- itative seat of the Final Wisdom. " Never man so spake." If we take His character and analyze it, it presents the aspects, not of approximation to an ideal standard, but of the unveiling of the utterly True, the utterly Good, the utterly Beautiful. If we take His mental attitude toward human- ity, it is found to contain more than the disposition of liberality, shared by many of the greater minds; it is the embodiment of principles involving the attitude of God toward the world, the intrinsic value of man considered apart from accidents of 54 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE environments, the fundamental unity of the human race. In the present Lecture we are engaged specifically with these last considerations; namely, the implications involved in the mental attitude of Jesus Christ toward foreign races and their faiths. I shall hope to show that they furnish us with suggestions of the Larger Meaning of the Incarnation. That it is possible to attach to the Incar- nation of Jesus Christ meanings that are large and welcome with the warmth of reality, or meanings that are narrow, exclusive, and repellent with technicality, is shown by the course of religious think- ing in the West. One cannot doubt, who looks broadly on the development of Christian history from the beginning, that the sense of obligation to define, and, so to say, to interpret the Person of Christ, has been present at all times. Nor can one see how the essential moral principles of our religion could have been protected from evaporation, or how the religion itself could have worked its way through the ignorance, superstition, and animalism which it encountered, had there not been LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 55 this sleepless vigilance not only to safe- guard, but to interpret, the faith that animated the company of apostles and mobilized the army of martyrs. But the scholasticism of the West, however lofty its purpose and devout its spirit, involved itself in the intricacy and exactness of its definitions of the Person of Christ; and, by throwing the accent upon the academic side of the problem, it furnished an illus- tration of the way in which the greatest of subjects can be enshrouded in disputes about words, to no profit but to the sub- verting of the hearers. Principal Caird does not state the situation unfairly in saying that the doctrine of the Incarnation "came to be regarded simply as one of those doctrines which lie beyond the scope of human intelligence, as a theological enigma or mystery; a doctrine indeed not contrary to reason, but above reason; yet which, as authoritatively revealed, must be received as an article of faith." 1 When the accent is thus placed on the technical definition of Christ as the physical and metaphysical apparition of God, the inter- 1 Fundamental Ideas, vol. ii. p. 100. 56 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE est shifts necessarily from the fact of the Incarnation and its meaning for the world to scholastic conflicts over rival definitions of the fact. Henry Hallam, in his " In- troduction to the Literature of Europe," 1 comments on the great revival of the papal religion which occurred after the shock it" had sustained in the first part of the six- teenth century. He assigns as the prin- cipal cause of this revival of Catholicism the relapse of Protestantism into academic controversies. He speaks of those "per- petual disputes, those irreconcilable ani- mosities, that bigotry, and, above all, that persecuting spirit, which were exhibited in the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches. Each began with a common principle, the necessity of the orthodox faith. But this orthodoxy meant evidently nothing more than their own belief as opposed to that of their adversaries ; a belief acknowledged to be fallible, yet maintained as certain; rejecting authority in one breath and ap- pealing to it in the next ; claiming to rest on sure proof of reason and Scripture, which their opponents were ready with just as 1 Cf. vol. i. pp. 542-552. LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 57 much confidence to invalidate." One of the subjects in dispute between Calvinists and Lutherans was the real presence or ubiquity of Christ's body in the Sacrament. Another was the free will of man in rela- tion to the Decree of God. A third was the Person of Christ in its metaphysical relation to the Godhead ; and it led to one of the tragedies of scholastic history when the charming Spanish physician Servetus, "who distinctly held the Divinity of Christ" (Hallam), was burned to ashes at the age of forty-two by the not less charming and gifted Calvin, then but two years his senior, who held the same belief, yet with other metaphysical connotations. It is not for me to press upon this audi- ence my own personal faith in that aspect of the Incarnation which relates to the in- ward and esoteric correspondences of the nature of Christ with the absolute essence of the Infinite. I have such a faith, and it grows stronger continually. This faith is for me most precious and of deepening reality, but, in a matter so high and so obviously beyond the sphere of definition, it is my duty to hold this faith with trem- 58 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN EACE bling before God and to confess it with humility before men. The attempt to define the indefinable and to invest the result with authority, is the producing cause of schism in the household of Christ and alienation among His brethren. It is a part of the pathos of Christian history that the joy of sharing in the larger view of the Incarnation so often has been sacri- ficed to the zealous, but futile, effort to establish the universal authority of specific theories of the physical and phenomenal Person of Christ. It would be a comfort to some, perhaps, if the universal authority of a particular theory could be established. Meanwhile there is a sense, large and warm with reality, in which those who differ in theory may agree in principle, and see in Christ with eyes of common faith the Image of the Invisible God. It is the effort of this Lecture to bring into view this larger interpretation, which casts no criticism and raises no debate on any man's personal metaphysic of Christ, but answers that instinct in every heart which prostrates itself in reverence and offers itself in ser- vice to the Divine that Christ discloses. LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 59 "Strong Son of God, immortal Love, "Whom we, that have not seen Thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Believing where we cannot prove ; " Thou seemest human and Divine, The highest, holiest manhood, Thou: Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them Thine." So long as we look upon the Incarna- tion Idea as a breach of the natural order, as the breaking into the world of a God who ordinarily lives apart in the inscrutable solitudes of infinity, so long will the Incar- nation of Jesus Christ present to many minds aspects of unreality which invalidate His claim to be the Redeemer and the Light of the World. Those whose theory of the world is materialistic, and to whom mind is simply a function of the material life and the physical brain, are likely to have no place in their ordinary system of thinking for the Incarnation Idea; because they are likely to feel no need of an unseen realm of spiritual personality lying behind the ma- terial world, and expressing itself through the medium of the material and phenome- 60 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE nal world. This expression of the unseen spiritual through the visible material is the Incarnation Idea. Mr. William Wynne Pey- ton, a Scottish writer too little known on this side of the sea, says in his book, "The Three Greatest Forces in the World," 1 "The Incarnation Idea is essentially that of the unseen universe looking out upon us from the seen." This is a striking and cor- rect definition. To those who can trust the evidence of their own consciousness as it is given occasionally in the presence of the lovely or awe-inspiring scenes of nature, there is no difficulty in apprehending the reasonableness of the Incarnation Idea. It is this of which we are conscious in moments of unfettered communion with nature. That which the eye sees, of gran- deur and beauty : the balancings of clouds, the glittering ice-ranges, the interminable delight of sun-swept oceans ; that which the ear hears, of birds in fair morning hours of early summer, of winds breathing through masses of pine forest; that which the hand handles, of emblazoned flowers and gems curiously wrought in the lower parts of the i 105. LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 61 earth, conveys to us more than the image of itself. Looking out on us from that phenomenal image is suggestion of the Invisible; of the world of illimitable pur- pose, feeling, and power. This is the Incar- nation Idea, expressed through nature. It is the witness in nature of the Immanence of God. One cannot refrain from repeat- ing Wordsworth's immortal lines, written as he looked once more on "the sound- ing cataract, the tall rock, the mountain, the deep and gloomy wood" near Tintern Abbey: — "I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things." 62 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE But this experience of the Incarnation Idea, "of the Unseen Universe looking out upon us, " comes nearer to us than the con- fines of external nature. We know it in ourselves, in the mysterious witnessings of our subliminal consciousness to a power belonging to the Infinite, the Eternal, the Unseen, which is looking out upon us from the depths of our own being. It is the In- carnation Idea; God with us, in us ; and we, in Him. It is the scientific verification of religion. "I contend," said the lamented Frederick W.H. Myers, in his " Human Per- sonality and its Survival of Bodily Death," "that religion and science are no separa- ble or independent provinces of thought or action; but rather that each name im- plies a different aspect of the same idea." "Assuredly," he continues, "this deepening response of man's spirit to the cosmos deep- ening around him must be affected by all the signals which now are glimmering out of the night to tell him of his inmost nature and his endless fate." 1 The words, spoken by one who now, we must believe, knows in the state after death the fulfillment of these 1 Vol. i. p. 3. LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 63 prophecies of the subliminal consciousness, remind us again of Wordsworth: — " Those first affections. Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our seeing; Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake, To perish never; Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, Nor Man nor Boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy! " What I have now said concerning the witness of the Invisible through nature and man prepares us to see in Jesus Christ the complete expression of the Incarnation Idea. If through impersonal nature we have re- ceived impressions of a self-revealing God looking out upon us from the things that are seen; if in our own consciousness we have had this impression confirmed of an indwelling and self-disclosing Infinite, not- withstanding all the superincumbent den- sity of the physical, and all the obstructing 64 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE media of sinfulness and ignorance, there is at least no contradictory element involved in the thought of one absolute expression of the Incarnation Idea, one complete self- disclosure of the mind and spirit of God occurring in the world's history. That such did occur in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ becomes a scientific probability, in the light of the actual history of civilization. The words of Frederick W. H. Myers, to whom I have already referred, are significant of the opinion of a man of science : x "In an age when scattered ritual, local faiths, tribal solutions of cosmic problems, were destroy- ing each other by mere contact and fusion, an event occurred which in the brief record of man's still incipient civilization may be regarded as unique. A life was lived in which the loftiest response which man's need of moral guidance had ever received was cor- roborated by phenomena which have been widely regarded as convincingly miraculous, and which are said to have culminated in a Resurrection from the dead. To those phenomena or to that Resurrection it would at this point be illegitimate for me to refer 1 Cf. Human Personality, vol. i. p. 8. LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 65 in defence of my argument. I have ap- pealed to science, and to science I must go; in the sense that it would be unfair for me to claim support from that which science in her strictness can set aside as the tradition of a pre-scientific age. Yet this one great tradition, as we know, has, as a fact, won the adhesion and reverence of the great majority of European minds. The complex results which followed from this triumph of Christianity have been dis- cussed by many historians. But one result, which here appears to us in a new light, was this — that the Christian religion, the Christian Church, became for Europe the accredited representative and guardian of all phenomena bearing upon the World Unseen." From this point of view science itself can regard Jesus Christ as the Image of the Invisible God, the unique, unhindered ex- pression of the life and fullness of the God- head. In Jesus Christ the Incarnation Idea obtains entire fulfillment: the unseen, to use the glowing words of William Wynne Peyton, 1 "looks out upon us from the seen. 1 Cf. Three Greatest Forces, pp. 105, 117, 118. 66 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE The Incarnation in Christ is linked into the history of the whole creation. It is not a wedge driven into the unity of nature; rather it is nature fulfilling herself, the home-coming of the hope of ages, the star- dust of incarnations rolled into a sun. When the Sinless Man appeared, the Ideal, the Archetype, the Archangel of Humanity, then He is discerned as the Incarnation of the Absolute Personality, whom we feel in the heart of the universe." This discussion of the Incarnation Idea obviously bears upon our main subject, which is, "The Attitude of Jesus Christ toward Foreign Races and Religions." The significance and the authority of that attitude are determined by the significance for us of the Person of Christ. The larger mean- ing of the Incarnation begins to appear when in that sacred Person we feel the Un- seen Infinite looking out upon us from the seen; when we become able to accept His own suggestion: "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." ' At that moment a new significance invests His every word and attends His every act bearing upon 1 John xiv. 9. LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 67 questions of humanity; an authority which combines with the charm of example the majesty of revelation. It still remains prob-' able, because of our various temperaments, our diverse training, our dissimilar tradi- tional inheritances, that we may differ from one another in respect of that private and personal metaphysic of Christ which repre- sents in the soul of each worshipful man his own capacity to realize the inward and esoteric correspondences of the nature of Christ with the absolute essence of the Infinite ; yet we are one in reaching a con- ception of the Father through Christ, and, with the author of the Epistle to the He- brews, we can all say: " God hath spoken unto us in a Son, who is the effulgence of His glory, and the very Image of His sub- stance." x What, then, are those characteristics in the mental attitude of Christ toward for- eign races and their faiths, whereby — assuming Him to reveal the Father — we learn the actual attitude of God toward this complex world of men ? I have pointed out in my former Lecture the contrast be- 1 Cf. Heb. i. 1-3, marg. 68 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE tween the mind of Christ, in this world relation, and conventional attitudes with which history and observation have made us familiar. We look in vain for any trace in Him of antagonism such as has been developed by racial aversions, feuds, and religious fanaticisms. He was entirely out of that atmosphere of antagonism. He never entered it. It is impossible for the imagination to connect it with Him. Pre- judice He had none; to race hatreds He was a stranger. To the type of superior- ity represented by Pharisaism He opposed the fine and terrible scorn of a nature too great for such petty self -exaltation. His only religious controversy was with the insincerity and intolerance of the religious leaders of His own people. There were idol temples in His time, with their priests and their votaries, yet He attacked them not. Nature worship and animism existed in His time, yet He made no crusade against them. Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucian- ism, Zoroastrianism, were all in force when He gathered the eleven on the hill of Bethany and said: "Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations." LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 69 But no syllable of denunciation was added concerning faiths and practices opposed to every ethical and intellectual principle for which He stood. There is reason to think that He made use of certain features of those older religions in some of His own teachings and discourses. It appalls one to think of the recurring paroxysms of anti-Semitism in various quarters of Christendom, of the animalistic ferocity against Moslems that made the Crusaders, going to sanctify the grave of Him who abhorred religious strife, like tigers vaulting on their prey. This is anti-Christ, signing itself with the name of Christ. It is godlessness essaying to do God service. Nor can we find in Christ a trace of the passive curiosity that looks lightly on this manifestation of ethnic religion and on that, as diverting eccentricities of heathen- ism, which stimulate the beholder with the sense of novelty as he saunters through lands with which he owns no brotherhood, which are to him no more than scenes in a play. Equally far from the mind of Christ is the note of academic contemptuousness 70 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE toward alien thought that runs like an undertone through some of the Western study of religion, prejudicing its conclu- sions. We are all familiar with it. It represents the involuntary constitutional reactions of the historic sense of the West against an Oriental spirit, which, with deficient cosmopolitanism, it disparages be- cause it is so unhistorical, forgetting that the mysticism it disparages, like the Hegeli- anism over whose downfall it exults, may be, meantime, in certain of its best ele- ments, slowly coming to its own in the deep- est life of the West; merely because the West, like the East, is human. It is im- possible to connect the Spirit of Christ with this attitude of academic contemptuous- ness. It fits neither His thinking nor His feeling. His thinking precludes it, in part because historically He stood close to a philosophical atmosphere imbued with agnosticism, yet never, even by implica- tion, condemned the esoteric instinct, nor taught that the ethical is to be segregated from the mystical, nor that the one by necessity excludes or infringes upon the other. What Christ denounced was a ritu- LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 71 alistic mysticism that had outlived, in senile interest in trifles, its virile zest for the deep things of God. Christ's thinking precluded this aca- demic contemptuousness, because, also, of the completeness of His view of the world. He conceived it ever in its oneness, as re- lated to Himself, and as related to truth. He saw Himself always in world relations. The utterance in Matthew, 1 with the magnificent rendering supplied by the margin, states, as in a glittering epigram, His impartial self -giving to the world: "As the lightning cometh forth from the east and is seen even unto the west, so shall be the presence of the Son of Man." And the companion saying, also in Mat- thew, 2 called forth by His appreciation of the religious insight of a member of an alien race, points to His inherent reverence for faith in the Infinite, in whomsoever it may be found: "I say unto you, that many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven." 1 Matt. xxiv. 27, marg. ' Matt. Tin. 11. / 72 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE When we gather and classify all the data in the life of Jesus Christ, supplied by deed, or word, or by the not less eloquent implications of silence, showing His tem- per and mental attitude toward the world, it may be said that three generalizations of great sublimity appear to control His thinking and to furnish Him a basis on which to live and to die. These are: the Father's impartial interest in humanity; the unqualified value of human life; the essen- tial unity of the race. Christ's assurance of the Father's impartial interest in humanity cannot be shown, in a single instance, more clearly than in that Logion of Matthew, where, as with the wave of a king's sceptre, He relegates to the past the Jewish social conception and supplants it with His own: "Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you; that ye may be sons of your Father which is in heaven: for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust." 1 This utterance 1 Matt. v. 43-45. LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 73 is typical. On this conception of the divine inclination of impartial love He built His life and achieved His death, as on a rock impregnable, against which the gates of hell prevailed not. By this utterance and by the perpetual amplification of it in His life, He placed Himself on record against race hatreds and feuds, whether expressed in the bloody encounters of war, or in the envenomed scornfulness of hereditary pre- judices. Against these He took ultimate ground, that they were un-Godlike, contra- dictions of a divine order, clouds of wrath, vapors in a lower atmosphere, hiding in- solently the impartial sunshine of an infi- nite interest in man. It is most glorious to reflect upon Christ's assurance of the Father's universal interest in humanity; to see the corresponding breadth and sweet- ness of His thinking, as the effect of this assurance. It conditioned all that He said and did and was. Nothing offended Him save the attempts of priestly intolerance or social tyranny to deny or intercept this re- velation of the Father. The ignorant, the helpless, the idol-worshiping foreigners, the sinner, the harlot, the red-handed sol- 74 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE diers fulfilling their awful duty at His Cross — He comprehended, forgave, loved them all; seeing them all, and the innumerable multitude of whom they were types, in their relation to the impartial interest in the heart of God. Equally wonderful is Christ's assurance of the unqualified value of human life. If we could pause to analyze the psychology of His treatment of a number of unrelated cases, — such as the wayside blind pauper, the refined Nicodemus, the Greek woman of Syrophcenicia, the young ruler, Pilate, Simon Peter, Mary of Magdala, the centu- rion at Capernaum, the woman of Samaria, and many others, — evidence would appear of a generalization running like a deep and silent tide beneath His ministry, bearing it ever to lives as lives, irrespective of the accidents of race, culture, natural capacity, or moral development. All that the canons of social and ecclesiastical authority stood for as classifying individuals in a scale of relative importance had, apparently, no value for Him. He ignored it and went to the mere manhood in man, the mere woman- hood in woman, to the mere humanity in LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 75 all, to take note of it only, and at every cost to save it. " What shall a man be profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and for- feit his life? or what shall a man give in exchange for his life ? " * Life had for Him unqualified value; value in its own right. If adorned with wealth, office, religious pres- tige, it was not thereby more to Him. If scarred with poverty, ignorance, sin, and the stain of the pariah, it was not thereby less to Him. It was all life, human life; and on the face of life Christ saw the like- ness of a child to a Father. The fruit of these two generalizations was a third : the essential unity of the race. The Father's impartial interest in human- ity, the unqualified value of human life, were as postulates forcing the conclusion that, beneath all confusing differentia, the race is one. How deeply the generalization was imbedded in the consciousness of Christ appears by implication, as we see the thought of Christ reflected in the apostolic age, rather than in any extended reference made by His own lips. He assumed the unity of the race in every spoken word of 1 Matt. xvi. 26. 76 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE unrestricted invitation, in every uncalculat- ing work of mercy. He visualized before- hand His own crucifixion as an uplifting, in a world-centre of sacrifice, whence should go to the circumference of life one force of love intelligible to one homogeneous hu- man conscience and soul. " I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Myself." "This," says the narrator with awful solemnity, "He said, signifying by what manner of death He should die." 1 But what He left unsaid by word of mouth, touching the unity of the race, He left on record in that spirit of mind, that temper of soul, which, when it profoundly condi- tions a personality, makes its controlling convictions more evident without words than with them. We have only to know the apostolic age to discover the impres- sion made by Christ touching His concep- tion of the essential unity of the race. To a life that has attained unto Divine know- ledge, says Paul, "there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman: but Christ is all and in all." 2 The author of 1 John xii. 33. ' Col. iii. 10, 11. LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 77 the Apocalypse sees in vision the numbered host of Israel in the City of God, one hundred forty and four thousand. Then, turning from a segregated and counted Israel, his eyes look out on an undifferen- tiated human race: "After these things I saw, and behold, a great multitude, which no man could number, out of every nation, and of all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne." 1 Such was the reflection cast by Christ's thinking upon the age of His immediate followers. It is impressive, under any circumstances, to see a life founded upon such generalizations as these. The product of these generalizations seems to be, in all cases, a characteristic breadth of vision, a reverence for person- ality, a chastened tenderness. When we find these qualities in one of our contempo- raries, this breadth of vision, this reverence for personality, this chastened tenderness, joined with a corresponding righteousness of character, we say of such a one that he is Christlike. By this we mean that in such a one we seem to find a suggestion of, possibly a remote approximation to, qualities whose 1 Cf. Rev. vii. 78 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE originals came, once for all, and all at once, to perfect manifestation in One who called Himself the Son of Man. But the history of Western thought since the age of Christ, whatever else it shows, shows that neither the mind nor the heart can stand before this Christ presence without inquiry into His nature. Every effort has been made to abandon that metaphysical inquiry and to take Him simply as a human incident of remarkable beauty and exemplary ser- viceableness. No such effort permanently avails. There is that in man's religious con- sciousness which pauses in His presence as Moses at the burning bush, saying: "I will turn aside and see this great sight." He Himself precipitates our inquiry — "Whom do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?" Age after age has answered that challenge from His lips. The answers, taken chrono- logically, form, in themselves, an epitome of the history of philosophy and the evolu- tion of ethics. The interpretations of the nature of Christ, both scholastic and emo- tional, reflect the times in which, and the persons by whom, they have been made. Beneath them all, like a deep pedal note LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 79 held firm beneath the intricate counterpoint of a cathedral organ, is a perpetual voice from the Infinite that seems to say: "This is my Beloved Son, hear ye Him." Each age makes its contribution, helpful or other- wise, to the long answer. Perhaps the con- tribution of our age may be a profounder apprehension of the Incarnation Idea, whereby the Incarnation of Jesus Christ shall appear, not as an event without analo- gies, not as a breaking in of God upon the field of human life, but as the most natu- ral personal expression of the personally Self -revealing Infinite. "The Incarnation Idea," to use once more the words of Pey- ton, " is essentially that of the Unseen Uni- verse looking out upon us from the seen." Our testimony to this is involuntary. It occurs whenever nature is permitted to con- trol our attention ; whenever we rest trust- fully upon the bosom of nature, as John upon the breast of Jesus. It occurs when the inward ear is quickened to hear, far within the recesses of consciousness, the bidding of a will not our own, the movement of a law whose sanctions are, in the nature of things, the breathing of a Spirit of which we 80 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE cannot tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. It occurs when from Christlike souls about us come forth suggestions of indwelling power beyond the measure of the human average, prophetic intimations of their immortality. It is the Unseen looking out upon us from the seen. But why should that Unseen, being personal, look out upon us only from the impersonal; from the im- personality of nature and the indefinable depths of our subliminal consciousness, or from the half-developed suggestions of di- vine affinity in the souls of the best men and women ? Why should not the Unseen, being personal, look out upon us once for all when the fullness of time was come, in the similitude of a perfect Manhood ? Why should not that Unseen, being personal, in- terpret itself completely in the terms of the warm and living attributes of personality, which we know best and can most surely understand? Let us assume that He has done so, and that this is the larger meaning of the Incar- nation; the largest meaning yet discerned by us, that Christ is in truth the Personal Revelation of the Infinite, which looks out LARGER MEANING OP INCARNATION 81 upon us from the visible character and con- duct of the one Perfect Manhood. What knowledge would be brought to us, by this particular Revelation of the Infinite ? Knowledge on many lines which cannot even be suggested in this Lecture. We have to do with one line only, the mental atti- tude of God toward the world as we know it. We see the world with its present race divisions, and its conventional scaling of racial values, as advanced races and back- ward races, Eastern races and Western races. We see it with its conventional classification of religions, as true and false; a classification commonly indicated by sta- tistics, diagrams, and parti-colored maps. We see it with minds affected by conven- tional prejudice, in favor of the Western mode of seeing things and doing things and, more or less bitterly, more or less contemp- tuously, against the Eastern mode of seeing things and doing things. Let us assume that the Incarnation is, not a sporadic and accidental instance of a gifted life surmounting the average, but the Personal Infinite looking out upon us from the visible Son of Man, in 82 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE a deliberate self -disclosure; then the gen- eralizations conditioning the mind of Christ become for us an actual view of the mind of God. We see the Father, in His thought concerning the ethnic and reli- gious problems of the modern world. Upon this view of the Incarnation, God is what Christ is : Christ's impartial interest in hu- manity, Christ's sense of the unqualified value of humanity, Christ's vision of the essential unity of the race, are qualities of God. The intrinsic interest thus acquired by these conceptions can be overlooked only by the unreflecting. Their bearing, when understood, upon the restatement of many fixed opinions concerning the world, is natural and obvious. Not without effort can the human mind, restrained by genera- tions of conventionality, rise even to the im- plications contained in the conception of a God who takes an impartial interest in humanity, who is no respecter of persons, who, while electing men and peoples for special service, has no favored nation; who would have all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. From the LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 83 Divine mind, prejudice in all its forms and degrees is absent. To that mind, not being in subjection to categories of space and time, the age-long chasm between East and West is not present as a necessary fact of consciousness ; neither do the reversals and cleavages of race interests in the drama of history have, for Him, as for us, the effect of shifting the accent of power and impor- tance from Oriental to European civiliza- tion. There is a sense in which history and the philosophy of history cannot give us the ultimate facts of existence; being them- selves conditioned on time categories, not authoritative for the mind of God. Letters and art, exploration and war, feudalism and democracy, Church and State, conquest and independence, labor and capital, race affinity and race antipathy, are limitations and modes of partial expression in a phe- nomenal universe. But God's thoughts are not our thoughts, neither are His ways our ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are His ways higher than our ways, and His thoughts than our thoughts. 1 To Him all hearts are open, all desires 1 Cf. Is. lv. 8, 9. 84 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE known, and from Him no secrets are hid. He hates nothing that He has made. This impartial interest in humanity is, in the mind of God, joined with His sense of the unqualified value of human life. Except as we see God in Christ, it is scarcely possible for us so to emancipate, ourselves, even in theory, from the ten- dency to discrimination in a statement of values as to conceive, much less to con- form to, God's estimate of life. Even those natural affections wherewith He has en- dowed us, while, in principle, they help us to understand Divine love, act, at the same time, as limitations upon what we try to aflirm. We call God "Father," and we do well; but the selective love of a man for the children of his own body precludes him from fathoming a Father- hood that is to all flesh what the father- hood of a man is to one or two. To the in- herent limitations in natural relationships are added innumerable others developed in the struggle for existence and under the principle of selection. At every point civ- ilization makes its way by new discrimina- tive categories. Education and illiteracy, LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 85 physical capacity and incapacity, beautiful youth and withered age, poverty and opulence, tradesmanship and aristocracy, private work and public fame, goodness and perversity, stronger races and weaker races, the practical West and the dream- ing East : — by these and a thousand other lines we delimit frontiers of caste and establish scales of relative value. Unless it be that the Infinite Unseen looks out upon us and reveals itself in Christ, it is practically out of our power even to con- ceive a God-Mind that, while cognizant of these distinctions, is unfettered by them; that sets the same value of the priceless hu- man upon the emperor intrenched within his palace and the starving peasant shot down at his gate; between the soul of a Wilberforce pleading in Parliament for the abolition of slavery and the cowering cap- tive of the slave-driver, dragging his fetters coastward through the hollow paths of an African jungle. That aspect of the Larger Meaning of the Incarnation which most affects my pre- sent purpose in these Lectures is Christ's vision of the essential unity of the race. 86 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE (That unity I propose to discuss in detail in my next Lecture.) Christ saw the race as one homogeneous body of life. He regarded His Incarnation as an incorpora- tion of Himself in the common flesh of this undifferentiated race. He was the Son of Man giving Himself for the life of the world. If indeed the Personal Infinite is disclosed in Christ, then the Incarnation may, in the splendid words of Caird, 1 be said "to have changed for us the whole aspect of our moral and spiritual life, not merely by setting before us an example of moral perfection, but by disclosing the presence of a divine, or infinite, element in our nature; by revealing to us under all the limiting conditions of humanity — its transiency and evanescence, its weak- nesses and imperfections, even its moral defilement and disability — an ideal glory and beauty, an essential affinity with the nature of God." So, we must believe, to the mind of God, the intrinsic nature of the race appears ; as one, and as kindred with Himself. All possible divisions, whereby, in a code of scientific classification, por- 1 Fundamental Elements, vol. ii. pp. 103, 104. LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 87 tions of the race are segregated from other portions, are to the mind of God super- ficial and formal. Race divisions, color lines, linguistic barriers, types of civiliza- tion, advancement, retrogression, forms of government, systems of religion, are acci- dents of variation on the surface of an organism unified in fact by its "essential affinity with the nature of God." When this view of the unity of the race is considered, new, and, we may believe, more approximately adequate, meaning is given to that event which has enchained the interest of twenty centuries, the Death of Christ. In the moment of the Cross, as in each moment of the Incarnation, it is possible to believe that the Personal Infinite looks out upon us. The Western traveler in Japan experi- ences reverential feeling as he stands before the Daibutsus, or colossal bronze images of the deified Buddha, — among the most magnificent products of Japanese reli- gious art. Of that at Nara, dating from the eighth century, or of that at Kami- kura, dating from the thirteenth century, the estimate of one deeply versed in the 88 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE emotional message of the higher arts is well within the truth: "The impression it produces," says Basil Hall Chamberlain, "grows on the beholder each time that he gazes afresh at the calm, intellectual, passionless face, which seems to concen- trate in itself the whole philosophy of the Buddhist religion — the triumphs of mind over sense, of eternity over fleeting time, of the enduring majesty of Nirvana over the trivial prattle, the transitory agitations of mundane existence." * It is a great religious conception. It makes its own appeal to some of the greatest emotions in man. But the Larger Meaning of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ is the concep- tion of a God greater than the Daibutsu — even of a God whose affinity with the race brings Him forth from the unbroken peace of eternity to a self-revelation of love, that speaks at last through pain and sacrifice. Perhaps not in our language has any other voice expressed more gloriously than Jean Ingelow's the unity of the race and the Divine acknowledgment of its kinship with God as interpreted by the Death of Christ. 1 Things Japanese, p. 815, 4th ed. LARGER MEANING OF INCARNATION 89 'And didst Thou love the race that loved not Thee, And didst Thou take to heaven a human brow ? Dost plead, with man's voice, by the marvelous sea ? Art Thou his kinsman now ? ' By that one likeness which is ours and Thine, By that one nature which doth hold us kin, By that high heaven, where, sinless, Thou dost shine To draw us sinners in; " By Thy last silence in the judgment-hall, By long foreknowledge of the deadly tree, By darkness, by the wormwood and the gall, I pray Thee visit me." LECTURE m THE ESSENTIAL UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE Mr. James Bryce, in the first chapter of "The American Commonwealth," quotes with approval a remark of Aristotle to the effect that the first step in investigation is to ask the right questions. 1 This just observation might with advantage be pre- faced by another: the power to ask the right questions presupposes the right mental attitude toward the subject to be investigated. The subject engaging us in these Lectures is the Human Race. My effort thus far has been to find a mental attitude toward this subject that seemed to carry in itself inherent authority as a standard for imitation. We have sought it where, by the common consent of the Western world, it might be expected to exist, namely, in the mind of Christ. The results of my inquiry and the implications contained in those results are before you 1 Cf. vol. i. p. i, 2d ed. UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 91 in the first and second Lectures. The his- torical records of Christ's words, actions, and influence, and of the impressions formed thereby in the minds of men, during a brief but significant time of earthly manifestation, form the larger part of the New Testament writings. By a comparison of these with the conven- tional attitudes of the Western mind toward Oriental races, we have discrim- inated the qualities of breadth, sympathy, vital interest, and love that marked the position taken by the mind of Christ toward the great world that stretched out eastward and westward, beyond the bounds of Judaism. It was a world with which by physical inheritance, being of Jewish birth, He had no affiliation. His position toward that larger, foreign world is in sharp contrast with prevailing sentiment found among Western nations and men. Hatred, suspicion, implacable antagonism, ferocious efforts undertaken in the name of Christ to destroy His supposed ene- mies, unprovoked attempts at conquest for commercial gains, not infrequently have animated the passions of the West against 92 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE Oriental races. In milder moods or times violence has given place to passive curi- osity; the traveler in search of new sensa- tions makes the East his pleasure ground, finding in strange scenes and stranger customs food for an amusing holiday. The scientific spirit has seized upon the East as a field of research; translates its classics, compares its religions as the cults of alien races, subjects its consciousness to psychological tests; looking down, with an Anglo-Saxon disdain, often subconscious because hereditary, upon what seem to it the weird and inconsequent movements of the Eastern mind. Not so did Christ look out on the world. The attitude of His spirit, as I have shown in the first Lecture, was quite different from these attitudes. To Him, loyal though He was to the ances- tral tradition of His mother's house, there were no alien races. He was a part of all, for all were members of one humanity, and in that humanity He had clothed Himself, to be one with it in life and in death. Upon the world He looked as upon a brotherhood, with a brother's interest therein, a brother's affection, a brother's UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 93 purpose of self-sacrifice. Thus has been rewarded our inquiry into the world- sympathy of Jesus Christ. I am prepared to say that the ethical grandeur of His attitude toward a world, which from the point of view of Jewish conviction lay altogether beyond the bounds of true religion, seems to give to that attitude inherent authority for us as a standard for imitation. In the second Lecture I considered this mental attitude of Christ in the light of implications involved in the thought of the Incarnation. Under many modifications of theology and metaphysic, in terms varied to suit the needs and abilities of all minds, from the untutored peasant and the unques- tioning child, to the scientific altruist, the philosopher and the mystic, men have tried to explain what is implied in the Incarna- tion of Christ. No one yet has succeeded in doing this to the satisfaction of all others; but the attempt to do it never ceases. It has appeared to the religious consciousness of twenty centuries that in the nature of this unexampled Person who loved to call Him- self the Son of Man there must surely be 94 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE more significance than that of a mere "hu- man accident of remarkable beauty and exemplary serviceableness." 1 Every effort has been made to abandon the search into the depths of Christ's Personality, on the ground that the mind thereby is led from the firm basis of history into peril- ous speculation. Excesses of dogmatic zeal have, from time to time, repelled from this search some of the most pure and reverent minds in Christendom. But always the minds whose ethical quality has been most like His own have found themselves return- ing to the attempt to see more clearly into those depths that evidently underlie the nature of the Son of Man, as if attracted by His question : " Whom do men say that I, the Son of Man, am ?" I have ventured upon no formal statement concerning the inner meaning of the nature of the Son of Man, — those esoteric correspondences of His Spirit with the essence of the Infinite which to some of us, in our own private thinking, form the very essence of our reli- gious belief. I have only suggested that the true meaning of the Incarnation Idea may 1 Cf . Lecture II. UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 95 be that the Unseen Infinite looks out upon us from the seen. That Idea, the suggestion of unseen perfection, we recognize as pre- sent approximately in nature, in the noblest souls around us, and at times dimly present in our own subconscious experience. If we can permit ourselves to believe that Christ may be the perfect expression of the Incar- nation Idea, that through Him the personal Infinite looks out upon us and reveals itself clearly; then the mental attitude of Christ toward the world at large takes on this enormous significance, that it is identical with the attitude of God. Christ's impar- tial interest in humanity, Christ's sense of the unqualified value of human life, Christ's vision of the essential unity of the race, give us a standard for imitation that is final because it is Divine. He who can see the world as Christ sees it, who can regard it with Christ's breadth of vision and sym- pathetic interest, who sees the race as one and accords love and honor to all its mem- bers, becomes, so far forth, a Godlike, be- cause a Christlike, soul. With this restatement of my general point of view, I approach the subject of the 96 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE present Lecture: "The Essential Unity of the Human Race." With the general na- ture of popular and scientific opinion on this subject I may assume that my present auditors are acquainted; more especially with the active discussions that were called forth in connection with the establishment of evolution as a principle interpreting the phenomena of life. The Apostle Paul was possibly the most commanding mind of his time that undertook an interpretation of the Christian ideal of the unity of the race. His brilliant contemporary, Seneca, was, possibly, the chief impersonation of the in- tense moral earnestness of a non-Christian philosophy that rose to a kindred conception. Lightfoot has brought before us vividly the common aspirations of these two great souls. When the old national barriers had been overthrown, and petty states with all their interests and ambitions had crumbled into the dust, the longing eye of the Greek philosopher wandered over the ruinous waste, until his range of view expanded to the ideal of a world-wide state, which for the first time became a possibility to his intellectual vision, when it became also a UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 97 want to his social instincts. The language of Seneca well illustrates the nature of this cosmopolitan ideal: "We are members of a vast body. Nature made us kin, when she produced us from the same things and to the same ends. I will look upon all lands as belonging to me, and my own land as belonging to all. I will so live as if I knew that I am born for others, and on this ac- count I will give thanks to nature. She gave me alone to all men, and all men to me alone. I well know that the world is my country. Nature bids me assist men. Wherever a man is, there is room for doing good." 1 In harmony with these utterances, yet more lofty and more distinct because made concrete through his relation to Christ, the Apostle Paul announces his view of the unity of the race. "God Himself giv- eth to all life, and breath, and all things; and He made of one every nation of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth." 2 "Man is renewed unto knowledge after the image of Him that created him: where 1 Cf . Lightfoot, Epistles of St. Paid, PhUippians, pp. 306, 307. 2 Acts xvii. 25, 26. 98 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE there cannot be Greek and Jew, circum- cision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scyth- ian, bondman, freeman: but Christ is all, and in all." ' " To the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain Jews; to them that are without law, as without law, that I might gain them that are without law. To the weak I became weak, that I might gain the weak: I am become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some." 2 Thus do these two companion souls of the first century (whether inde- pendently or by common consent it matters not), Seneca the Stoic, Paul the Christian, speak in terms of the ideal concerning what would be in principle a Civitas Dei, a world-state of God, in which the essential unity of the race might be worked out to its glorious conclusions. But Seneca and St. Paul knew little of the real world as we know it. They knew immediately the countries about the Mediterranean; and, dimly, a shadow land of legend-like infini- tude, stretching every way beyond. Camel trains from the East, fair-haired barba- 1 Cf. Col. iii. 10, 11. 2 Cf. 1 Cor. ix. 20-22. UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 99 rians from the north, might suggest, but could not define, the race problems locked in the fastnesses of that unexplored im- mensity, the habitable world. When one measures the pure cosmopolitanism of their ideals against the narrow scope of their knowledge, one feels that upon both of those kingly minds there rested an inspiration from God. For after many centuries, and under the stimulation of the Revival of Learning, the Western know- ledge of the world remained deficient and grotesque. One has only to examine the maps that preceded modern cartography to have evidence of the monstrous distor- tions and misapprehensions that vitiated the world-knowledge of a relatively late period of English thought. The eccentric courses chosen by the marine explorers of the Elizabethan age, in the search after new routes to India, are typical of mental and moral eccentricities touching methods of approaching the East that still survive in an age of steamships, submarine tele- graphs, and admiralty charts. A curious inconsistency followed the Protestant Re- formation in Holland and England. By 100 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE means of the Reformation the Bible was admitted to general use and became a source of public knowledge. By degrees the doctrine of its verbal inerrancy was established and long remained unques- tioned. The cosmopolitan brotherhood announced by St. Paul and the absolute unity of the human race announced in the first chapter of Genesis were theoreti- cally admitted to bind the conscience. Yet, in fact, Dutch Protestantism and English Protestantism, rigidly orthodox at home, rejected even the show of evangelistic pur- pose that accompanied the earlier Portu- guese and Spanish explorations of the East, and proceeded to set at naught the ideals of St. Paul and ignore the cosmogony of Genesis, by forming East India Compa- nies, dispatching armed expeditions, and establishing fortified stations to invade, to persecute, to plunder, and to pollute Oriental communities, whose impressions of Christendom were identified thereby with acts of tyranny, extortion, and debauchery. No darker chapter of moral obsessions exists in the annals of the West. The historical basis of my statements has been UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 101 brought to light, chiefly through research in official documents and correspondence. Had the East been filled with beasts or devils rather than with men and women of a common humanity with our own, there could not have been shown less consideration for rights and feelings than was shown in many proceedings. Charters may be revoked and companies dissolved, but traditions five in the wounded heart of the East, springing up in belated resurrec- tions of responsive animosity or subsisting in sullen antagonism toward a faith that preaches love and practices injustice. No nobler challenge can be offered to the social conscience of the West than that it shall, in the light of our fuller knowledge of world conditions and our clarified con- ception of humanity, make atonement for past offenses against our Eastern brothers. What opportunity is here for the higher ethics of commercialism to vindicate itself in the Orient; for friends of education to give on the same scale of imperial magnifi- cence as has been established in America, that the blessings of the higher learning may be multiplied abroad! What a calling 102 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE unto service is here for young men whose breadth of culture has saved them from race prejudice; whose humanitarian devo- tion dominates their life-purpose; whose chivalrous loyalty to Christ commits them to clear the reproach that has been cast upon His Name ! The whole subject of the essential unity of the race, together with the feelings and duties growing from that fact, may be said to have come to the modern world in a new light through the researches of the past sixty years in the field of anthropology, including especially the classifications made in that branch of the science of anthropology which is known as ethnology, and treats of races and peoples, the natural and artificial divi- sions of the human species. No one re- sult has been accepted unanimously as the outcome of these interesting researches. The students of ethnology divided on the fundamental question: Do the variations observable in the several branches of the world's population indicate separate and distinct species, and if so, how many dis- tinct species; or is there in all the world but one species, one race of mankind, which UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 103 maintains its indefectible and essential unity beneath the vast range of superficial variation? Among those who have con- cluded against the essential unity of the race, the widest divergence of opinion is to be found as to the principles of classification to be employed in ascertaining the bounda- ries of distinct species, and as to the number of such species. One recalls the interesting remark of Mr. Darwin in the seventh chap- ter of the "Descent of Man: "* "Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest pos- sible diversity among able judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (by Virey), as three (by Jacquinot), as four (by Kant), as five (by Blumenbach), as six (by Buffon), as seven (by Hunter), as eight (by Agassiz), as eleven (by Pickering), as fifteen (by Bory St. Vincent), as sixteen (by Desmoulins), as twenty-two (by Morton), as sixty (by Crawford), or as sixty-three (by Burke)." The latest published classification, I be- lievers Deniker's,in"The Races of Man," : » New York, 1896, p. 174. 2 London, 1900. , 104 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE which makes twenty-nine races and sub- races in five main divisions. While these discussions have gone on for many years, the outlines of a deeper truth have been growing more distinct; a truth so comprehensive, so elemental, that in its presence questions of classification no longer disturb our conviction of the essen- tial unity of the race. That truth is the principle of evolution, which, while reor- ganizing modern thinking about the origin of man, has made it possible for men of intellectual insight to hold the unity of the race on scientific grounds as well as on re- ligious and social grounds. Like the utter- ance of a prophet are the words of Mr. Darwin (dating as far back as 1871) : l "The question whether mankind consists of one or several species has of late years been much discussed by anthropologists, who are divided into two schools. Those who do not admit the principle of evolution must look at species as separate creations, or as in some manner distinct entities. Those naturalists, on the other hand, who admit the principle of evolution, and this is 1 Op. tit., pp. 176-180. UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 105 now admitted by the majority of rising men, will feel no doubt that all the races of men are descended from a single primitive stock. We may conclude that when the principle of evolution is generally accepted, as it surely will be before long, this dispute will die a silent and unobserved death." It is contrary to my purpose to hazard any observations in the field of science, where I am not qualified to enter, and where no dogmatic utterance from me could escape the charge of presumption. But I may be permitted to testify, as a layman, to the ! manner in which some of my most cherished beliefs regarding life and humanity have been fertilized by implications connected with the principle of evolution; especially my belief in an essential unity underlying all the divergent forms of human life and extending into the mysterious regions of thought and feeling. No theoretical conclusion as to the unity of the race can be relied upon to produce in us feelings corresponding to the world- sympathy of Jesus Christ. It must be a conviction tested by fact. By Him that mental attitude toward the world was 106 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE maintained, not in academic solitude, but throughout a life of contact with facts and with prejudices. The genuineness of Christ's attitude, as representing not theory but conviction, is proved by His reverent treatment of humanity, by His world-con- sciousness in teaching, by His vision of purpose when advancing to a sacrificial death, and when sending, by means of apos- tolic messengers, to the uttermost bounds of the known earth, His gospel of a redeemed humanity. Hence my purpose, in the remainder of this Lecture, is to discuss on practical grounds, the possibility of developing in ourselves a world-consciousness, as broad and free from prejudice, as reverent and sympathetic, as unembarrassed by tradi- tion as that of Christ; and of doing this in the face of practical conditions that have made it for many difficult, for many im- possible, to look forth upon the enormous variations in human character and condi- tion that diversify the modern world, yet see and welcome beneath them all, the evidence of essential unity, and the obligations and possibilities suggested by that evidence. UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 107 That there are important considera- tions, affecting our own personal efficiency, involved in the cultivation of an adequate world-consciousness, will be questioned only by those who have failed to make a com- parative study of individuals. When we measure a human spirit that has learned to say with Seneca: "I will so live as if I knew that I am born for others. I well know that the world is my country. Wher- ever a man is, there is room for doing good;" — when, I say, we measure such a spirit against one that remains immured within some straitened cell of ancestral provincialism, the sense of being in the presence of relative personal values is in- voluntary. However much we may love the provincial, and acknowledge his local worth, we feel in the other the vigor of a purpose, the warmth of a love, the author- ity of a gift, that calls us out from our hid- ing-places of selfishness to walk at liberty as sons of God. More acute is this sense of relative values if, in the provincial, has occurred the frequent doom of self-centred repression, the mental impoverishment that begets the embittered spirit of an 108 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE Ishmaelite. The life, shut in upon itself, estimating values by a standard of self- interest, absorbed in the local and the in- cidental, robbed of opportunity to breathe the free air of the open world, falls a prey to prejudices and fixed opinions, to un- reasoned dislikes and unverified beliefs. There are few sights more deplorable than the entanglement of young manhood in the birthright of Ishmael; accepting without protest some ancestral race pre- judice or some provincialism of current opinion, despising before it knows, or hating by hearsay what it has not seen; dooming itself to a superficial youth, a selfish manhood, a narrow old age, a short and shadowed memory. What can be more unlike to this than a mind imbued with the world-sympathy of Jesus Christ? It approaches the world without hostile or contemptuous prepossessions; it claims, with Seneca, the world as its country, and prepares to support its claim by service; it trusts to love to rend the veil of local differentiation and reveal the common heart of the race, the inner shrine of life. It reasons from its own subliminal intima- UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 109 tions of God and immortality — to kin- dred depths in all other souls, and learns to reverence humanity by what it finds within itself. It counts humanity the more divine because without monotony, therein being a more homogeneous revelation of Him who fulfills Himself in many ways. What vigor of purpose, what warmth of love, what authority of insight, what scope of power, in such a life ! This is the cosmo- politan, the citizen of the world, having the similitude of a son of man ! The cultivation of such a world-con- sciousness, until it becomes not occasional but constant, is complicated by difficulties which are matters of fact, and as such entitled to full and fair consideration. The believer in the principle of evolution may, without great difficulty, accept in theory a doctrine of the unity of the race; but his embarrassments in transmuting that theoretical opinion into a working attitude of mind and a genuine sentiment of heart, are real. In the First Epistle of St. John is a passage of much shrewdness, pointing out that a religion which in prin- ciple worships God but cannot transmute 110 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE that worship into the service of humanity, because humanity presents such uninviting aspects, is not an adequate form of religion. "He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom he hath not seen." After the same manner of reasoning, theoretical belief in the unity of the race is unserviceable unless it sur- vives in the presence of the facts. He who believes, as an evolutionist, that the race is one, cannot experience full moral and social impulse of that belief, until he holds it experimentally, from first-hand know- ledge of the world at large. An experimental and reasoned belief in the essential unity of the human race is something more profound and less depend- ent on emotion than are those intuitions of fellowship and similarity which we experience in our local relations with others. I do not mean to say that we may not have intuitional perception of race unity and world fellowship, for that indeed I believe and experience. I can truly say that in intellectual and spiritual inter- course with Orientals who, by anthropolo- gists, would be classified under several UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 111 different categories, I have felt that human kinship which scarcely may be described by a term less strong than consanguinity of the soul. And I have reason to sup- pose that in themselves the consciousness of kinship with me was not less powerful. I therefore by no means intend to exclude the intuitional in indicating data for an experimental belief in world fellowship. But this I would point out: that the grounds for this belief include a much wider field of observation than is covered by those common instincts and by that intuitive consciousness of relations which determine local spheres of kinship. I mean such instances as the specialized instincts that produce friendship and love between individuals; the sense of a com- mon original that accompanies, with or without love, the primary degrees of fam- ily connection; the impression of solidarity that conditions neighborhood life ; the feel- ings of brotherhood or companionship that grow out of similarity of occupation or training, as between students of one of the fine arts, or, in a broader manner be- tween men within the academic circle; the 112 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE subtle instinct of patriotism that, in the hour of impending war, welds seventy mil- lions of souls into one; the yet more sub- tle instinct of the racial group, that for two hundred years has kept Anglo-Saxon- ism floating unamalgamated . on the sea of Asiatic life, like oil upon water. None of these, not even the broadest, is identi- cal with the experimental and reasoned belief in the essential unity of the human race. That is something more profound and less dependent on emotion than are these. It rests on grounds that are but in part intuitive, as when Shakespeare says, in "Troilus and Cressida," " One touch of na- ture makes the whole world kin," and that are much more established by observation, reflection, and sympathetic intercourse. This being so, it is not difficult to realize why, to many minds, the practical con- ception of essential unity in the human race is as unwelcome as it is incredible. Theoretically evolutionary science may ap- pear to affirm it; theologically the Bible may appear to defend it; but too many minds, hospitable to science and reverent toward the Bible, disclaim as repugnant UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 113 to sensibility and humiliating to pride the mental attitude and the disposition of heart toward alien races which assume common feelings, common possibilities, and com- mon rights in the great affairs of human existence. I shall enumerate some of the reasons for this instinctive antagonism to the idea of racial unity. One of the most effective has been lack of knowledge. The present degree of ease with which the visitation of the East is accomplished from Europe and America is a late accession to the luxury of civilization. Our readiness to adopt new conditions acts as an illusion, concealing the long ages through which the thought life of the Western world was developing and its formative impressions were deepening in almost total ignorance of the history, the ideals, the soul of the East. The place of correct knowledge was taken by a wonder- land of fables mixed with incorrect observa- tions and fortuitous deductions of explorers or adventurers, while the lusts of unethical commercialism and the depravity of con- scienceless ambition completed the mental distortion begun by ignorance. Our know- 114 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE ledge of the East, gathered in the past hun- dred years, is as yet too recent, too undi- gested, too inadequate, and too powerfully affected by conscious or unconscious preju- dice, to form a basis of induction. Still it is true that we see the East through a glass darkened by smoke from smouldering fires of past disfavor; that we know the East but in part, and that that partial knowledge is like light broken and bent in a faulty lens. Scientifically and strategically we know the East fairly well: its fauna and its flora, its coast line and harbor defenses, its deserts and veldts, its handicrafts and products, its palaces and temples, its classics and my- thologies. But the soul of the East, the inner God-consciousness of the East, its hidden spiritual potency, its grief and joy, its need and aspiration — the human ele- ments of the East, whereby it is not a spectacle, not a problem, but life, living in its own right — that we know not at all. Some Westerners have indeed essayed to set forth this inner thought life of the East, to interpret Oriental emotion and impulse, to discover the psychology of polytheism, and the mystical values that lie like clouds UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 115 behind clouds in the inner depths of pan- theism. For the most part these interpreta- tions have been formal and distant, and, from the Eastern point of view, misleading; because those making them were more scholarly than sympathetic, more critical than reverent. Another reason for instinctive antago- nism to the idea of racial unity is found in the obvious differences that impress the Western observer of life and manners in the East. He finds, upon arrival in coun- tries with which the West long has held official and residential relations, unexpected identities, surprising proofs of the power of Occidental civilization to impress its ma- terial aspects upon remote centres of life. Spires of English churches rise among gopuras of Hindu temples and minars of mosques; a Russian cathedral crowns the highest hill in Tokyo. The electric trolley car flies through the suburbs of Colombo, and wins its appropriate number of human sacrifices from among the white-robed Sin- halese. As one approaches Shanghai by the river, or Cawnpore by rail, torrents of black smoke pour from tall, brick chimneys, 116 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE as in the manufacturing towns of Lan- cashire or Massachusetts. In the sweet evenings of the season, upon the Maidan in Calcutta or the Marina in Madras, the pattering hoofs of well-groomed horses, the twinkling beauty of polished broughams, remind one of Hyde Park on an afternoon in May. So far forth the Western traveler feels at home and says, judging life by his provincial standards : " All things continue as they were from the beginning." But, as he lifts his eyes from the small circle on which the West has stamped its image and superscription, and looks forth upon the un- Europeanized expanse of Oriental society, he is amazed at the novelties and contrasts. Apparently he has entered another world of aspect, habit, proportion, and purpose. Nothing remains measurable by the old law of relations. Color questions stand inverted, brown skins or yellow being more honorable than white. Costume breaks from conventional propriety, and riots in eccentricities, positive and negative. The old social order of his fathers changes, giv- ing place to a new order, which yet is older than the old. Mystical symbolism fills all UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 117 the silent East with suppressed religious passion; incalculable and terrible to one who has conceived only the smooth ortho- doxy of Western churchmanship. Types of civilization appear that no unprepared Western mind can classify under any cate- gory of the useful or the excellent. Brah- mins, more imperious and more impene- trable behind the sacred cord upon the naked breast, than knight crusaders be- hind morions and pectoral shields of steel ; priests of Buddha, with yellow robes and fungus-like umbrellas, as moving flowers of the tropics, flitting in and out of the jungle; ascetics and devil-worshipers, with bloodshot eyes, faces smeared with ashes, hair braided with clay, beating hollow- voiced drums, gathering alms from the ever- willing, ever-reverent throng. The Western looks on these types; estrangement mixed with scorn rises within him; of himself he asks, "And what have I to do with these?" Such, among many others, are the obvious contrasts set up in the East against every Western preconception of order, utility, and truth. I would suggest them to your minds at their full value. Nor would I evade the 118 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE fact of contrasts less obvious to the super- ficial observer; contrasts in feeling, in the manner of conceiving entities of thought, in the scale of life-values, in temperamental states and tendencies. So far from evading these, and their bearing upon race unity, I propose to make them the subject of my next Lecture, because of my conviction that in our clearest apprehension of these and of their meaning lies the path to a grander and more serviceable theory of unity than has yet been fairly examined. But, at present, it is these contrasts, the more obvious and the less obvious, that foster in many Occi- dental minds repugnance to the thought of race unity, and to the practical implications contained therein. I must advert to another cause for this instinctive antagonism, namely, race pre- judice. It is in this case less easy than in the former case to give expression to the characteristics of the reason alleged. Race prejudice is a psychological problem of ex- traordinary interest. Undoubtedly it has alliances with some of the noblest senti- ments and with some of the most ancient experiences of humanity. The Jews, in UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 119 the age of their theocracy, raised race pre- judice to the level of religious duty. They were bound in honor to Jehovah to culti- vate it in themselves, to instill it in their children. An epitome of their schooling in the duty of segregation and in the cultiva- tion of disdain for other races is given in that magnificent trumpet-call of Isaiah: 1 "Thus saith the Lord God, My people went down at the first into Egypt to sojourn there: and the Assyrian oppressed them without cause. Now therefore, . . . Depart ye, depart ye, go ye out from thence, touch no unclean thing; go ye out of the midst of her; be ye clean, ye that bear the vessels of the Lord." There can be no reasonable doubt that race prejudice, as instilled into the Jews for a purpose, resulted in good as a means of cultivating moral and religious principles that were of interest and advan- tage ultimately to the whole world. But, like the institution of sacrifice, it fulfilled its end and was displaced in the larger purpose of Christ. When the Jew, Simon Peter, undertook to justify his shrinking from a Roman, on the ground that he had never 1 Cf . Isaiah lii. 120 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE yet defiled himself by contact with the cere- monially ostracized, he was rebuked with the significant message "What God hath cleansed, make not thou common." l That the rebuke had opened his eyes to a larger world relation appears in his frank avowal : "Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons." 2 It may not be de- nied that race prejudice is allied to certain necessary instincts that work for the gen- eral good. A specializing love and pride for one's own ; a loyal affinity for one's an- cestral house; an intuitive feeling of the superior excellence of one's native land; a rational dislike for the commingling of one's blood with the blood of alien and dissimilar nations, are, if held in moderation, aspects of social feeling that serve good ends. Yet any one of them may, in a moment, pass over into race prejudice and become un- ethical and so unchristian. The special weaknesses of race preju- dice are that it flourishes in the absence of knowledge ; that it loves the darkness of a traditional feeling rather than the light of an educated conviction; and that it tends 1 Cf. Acts x. 15. ' Cf. Acts x. 34. UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 121 to dimness of moral insight and the degen- eration of love into selfishness. There is no one of our social instincts more eccentric in its operations, more curiously interwoven with reason, judgment, and emotion. Before leaving this part of my subject, I must name one other cause for the instinc- tive antagonism found in many minds against race unity as a practical doctrine of society. I refer to national egotism. By instinct the Anglo-Saxon, in Britain or America, is a Pharisee. He goes into the temple, looks God in the face, and says without a blush, " I thank Thee, that I am not as the rest of men." He is the ethnic Pharisee of the world. Not the Teuton, not the Slav, not the Latin, not the Mongolian, not the Japanese, not the Hindu, by his utmost effort raises the sense of superiority to so high a power as is reached by the Anglo-Saxon consti- tutionally and with ease. He believes in himself and knows himself by his fruits. He stands within the towering structure of a civilization created by his own energies, and says to the world: "If you seek my monument, look about you." He outvies 122 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE Israel in conceiving himself to be a chosen people. He deems himself invincible and altogether necessary to the world. He can- not imagine the world to subsist without the Anglo-Saxon. When one of his own poets warns him of the vanished glory of past empires, "lest he forget," he frowns when he does not laugh. One might use concerning him the gorgeous parable of leviathan, for he is, in his thought, Levia- than of the Latter Days : compact, inven- tive, eager, invulnerable, armed to the teeth. "His strong scales are his pride, Shut up together as with a close seal. They are joined one to another; They stick together, that they cannot be sundered. His eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. Out of his mouth go burning torches, And sparks of fire leap forth. His breath kindleth coals, And a flame goeth forth from his mouth. In his neck abideth strength, And terror danceth before him. His heart is as firm as a stone; Yea, firm as the nether millstone. When he raiseth himself up, the mighty are afraid; By reason of consternation they are beside themselves. UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 123 If one lay at him with the sword, it cannot avail, Nor the spear, the dart, nor the pointed shaft. He counteth iron as straw, And brass as rotten wood. He laugheth at the rushing of the javelin. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: He maketh the sea like ointment. He maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to be hoary. Upon earth there is not his like, That is made without fear. He beholdeth everything that is high: He is king over all the sons of pride." * Such is the Anglo-Saxon; Leviathan of the Latter Days; king over all the sons of pride. Until his national egotism be chastened and brought into subjection to the spirit of Christ, the gulf between East and West stands fixed; the vision of a unified world tarries! I said, earlier in this Lecture, that "an experimental and reasoned belief in the essential unity of the human race is some- thing more profound and less dependent on emotion than are those intuitions of fellowship and similarity which we experi- ence in our local relations with others." 1 Cf. Job xU. 124 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE At this conviction I have arrived after a number of years largely devoted to a study of Oriental life and consciousness, together with a period of observation in India, Ceylon, and Japan, which, while too brief to produce authoritative results, was en- riched by somewhat exceptional opportu- nities for unfettered intercourse with culti- vated life in the Orient, upon a basis of mutual confidence and friendliness. I am prepared to express the opinion that if one shall go into these remote regions with a mind disburdened of race prejudice and eager for evidence on which to build belief in the essential unity of the race, he is bound to find that evidence in abundance lying ready to his hand. In this opinion I state nothing that is original or new. Others, whose observations, conducted in the same sympathetic spirit, were scien- tific and sustained, have formed a like opinion, and have found the East prolific in evidence for its support. That evidence has appeared not exclusively among races possessing an indigenous civilization, like the Japanese or the Aryan races of Hindu- stan, but also in quarters of the globe and UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 125 among people surrendered by the imagina- tion of the West to the last profundity of barbarism. As long ago as 1836, Charles Darwin, then in the unspent keenness of his powers of discernment, made a voy- age as naturalist upon H. M. S. Beagle to study the distribution of organic beings inhabiting South America. He proceeded to Terra del Fuego, confessedly the ulti- mate point of human race-degeneration. Long afterward he makes this record: 1 "Although the existing races of man differ in many respects, yet, if their whole struc- ture be taken into consideration, they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points. Many of these are so unimportant or of so singular a nature, that it is extremely improbable that they should have been independently acquired by aboriginally distinct species or races. The same remark holds good with equal or greater force with respect to the numer- ous points of mental similarity between the most distinct races of man. The American aborigines, negroes, and Euro- peans are as different from each other, in 1 Cf. op. cit., p. 178. 126 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE my mind, as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the [aborigines of Terra del Fuego] on board the Beagle, with the many little traits of character, showing how similar their minds were to ours ; and so it was with a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate." If such evidence of essential unity was dis- coverable between the chastened mind of culture and the darkened intellect of sav- agery, it is not surprising that my inter- course with the ancient and high civiliza- tions of the East yielded every proof of the same unity. Indeed, it would be impos- sible for me to overstate the abundance and conclusiveness of this evidence, offered on every hand to one who had no reserves of prejudice, no bewilderment amid the startling and incessant play of contrasts, no shrinking from color or caste, no faith in the reasonableness of Western pride, no theory of psychic differentiation — no- thing but the love and confidence of a man toward his human friends. The same- ness of humanity seemed to me so ab- solute that I saw no reason why, granting UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 127 an exchange of training and environment, they might not become as I, and I as they. This experience of sameness, or unity, was, as I have explained, not grounded chiefly in emotion. It became an experimental and reasoned belief resting upon various kinds of evidence. The inventive capacity of the brain and the productive capacity of the hand I be- lieve to be broad human endowments as distinguished from national idiosyncrasies. The arts of design and the arts of pro- duction are not characteristic of any one part of the world as against other parts. It is quite true that circumstances have intervened variously to foster or to retard the practical development of these arts at different points in the world. It is also true that temperamental variations between peoples inhabiting opposite sides of the globe affect what may be called the accent of invention and production, determining whether the emphasis shall be set chiefly on the qualities of beauty or chiefly on the qualities of utility. These particulars are incidental. They resemble the tempera- mental distribution of talents in a family 128 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE of brothers, where one is a musician, one an engineer, one a philosopher. The evi- dence for racial unity appears in that the faculties of suggestion and design as ap- plied to the material of nature, and the re- sources of manual skill and power whereby the creative suggestions of the mind are worked out into form and fact, represent a field of experience where there is no East, no West, but only man, made in the image of that one conceiving and producing Mind, "of whom are all things." 1 By reason of temperamental variations, the nature and effects of which I would con- sider in my next Lecture, the accent of invention and production varies. In the West mental suggestion and manual pro- duction are strongest on the side of utility ; in the East the same powers are strongest on the side of beauty. Between the two lies no impassable gulf; the Western intel- ligently enters the East and seeks to repro- duce its beauty of design and workmanship. The Eastern perfectly apprehends and readily assimilates our utilities so far as he deems them worthy of notice. If there 1 Cf. 1 Cor. yiii. 5, 6. UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 129 be limitation, it appears to be upon us rather than upon him. Our standards of utility offer nothing to which he cannot at will attain. His standards of beauty still baffle our power of assimilation. To this conclusion I am led by a comparative study of three exhibitions: The exhibition of Indian designs and handicrafts at Ahmedabad, in the remote native state of Gujerat, India, in the cold season of 1902; the exhibition of Japanese designs and handicrafts at Osaka, Japan, in the spring of 1903; the General Exhibition at St. Louis in the summer and autumn of 1904. The former two exhibitions were strictly national in character ; but therein I found objects of utility conceived by Western minds, reproduced in perfection by Eastern hands; delicate instruments of surgery, or astronomy, or physical experiment; arms of precision for use in war; machinery heavy and light; vehicles of transportation; instru- ments of music; food preparations; printed books. On the other hand, at St. Louis, I found superb memorials of a vigorous and sanguine West, excelling itself in discovery and application of the useful forces and ma- 130 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE terial of nature, and clothing those utilities with much beauty of design and finish; yet I did not perceive that the West has been able to reach aesthetic standards repre- sented by the bronzes of Tokyo, the em- broideries of Kyoto, the enamels of Jaipur. The extraordinary keenness of discern- ment and analytical power shown by the East in its estimate of Western men, mo- tives, and affairs, presents another kind of proof of the essential unity of the human race. While the voice of Anglo-Saxon Pharisaism and prejudice has been pro- claiming contemptuously that the East is inscrutable, swathed in bands of imprac- ticable ethics and impossible philosophy, the modern East has become an astute critic of the entire system of Occidentalism. It is unnecessary to emphasize such occa- sional examples of this as are furnished by the book called "The Indian Eye on Eng- lish Life," by Mr. Malabari of Bombay, or the recent address before a Theistic Prayer Union by the Hon. Mr. Justice Chandavar- kar on "The Simple Life," in which ana- lytical qualities are displayed, carrying the principle enunciated by Wagner to conclu- UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE 131 sions more vital than his own. One has opportunities to note current phenomena showing in many ways that cultivated Oriental minds find no difficulty in com- prehending and judging the civilization of the West. I refer to editorial discussion of Occidental subjects in the Indian and Japanese daily and weekly press; to liter- ary criticism as found in certain Oriental reviews, for example, in the Hindustani Review; to the power of Eastern minds to express poetic conceptions under West- ern forms, as shown, exquisitely, by Mrs. Sarojini Naidu's volume of poems called "The Golden Threshold," lately published in London, with an introduction by Arthur Symons; to the classical use of the Eng- lish language throughout circles of culture in India and Ceylon, after a fashion that suggests the style of Addison, Burke, or Macaulay; to the cosmopolitan type of diplomacy shown by Japan in recent nego- tiations with the West; and finally, to the ease with which graduates of Eastern uni- versities discharge the requirements of Ber- lin, Oxford, or Harvard, as candidates for the higher degrees. 132 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE In concluding this Lecture on " The Es- sential Unity of the Human Race," I must refer to one evidence of unity more subtle, and possibly more spiritual, than those be- fore mentioned. When we enter the region of fundamental emotions, the Western heart that permits itself to beat freely is answered in the East with a naturalness that first amazes, then delights. Great as is the West in the range and dignity of its emo- tions, it learns from many an Oriental that honor, and courage, and compassion, and forgiveness, and faithfulness, and love can be interpreted with a delicacy of touch and a glorious depth of tone that speak of a soul unconquered by material ends, mystically loyal to unseen ideals, believing immea- surably in the invisible. Is there anything inexplicable to the higher order of Western minds in the essential principle that runs through Oriental mysticism ? On the con- trary, though we may reject its forms, we give involuntary homage to its spirit. It is the search of the soul for a best that does not depend on perishable modes of matter, that looks not on things that are seen, but on things that are not seen, because they UNITY OP THE HUMAN RACE 133 only are eternal. It is the same spirit of faith in the Invisible that has lived in all the higher thinking of the West, in the Spanish Molinos and Francis de Sales, in the Cam- bridge Platonists, in Wordsworth and Em- erson, that will not be put off with the stone of physical proof, but grasps with the hand of faith bread eternal, invisible, unprova- ble. It is, in East and West, the one spirit of which Tennyson, in "The Ancient Sage," speaks grandly: — "For nothing worthy proving can be proven, Nor yet disproven; wherefore thou be wise, Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith! She reels not in the storm of warring words, I She brightens at the clash of ' Yes' and ' No,' She sees the Best that glimmers thro' the Worst, She feels the Sun is hid but for a night, She spies the summer thro the winter bud, She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, She hears the lark within the songless egg, She finds the fountain where they wail'd 'Mirage!' " LECTURE IV TEMPERAMENTAL CONTRASTS BETWEEN EAST AND WEST Having discussed, in my last Lecture, the Essential Unity of the Human Race, I am to attempt now the consideration of those mental and spiritual differences which make the Eastern world unlike our own, and which are both interesting and sug- gestive to him who is convinced that the race, as a whole, is one race. Frederic Amiel, in the "Journal Intime," 1 makes the following observation : " Every man pos- sesses in himself the analogies and rudi- ments of all things, of all beings, and of all forms of life. The mind which is subtle and powerful may penetrate these poten- tialities, and make every point flash out the world which it contains. This is to be conscious of and to possess the general life." The thought is stimulating to that buried life within us all, which, sometimes _' Cf. London Ed., 1885, vol. i. pp. 144, 145. CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 135 dimly, sometimes vividly, seems to discern the universality of consciousness, to appre- hend and to be a part of all that is. Mr. William Inge, in his extraordinarily use- ful book on " Christian Mysticism," * has pointed out that the doctrine that man in his individual life recapitulates the spir- itual history of the race, ever has been a treasured conception of mystical thought. While we may not be prepared to accept it, we may acknowledge the helpful sugges- tion contained in the idea. For, from the contrasts, not to say the contradictions, of thought and feeling that we note within the unity of our personal self-conscious- ness, we can reason to the contrasts occur- ring between persons, or families, or nations, or racial groups. We may acknowledge these contrasts without disturbing our con- viction of underlying unities beneath all human life. The power of an individual to appre- hend and to be a part of the universal con- sciousness, to feel that the manifold tem- peraments of other lives and races are, in a sense, reflected within himself, is not 1 Cf. New York Ed., 1899, p. 35. 136 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE a power equally possessed by all. The con- dition of possessing it richly is the culti- vation of the subjective side of conscious- ness. To those who have lived chiefly in the outward, a formal life of routine, deal- ing mainly with well-known externals, traveling back and forth in beaten paths of neighborhood tradition, the range of thought contracts. The orbit of tempera- mental experience diminishes ; ability to un- derstand outlying differences on the broad field of human life grows less; creatures of habit, seeing only what is near, under- standing only what is commonplace; — the world, for such, means the places, meth- ods, persons, and value-judgments familiar- ized by custom, — the world of the local. Between the world of the local and the broad continents of race life, there is a great gulf fixed for minds of this type. That which lies beyond the local is, for them, vague, bizarre, unthinkable. Not so with him in whose inner being have been cultivated elements of rich subjectivity, whereby he has been able to escape the deadening monotony of conventionalism. He feels within himself the boundless scope CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 137 and orbit of sensibility. His soul is an or- ganism not caged behind the bars of one narrow, personal experience, but having wings that bear it out into the general life, where it becomes all things to all men; wings that lift it up to heights where it looks into souls most remote and most unlike itself, intuitively understanding them. The sense of kinship with remote races, while it may be cultivated, is in essence an involuntary experience. I do not under- take to account for it, further than to as- sociate it with a desirable escape from the deadening monotony of conventionalism; especially, escape from conventional esti- mates of race value, and partisan traditions of race tendency. Emancipation from these seems to result in experiences of world kin- ship, which are the more impressive because mutually involuntary. It is one thing to urge on academic grounds the brotherhood of man; it is another to feel the vivid cor- respondence of soul forces, beating like pulses against one's own heart, in those whom the prejudices of a thousand gener- ations have repelled as aliens. It is as one who, in a measure, has felt and 138 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE feels this correspondence of soul forces be- tween the Oriental and the Occidental con- sciousness that I speak of " Temperamental Contrasts between East and West." In my last Lecture, while defending the "Essen- tial Unity of the Human Race," I dwelt, with some emphasis, upon obvious external contrasts to modes of Western civilization that meet one, on entering the remote East: eccentricities in fashion, tint, and fabric of costume; physical color contrasts; browns and yellows of exquisite softness deepen- ing the skin color, until the European com- plexion seems cold and pallid; mystic sym- bols of the occult, swung from the neck, set in the wayside shrine, or imparting awful personality to desolate landscapes. I shall never forget my first glimpse of stone idols bestriding stone horses, on a South Indian plain, overgrown with cactus. One sees merchants kneeling on the floor of shops, and bargaining with the dignity of men at prayer. Here are Brahminy bulls, stroll- ing through thoroughfares, or pausing to eat choice morsels in shops whose owners watch with reverent obeisances the spoiling of their goods. Here are apes, dwelling in CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 189 temples, pampered in luxury, leaping forth with outstretched palms demanding gifts. Here are shrines of religion, like Tenoji's in Osaka, filled with garments and toys of little children whose souls have been swept off in the mysterious current of death. Such are "the obvious contrasts set up in the East against every Western preconcep- tion of order, utility, and truth." Yet these and a thousand other picturesque dis- tinctions, making daily life in the Orient a panorama of incredible novelty to him who observes it for the first time, are but out- ward and visible suggestions of inward and invisible distinctions, far more profound. The self-consciousness of the East, gov- erned by immemorial prepossessions, comes at the problem of life from an angle of vision, and sets the accent upon the worth of life under a standard of value-judgment, different from our own, and, as the preju- dices of most Westerners prompt them to believe, unintelligible to us. I know of no more conspicuous instance of the tendency of prejudice to paralyze the power of discernment than the common- place Western declaration of the utter un- 140 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE intelligibility of the East. This declaration has been reiterated from every possible source of authority, until the inscrutable East has become a proverb. The traveler, the explorer, the missionary, the diploma- tist, the merchant, the civil officer, the military governor, the ethnologist, through long years of uncontested affirmation, taught us to dismiss as unintelligible what we could not denounce as immoral, in the Oriental self-consciousness. The fatuous tendency of the human mind to let pro- verbial sayings pass unchallenged, and to accept a due proportion of reiteration as equivalent to demonstration, may account for the venerable fallacy that the thinking of the East is a fabric whereof the web is absurdity and the woof wickedness. I do not undertake to say that we are at present competent, nor that we may for generations to come be able, to measure adequately the angle of vision from which the East looks out upon life, nor fully to comprehend the conclusions, philosophical and ethical, at which it arrives, and the path of arrival. Above all, I do not undertake to say that we have worked through the problem of an CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 141 Eastern Christianity to be developed in the future, nor fully have seen how the mind of Christ, which seems to lend itself to our angle of vision, can lend itself equally to the Eastern angle of vision. Yet into our equip- ment for this majestic study, two new ele- ments have come : religious psychology and the science of comparative religion. By means of these new branches of knowledge we have gone, in three decades, nearer to the heart of the East than in the three cen- turies that went before. The mind of the most sanguine cannot trust itself to say what, in three decades more, may be the fur- ther unfoldings of this, the most interesting spiritual problem in all the world. Already, I think, we are beginning to realize that the problem, as it stands, is a problem of temperamental variations, ex- pressing themselves naturally and charac- teristically, in East and West, on a field of humanity which, in essence, is one com- mon field. The race is one; but the bro- thers stand at opposite angles of vision, each seeing what appears to him, each passing value- judgments on what he sees. As a matter of historic fact, the Christian re- 142 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE ligion has been, for some centuries, the general possession of the West. The rela- tive assimilation of Christianity by the West shows in some measure the mission of Christ to life as the West sees it. The question now in suspense is, not the fanati- cal dream of bringing the Oriental con- sciousness around to the Western angle of vision; it is the capacity and power of Christ to organize and ethicize life as the East sees it, from its angle of vision and under its standard of value-judgments. That we may estimate, in a measure, what this problem of temperamental varia- tion involves, let us, for the moment, ab- solve the mind of all ancestral preferences and affections; let us, in spirit, expatriate ourselves, and come, like observers from another sphere, toward this, our Western self-consciousness. Our effort is to com- pute the Western angle of vision; to look, as strangers to ourselves, through the West- ern eye, out upon life. Let us search for the Western standard of value-judgment. Like Moses, reading curiously the tablets of Sinai, let us read those commandments of instinct that have been cut, as it would CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 143 seem, by God's hand, in the bed-rock of life, as the Occidental sees it. The first and great commandment graven in Western consciousness is to use nature; to utilize its resources; to value the sub- stance of the world, the wealth on its surface, the wealth in its depths. The appropria- tion of nature is instinctive in Occidental consciousness. Things and their values are real; the use of this reality is fundamental. To the West more than to the East, the great words attributed to Moses in the benedic- tion of Joseph seem to apply. They are as an inventory of a good, valuable world, in which it is worth while to live and delve and accumulate and use and enjoy. " Blessed of the Lord be his land; For the precious things of heaven, for the dew, And for the deep that coucheth beneath, And for the precious things of the fruits of the sun, And for the precious things of the growth of the moons, And for the chief things of the ancient mountains, And for the precious things of the everlasting hills, And for the precious things of the earth and the fulness thereof." 1 Far more definitely in the life of the West than in that of the East does this magnifi- 1 Deut. xxxiii. 13-16. 144 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE cent appreciation of the phenomenal world find an echo. To Western instinct this world is a good world. The pessimism of Schopenhauer, or Mallock's plaintive in- quiry, "Is life worth living?" enters as an alien note into the bustling definiteness of Occidental existence. For most people it has no meaning. They do not in the least understand it. To many to whom it is not unintelligible it is offensive; an intellectual obsession; an effeminate, fantastical vagary. The genius of the Western consciousness fastens upon the entities of the phenomenal world as real. All is as it seems to be. Self is real; and, to the common mind, that self-reality is set off from a God-reality which is much like a larger self. Personal distinctions between man and God are real, and just as they seem to be. Around these real persons lies a real world, to be known, subdued, used; a world of open beauty and hidden resource, calling man out to itself by ten thousand voices of invitation. To those voices man answers without hesitancy and with all his powers. These things, substances, forces of the world, are life; to many, enthralled by their power, they are CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 145 the totality of life. They are the solid ground — the terra firma — of existence. Beyond them beats the surf of an unfath- omed ocean, where hangs the sullen fog- bank of the unknown. Wherever in West- ern life the Christian religion has nourished the instinct of immortality, there is inter- est, often deep interest, in that which lies behind the fog-bank of the unknown, yet not interest strong enough to neutralize, often not strong enough to regulate, the funda- mental instinct to believe in and to value things. The utilization of nature springs from this instinct of reality. By degrees, rudi- mentary occupations of prehistoric times are superseded by definite devotion to in- dustrial policy, fixed on the conquest of nature to the uses of man. This growth and continuity of industrial purpose has stimulated the development of science in the West, and has extended scientific enter- prise to the remotest lands of the world. Industrial arts have become involved with ideas of national progress through competi- tion, producing complex and momentous conditions. The distribution and interplay 146 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE of economic interests has raised political issues of the first magnitude throughout the West and wherever the West, on any pre- text, comes in contact with the East. Be- hind the whole organism of industrial pro- gress leaps in the heart of the West a passion of energy — a belief in the value of doing — an unconquerable will to do. Wherever this ardor for the doing of deeds and the winning of things is tempered and broadened by culture, it produces the finest fruits of Occidental civilization; ambition held in check by moral responsibility, power and achievement consecrated to useful ends. But when the elemental passion for things takes possession of Western minds un- chastened by intellectual and moral culture, it produces, among rich and poor alike, a bitter and repellent type of selfishness. The philosophy of egoism becomes elemental, even brutal, in its simplicity. Natural in- stincts control the will. The value of life is assessed in terms of physical possession : to get, to have, to hold, to eat, to drink, to buy, to sell, to know sensuous pleasure. The field of knowledge is bounded by com- mercial requirement. The zest to know CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 147 the knowable world is not for the sake of pure knowledge, but in order to wrest from nature her secrets, that she may be further subdued to use, more securely yoked to the chariot of utilitarianism. Spiritual knowledge is ignored. One short, fierce creed of naturalism suffices for the uncultured rich and the illiterate poor: "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." The elemental instinct for things, working itself out to the opposite conclu- sions of success and failure, forms the per- petual tragedy of modern Occidentalism. On every hand we may trace to its bitter conclusion the working of this philosophy of materialistic egoism, in the illiterate poor, whose effort to possess the visible objects of desire has failed. I doubt if there is any product of Anglo-Saxon civilization more miserable to look upon than its degenerate poverty, unrelieved by education, unmiti- gated by religion, without God and with- out hope in the world. I doubt if, even in aboriginal paganism, there is any repre- sentative of humanity more to be pitied, or more destitute of compensation, than that last residuum of illiterate poverty that is 148 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE flung out as refuse from the terrible ma- chine of Western utilitarianism. We know the type: sodden with drink, corrupt, pro- fane, embittered against heaven and earth, without ideals, without imagination, with no reserves of physical vigor or spiritual consolation. Between this last stage of social degeneracy in the West and the cor- responding stage in the East, there is an extraordinary contrast in favor of the latter. Extreme poverty and total illiteracy in the East are a thousand times more plentiful than in the West, yet to the last there clings to them a certain dignity that carries the suggestion of a great inheritance. In my observations among the poorest of the poor in India, I have had occasion to marvel at the indefectible dignity of poverty. It sur- vives penury, and clothes with singular, and often noble, gravity, the shrinking frailness of the afflicted. I have observed it among famine sufferers, lepers and plague patients, among wanderers of the bazaar, and feeble pilgrims of the mofussil. Poorer than the poorest tramp on our Western highways, these Oriental children of sorrow carry with them a treasure that the world cannot CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 149 give nor take away. Menaced by bodily starvation, they appear to have meat to eat that the world knows not of. I attribute this to the indestructibility of the religious imagination as an element of consciousness in Orientals. Not things, but ideas, are their choicest treasures. The Vedic classics are read and expounded by itinerant teachers, who gather around them at the cross-roads or in the market-place eager groups, tech- nically illiterate, and saturate their spirits with the sublimities of ancient philosophy and tradition. The elemental majesty of these ancestral beliefs has been assimilated, and provides fuel for the religious imagina- tion with which, temperamentally, the East is enriched. Karma; reincarnation; the reality of the unseen and the unreality of the seen ; the imperialism of the will of God, are concepts that have given tone to con- sciousness, producing a characteristic and unchangeable world-view. Even where vice is joined with illiterate poverty in the East, there does not appear the same total sub- mergence of the man in the beast that marks the last corruptible stage of animal- ism in the West. To the end the suggestion 150 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE of a higher ancestry and a higher destiny- clings to the Oriental, like an order of rank. I do not say that wickedness is less wicked in the East, nor that it is less gross on some of the lower levels of practice; but I am confident that a better understanding of the ethical consciousness of the East is much to be desired in the interest of fairness, and as a corrective of Occidental Pharisaism. "Nolite judicare, ut non judicemini," is a timely commandment for such as, secure in the theory of Western virtue, bring a rail- ing accusation against the morals of the depressed classes in the Eastern world. The bitterness of poverty in the Western world, when unrelieved by education and religion, is the fruit of the unsatisfied pas- sion for things. On the other hand, the same passion, inflamed by success, works to the opposite extreme in the mind of the uncultured rich. The intensity of the instinct to possess, and to increase posses- sions, is producing a striking human type: the secularized, uncultured Anglo-Saxon of the modern world. Practical, virile, suc- cessful, unscrupulous, irreverent, he emerges on the field of competition. He has broken CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 151 away from the semi-Oriental ecclesiastical mysticism of the Latin races. In other words, the Church and the Christian faith have lost their power over him, although he may retain nominal relations therewith. He has his first free chance in all history to show what manner of person he is. He exhibits his power to press a policy of utilita- rianism, like a wedge-formation in the foot- ball field, straight through opposing prin- ciples of social ethics. He ignores powers and sanctions of the unseen world. To him, the goodness of life is its equivalent in terms of physical luxury and financial strength. For him, a man's life consisteth in the abundance of the things that he pos- sesseth. Life is sweet, with the zest of a fierce joy of acquisition. And, in the un- pitying paradox of selfishness, life's sweet- ness for himself deadens his sense of its sweetness for others. The feverish zest of living unto self begets brutal indifference to the life of others. This is the most cruel note of a materialized civilization. It is what Matthew Arnold calls "the worship of machinery." It supplants reverence and love for human personality. It sears the 152 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE conscience, so that crimes against brother- hood are condoned in the name of progress and business necessity. His factories pre- pare debased products. He evades law to secure their distribution, caring not whom they may injure. His speeding vehicles crush the innocent unwary. His exagger- ated notion of sport stimulates gladiatorial instincts. His luxury, ungoverned by eth- ical solicitude, degenerates into a social of- fense. Oblivion of the dead adds to the heartlessness of living. He is a stranger to the reverence that is born of meditation. God is not in his thoughts. Pessimism, the last revenge of life upon those who deal unjustly with the world, completes the hard- ening of the heart, the devitalizing of con- science. Such are the extremes to which the elemental passion for things, the bare philosophy of material energy, works itself out into failure or success. On the one hand are the illiterate poor, who, blindly governed by instinct, having no guide into the spiritual realm, know no higher destiny than the struggle for things. By misfor- tune or by fault they have lost their share, and, losing that, have lost hope, courage, CONTRASTS— EAST AND WEST 153 self-respect. They sink into the depths. No man cares for their souls. As the beasts that perish, they die and return to their dust. On the other hand are the uncul- tured rich. By evading the softening influ- ence of culture and the restraints of piety, by concentrating their energy in the passion for things, they gain their portion in this present life. They are filled with good. Their eyes stand out with fatness. They have more than heart could wish. They are gorged with prosperity. They are not in trouble as other men. They are clothed with pride as with a garment. These two extremes, hopeless poverty and conscience- less wealth, are not representative of West- ern civilization. They represent its morbid possibilities, under conditions of abnormal separation from the inspiration and re- straints of culture and religion. Between these extremes is the great mean of practi- cal usefulness and progress, where lies the strength of the Western world, its substan- tial excellence, its helpful mission and mes- sage to humanity. I have said, in effect, that the fundamen- tal principal, the first and great command- 154 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE ment in Western thinking, is the use and enjoyment of reality. To the Occidental the physical world is real, all things in it are real, all personal distinctions are real. The moral world is comprehended in the same scheme of reality; right and wrong are real; and, back of them, as the real source of moral distinction, is a personal God, whose relation to man is actual and imme- diate. "Man's chief end," in a world of reality, "is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever." This real world is for real men, with real powers; powers of investi- gation, of assimilation, of application, of accumulation, of action. Upon this basis of reality, the Western world has evolved a civilization which has contributed, and is contributing enormously, to the general good, within the lines set by culture and religion. It is a matter of thrilling interest to reflect upon the train of consequences issuing from the first axiom of Occidental consciousness: the usableness of a real world. To it we owe the passion for geo- graphical discovery that swept over Europe after the Revival of Learning, and begot the intrepid voyagers of Portugal, Spain, Eng- CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 155 land, and Holland. Their exploits, under- taken in pursuit of many subsidiary ends, were, in essence, an expression of the Euro- pean instinct to use the world. That in- stinct is the psychological clue to history. The nations of the West are subduers of the world, not by reason of political caprice or the fortunes of war, but through tem- peramental necessity. The genius for ex- ploration, discovery, and appropriation of the knowable earth is a trait in the blood. Modern arctic and antarctic researches bear witness to the activity of an instinct that cannot slumber while one corner of the globe remains unknown, unvisited, unused. The political and economic policies of Western nations in the Oriental world may offend our sense of righteousness, neverthe- less it remains true that there are psychic forces ordained of God in the Occidental consciousness projecting it Eastward. It is no vain optimism to trust that, with the growth of culture, the total outcome of world-development by the West in the East will be for the betterment of the whole human race. The same axiomatic conviction that the world is for the use 156 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE of man lies back of those scientific inves- tigations of nature and utilitarian appli- cations of science to life which are the characteristic marks of Western civiliza- tion. Discovery of chemical elements; classification of animal and vegetable spe- cies; mathematical, physical, and psycho- logical researches; increase of knowledge and improvement of method in engineer- ing, transportation, medicine, surgery, irri- gation, forestry, education, social economy, civil law : these and many other splendid enrichments of man's physical and mental inheritance flow from the deepest springs of temperamental necessity, accomplishing a providential purpose of good for the world. That these researches into the ma- terial of the usable world are sometimes conducted in a theoretical spirit which takes no account of ethical ends, and that the ardor of applied science proceeds chiefly from self-interest, does not diminish the providential value of race temperament in the evolution of mankind and the better- ment of the world. The effects of this axiomatic sense of the usable world on the character and spirit of Western nations CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 157 are conspicuous and interesting. It has given power, self-confidence, and precision. It has produced strong initiative, rugged adherence to purpose, resourcefulness in emergency, courage in the face of difficulty. These qualities are nurtured only in an atmosphere of reality, through which the prizes of life are discerned at short range. If one asks the moral outcome from this characteristic attitude of Western civiliza- tion, it must be admitted that it is both good and evil. The plain and obvious real- ity of visible things has stimulated indus- trial qualities, has enhanced the value of time, has erected standards of social and financial integrity which, though occasion- ally obscured by the prevalence of luxury and speculation, do represent the moral ideal of the majority. On the other hand, from the same instinctive passion for things have come the gravest blemishes and faults of Occidental civilization. The ferocity of unethical competition, the lust after ter- ritorial expansion, the spirit of aggression and domination, are evils that appear at times with intensity, turning the light of otherwise splendid material progress into 158 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE the darkness of oppression, injustice, and extortion. These are the morbid exagger- ation of powers which, restrained and coor- dinated by culture and religion, are indis- pensable for the development of the world. Yet, when all its faults are taken at their full value, and its excesses noted, the fact remains that good rather than evil is the prevalent effect of Western civilization upon the world. The noblest contribution yet made to the organized life of mankind by any portion of the race is the sense of ethical reality, the reality of right, the real- ity of duty. It has come as part of the general sense of world-reality that is charac- teristic of Occidental consciousness. The Western accent of thought upon the reality of nature, of man, of a personal God, cul- minates in ethical reality, the definiteness of right as distinguished from wrong. The foundation of this idea is, unquestionably, Semitic monotheism. Out of Persia and Palestine emerged the human conscious- ness of an ethical God. But the tempera- mental characteristics of the Occident were congenial soil for that sublime conception. It flourished in the West, nurtured by its CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 159 constitutional love of definiteness. The personal ethical quality in God seemed, to the Western mind and conscience, to utter itself in the eternal morality of law. The inherent righteousness of the infinite Holy One, speaking from Sinai and the Mount of Beatitude in Divine commandments, seemed, to the mind of the West, to speak perpetually in the sanction of human law and the personal imperative of the enlight- ened conscience. The Western conception of justice is founded, not in- caprices of gov- ernment, but in inherent and eternal ethical distinctions, the basis and norm of which is in the very Being of God. Faber's words express the essence of Occidental con- sciousness in the matter of right and wrong and their respective destinies in a rational universe : — "For right is right, since God is God, And right the day must win; To doubt would be disloyalty, To falter would be sin." The glory of the West is not chiefly her power over nature, her vast research into the secret places of knowledge, her ingen- ious application of force to production, nor 160 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE her initiative in social progress. It is her sense of the reality of ethical distinctions as inherent in the ethical nature of God. The humiliation of the West is her readiness to forget the divineness of duty at the bidding of material self-interest; to submerge the knowledge of righteousness beneath the overvaluation of possessions; to practice the lower ethics of utility while holding in theory the higher ethics of principle; sub- ordinating the divine conception of an ideal right to the charm and fascination of things. The lust for things has been the undoing of Western nations and Western individuals. It is at this point in our discussion of temperamental contrasts that we are pre- pared to realize wherein consists the funda- mental difference between East and West. The existence of a profound temperamen- tal contrast is felt by all thoughtful mem- bers of the Western world who breathe the atmosphere of the Orient. I have already pointed out that that difference is not ac- counted for when we take note of pictur- esque variations in color, costume, and mode of life which attract the eye of an observer. The deeper contrast appeals to CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 161 the soul rather than to the eye. Evidently it resides in consciousness, involves world- view, and represents the outlook of reason and understanding. No ethnic question is, on the whole, more interesting than this : Why is there this contrast between the active, forceful, practical, progressive West, and the calm, visionary, introspective, in- different East? I think that it is possible to give an answer to this interesting ques- tion: The East is as it is, because at the root and base of its self-consciousness is the conviction of the relative unreality of things that are seen. In making this general statement concerning the complex East, wherein every religious type is found, from the Sannyasin of India to the efficient, modern Churchman of Japan, I am not indifferent to obvious local distinctions. Nevertheless, the soul of the East is essen- tially one soul. He who comes near to the Oriental consciousness at any point, in a spirit of sympathetic appreciation, feels its mystic power, its affiliation with the unseen and the Absolute. In his " Ideals of the East," ' Mr. Kakuso Okakura, long regarded 1 John Murray, London, 1903, p. 1. 162 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE by Asiatics as the foremost living authority on Oriental archaeology and art, well says : "Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilizations, — the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Uni- versal, which is the common thought-inher- itance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those mari- time peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the Particular, and to search out the means, not the ends, of life." It is because of this "broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal" overspreading Asiatic life that one can make with safety a generalization upon the basic element in the Oriental consciousness. It is a conviction of the relative unreality of things that are seen. That which to the Occidental is most real, tangible, and actual, most obviously the end to live for, is to the Oriental consciousness a negligible quan- tity, because relatively unreal. Things, ob- CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 163 jects, persons, physical facts, qualities, and distinctions are, in the last analysis, imper- manent and vain; subtle strands in a vast cloud-veil of illusion, that infolds, like a misty, deceiving atmosphere, the one un- searchable reality of the Impersonal Abso- lute. In making this statement on unreal- ity I do not forget how enormously the Far East, in particular China and Japan, has been affected by that most extraordinary master and teacher of ethics, Confucius, with his accent on the five primary rela- tions of social and domestic life. They were formulated into a doctrine which could be mastered very easily by the people: 1. Between father and son let there be love. 2. Between king and subject let there be duty. 3. Between husband and wife let there be proper distinctions (of functions). 4. Between the old and the young let there be orderliness. 5. Between friend and friend let there be faithfulness. It is im- possible to overstate the greatness of Con- fucianism. It came into Asiatic life as a countervailing influence, to offset the in- difference to relationships developed by the absolute idealism of higher Hindu thought 164 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE and Buddhist pessimism. A profound stu- dent of the subject, Mr. Tokiwo Yokoi, of Japan, whom I had the pleasure to meet in Gujerat, India, on the Christmas eve of 1902, gave expression in the "Interna- tional Journal of Ethics" (January, 1906) to some striking remarks upon Confucian- ism in Japan, as a corrective of the too deep absorption in the Unseen which is charac- teristic of Asian thought. He says: "The life-ideal [of Japan] enriched itself most largely by accepting the ethical system of Confucius. The great merit of Confu- cianism was in the positive and ethical na- ture of its teachings. It dwelt on the im- portance of the daily routine of life, and invested with almost religious significance the minor, commonplace events of exist- ence. It was indeed a grand and inspiring ideal, and it has helped to produce in Japan those enlightened princes and scholarly statesmen to whom the country owes many a salvation in times of crisis, and to whom we owe that ideal of upright public service which to-day is proving so influential." The unprejudiced student of the modern East must admire the justice of these obser- CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 165 vations if happily admitted to the personal fellowship of certain Orientals of distinc- tion. I shall have occasion to refer to this more fully when discussing, in the next Lecture, " Religious Insight and Experi- ence outside of Christianity." There is reason to feel that the influence of Confu- cius upon ethical ideals of the Far East will be found ultimately to have prepared the way for a singularly noble type of Chris- tianity. Nevertheless, there is a fact larger than Confucianism to be taken into con- sideration in ascertaining the philosophical attitude of Eastern races toward life in this present world. That larger fact is Hin- duism and its gigantic cognate, Buddhism. It is no part of my present purpose to define Hinduism. It were a vain endeavor. No more can this vast, flexible synthesis of reli- gious thinking be defined, than the atmos- phere be walled about or the tide encom- passed with bounds. Great masters of the West have dealt with the problems of thought incorporated within the all-absorbing name Hinduism. Max Miiller, Oldenberg, Deus- sen, Rhys Davids, Coplestone, and many others have traced its channels from the 166 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE ancient springs of Central Asia, down through the defiles of the Hindu Kush into the plains of Hindustan. They have fol- lowed its eastward way, in the Buddhism of Ceylon, Siam, China, Japan. They have prepared invaluable memorials of scholar- ship for those who shall follow them. But the spirit of Hinduism, the mental attitude, the world-view from which it emanates, the opposites which it incorporates, the contra- dictions which it ignores, the imperial calm- ness with which it appropriates all things, even Christianity, as its own — who can define these! To liberal Hindus the illim- itable in Hinduism is its glory. Neither time nor place, creed nor form, can restrain its incalculable synthesis. One of its own representatives, Mr. Pramatha Nath Bose, F. G. S., M. R. A. S., in his book on " Hindu Civilization during British Rule," 1 says: " In one sense it is a very ancient religion, in another sense it is not. Though pro- fessedly based upon the Vedas, it is no more like the Vedic religion than man is like the protoplasmic germ out of which he is supposed to have been evolved. It 1 Cf. p. 45. CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 167 has grown through three thousand years to be what it is at present. It is not the creed of the Rig- Veda, nor of the Brah- manas, nor of the Upanishads, nor of the Puranas; it is neither Saivism, nor Vaish- navism nor Saktism : yet it is all these. It can hardly be called a homogeneous religion in the sense that Judaism and Zoroastri- anism are among the older, or Christianity and Mohammedanism are among the more recent, religions." It is well for us Aryans of the West, whose training in the method of religious thinking has for the most part been far different from that of our brother Aryans of the East, to understand how life has looked to those elemental prophets of negation, the makers of philosophies and theologies of Hinduism that have influenced all the East, including Buddhism and Mohammedan- ism, and that have reacted upon Christian thinking in the most cultivated circles of the West. One recalls the daring words of a brilliant Indian monk, the late Swami Vivekananda : " As the creed of the down- trodden Jew has held half the earth during eighteen centuries, so it seems not unlikely 168 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE that that of the despised Hindu may yet dominate the world." It is certain that reactions of the Higher Hinduism upon the higher religious thinking of the West may be looked for, to an extent not dreamed of by an earlier age of Western separatism, before the Christianization of the world can be accomplished. To a single aspect of philosophical Hin- duism I must confine my remarks; to that aspect that has most universally affected Oriental life — the relative unreality of things that are seen. While the goal of West- ern ambition has been to grasp, control, and use the world, the goal of Hindu thinking ever has been to reach and to be absorbed within the abysmal depths of Pure Being: the One, the Only, Reality, subsisting be- hind all possible distinctions, physical, per- sonal, moral. Beneath the variable features of the several systems of Hindu philosophy lies a formidable unity which, so to say, de- termines the subliminal consciousness of the Orient. It is insistence upon the ultimate fact of Pure Being, as that alone which pos- sesses finality. Personal distinctions cannot represent the final fact in Infinite Being. CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 169 Personal distinctions are seemings, not reali- ties. Were they real they would in effect be limitations upon the Illimitable, qualities of the Unqualified, attributes and modes of that which is beyond attributes and modes — namely, the Infinite Impersonal ; the Undifferentiated Essence of the Ultimate. I can speak of this only in the most general terms, contenting myself with this single reference to a subject so great that it would require a course of lectures to give it proper definition. My purpose in this reference is to show by suggestion how this characteristic Asiatic world-view, in itself and in its implications, produces a state of consciousness and a set of interests opposite to those most real and most vital to the Anglo-Saxon, with his instinct for definite- ness, his love of affirmation, his grasp on things. To him the world is real: nature, time, self, life, duty, character, God, are all personally real. To the Oriental, wrapped in the atmosphere of negation and imper- sonality, all this outward, visible whirl of incidents, people, and things is shadow-play upon the surface of inscrutable depths ; the so-called ultimates of right and wrong are 170 CHEIST AND THE HUMAN RACE changing lights gleaming across the dark ocean of the Unknown. The primary interest of the Anglo-Saxon is attainment outside of himself: to know by research in the storehouses of knowledge, by observation of the facts of nature and history ; to observe and compare phenomena, and thus to find himself, the world, and God. The primary interest of the Oriental is within. He desires escape from the exter- nal, from the shadow-play of substances and efforts and inventions and discoveries. He aspires to cut the chain of the phenome- nal, whereby he is held upon the surface of things, and to sink into the inner abyss of esoteric knowledge, mystically acquired and mystically liberated, through immediate union with the Absolute. One may not find in Western literature a statement of the Eastern ideal more magnificent and more intelligent to Western minds than that which Robert Browning, the most princely European mystic of the nineteenth century, sets forth in "Paracelsus:" — "Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise From outward things, whate'er you may believe. There is an inmost centre in us all, CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 171 Wall upon wall, the gross flesh, hems it in, This perfect, clear perception — which is Truth. Where truth abides in fulness; and around, A baffling and perverting carnal mesh Binds it and makes all error; and to know Rather consists in opening out a way Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape Than in effecting entry for a light Supposed to be without." It is when we reflect upon considerations like these, and not until we do so reflect, that we are able to interpret worthily cer- tain temperamental tendencies of the East, upon which ordinarily the provincial Anglo- Saxon, full of affairs, looks down with contempt; railing at the inert, purposeless Oriental. Indifference to the hidden resources of nature is one of these tendencies. It ap- pears in the lack of scientific initiative. The East has not been keen to pursue to their hidden springs the productive and motive powers of the physical universe; it has not arraigned nature before the in- quisition of science, to extort from her a confession of her secret wealth. There are indeed evidences that at a very early period individual Orientals were making explora- 172 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE tions in the domains of astronomy, physics, medicine, surgery, and other branches of knowledge, but the impressive conservatism of the Eastern world shows that these in- terests were sporadic, not general; that the mind was set on the exploration of other, and invisible, realms. The exciting annals of utilitarian invention throughout the West, the vast activities of applied science, com- peting to save labor and to annihilate space and time, find no counterpart in the general development of Eastern nations. Where Hinduism and Buddhism prevail, the popu- lar life is marked by touching simplicity. The wants and the pleasures alike are simple. It suffices to move quietly onward in old paths, hallowed by the practice of a thousand generations. The patient use of old methods and limited materials sheds over Eastern life a certain pathos which is majestic, because it suggests, not incapacity for progress, but preoccupation of the mind with things unseen. In the great Asiatic communities shaped by Confucianism, there is industry, but of a serene and pastoral type. The earth is tilled, not, as with us, for speculative competition in the grain CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 173 markets of the world, but according to "the slowly defining necessities of an agricultural community, developing itself through uncounted ages of tranquillity." The shepherd and the peasant of the mod- ern East are figures from an olden time. A pristine dignity invests them ; even as, in the mythology of China, the first Emperor was Fukki, the Teacher of Grazing, suc- ceeded by Shinno, the Divine Farmer. But this indifference to the hidden re- sources of nature is not boorish. This ineptitude for clever inventions to save time and to cheapen production is not because the hand is clumsy or the eye dull. On the contrary, the genius for beauty rises in the East to transcendent heights, consecrated to the service of religion and royalty. It would seem that the utilitarian indifference of the Oriental mind leaves unspent possi- bilities of power at the service of the aesthetic instinct. As touch becomes marvelous in the hand of the blind, being set apart, as it were, for special ministry, so the genius for beauty, reserved in a measure from sordid engagement with commonplace ends, at- tains a distinction unparalleled in Western 174 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE life. Beauty of design and workmanship in the West tends to become a commercial asset. In the East it still remains a religious aspiration. In consequence he who returns from the mystic, reverent beauty of the Eastern mode, to the useful beauty of the West, perceives that in some manner a splendid vision has faded out into the light of common day. He who has seen the designers of enamels at their work in Jaipur perceives how a Rajput handicraftsman raises beauty to the plane of the spiritual. Indifference to time is another tempera- mental tendency of the East. It exasper- ates the Anglo-Saxon, with whom time is money, and punctuality the courtesy of kings. Especially he despises it because, in the ethics of the West, a high estimate of the value of time ordinarily accompanies, if it does not presuppose, moral thoroughness, an active conscience, promptitude and honor in the discharge of obligation. In these qualities he finds the East deficient and, judging under the Western code only, with- out considering those factors in the Oriental consciousness whence comes this indiffer- ence, his eye darkens with scorn. He for- CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 175 gets that time, and the crowded programme of the phenomenal world, stand, for the Eastern mind, within the shadowy circle of unreality; that personal distinctions and the momentary importance of obligation are seen, by it, in a relation produced by the con- cepts maya and reincarnation, for which the West has no equivalent. I make no attempt to extenuate Oriental lapses from virtue, nor to hint at two codes of ethics; but I draw attention to the fact that Eastern indif- ference to time and obligation is not identical with Western laziness and shiftiness; its producing causes are not ignoble, and its rectification must involve, not the Western- izing of the East, but a new and vast synthe- sis of idealistic philosophy with the Christ's conception of manhood and of the world. If it is true that indifference to time and the strenuous programme of obligation breeds in the Eastern an ethical laissez-faire that offends the Puritan conscience, it is also true that a singular depth of tenderness is engendered by the pessimistic philosophy. The soul of the East is rich in the gentler feelings. Being less immersed in egoistic rivalry, it remains at leisure to feel, to love, 176 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE to share with others the perennial mystery of life's sorrow. To this it joins a superb genius for contemplation, and an insatiate interest in the spiritual realms; following every clue that leads into the soul's laby- rinth, and welcoming with inspiring, even importunate, interest every fellow-seeker after God advancing in the spirit of the larger brotherhood. I cannot carry my subject further in the present Lecture. In the Lecture following this I shall proceed toward the distinctly religious aspects of Orientalism, speaking of "Religious Insight and Experience Out- side of Christianity. ' ' My hope is that I have set forth the greatness of East and West in their respective spheres of consciousness; and that the exhibition of the tempera- mental contrasts herein involved suggests a Divine purpose to effect a better mutual understanding, a closer spiritual correspond- ence of these mighty spheres of human ex- perience and aspiration. There are quali- ties in us to which the modern East already begins to correspond; not only, we may believe, for the advancement of industrial arts, and arts of war. There is already in CONTRASTS — EAST AND WEST 177 progress an exalted commerce of the mind; an assimilation of educational ideals which may prepare the way for the assimilation of ethical ideals. And surely there are quali- ties in the finer souls of the East to which the Western world may with advantage give more consideration and readier hospitality. "The world is too much with us." We need to multiply our vision-seers, our inter- preters of the soul. Great prophets of the ideal have arisen among us, unto whom many have listened and by whom many have been interpreted to themselves : Cole- ridge and Wordsworth, Carlyle and Tenny- son, Ruskin and Browning. In these lived the spirit of the East. These were apostles of the unseen, evangelists of a larger spir- itual selfhood, who lifted up their voices in protest against our Western thraldom to the visible. Their message had in it the genius of the higher Orientalism. They declared (often, alas ! to dull ears) the un- reality, the shadow-dance, of things visible; the eternal glory and stability of that which seeks its ultimate affinities in God. Is there not, in all of us, beneath our Western bond- age to the conventional fashions of a passing 178 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE age, a finer sense of the Infinite Unseen, and of its glory and worth, that, in our best mo- ments, rises in us, at the call of the East, "to gaze beyond the things we see ? " Yes ! it is in each one of us, albeit buried deeply in some. We are Occidentals in habitude and custom of our outer life, but in the holy of holies within there visits us, in rare hours, an Eastern glory that breaks through language and escapes into the unfettered thought of Infinity. What man among us knows not at times his kinship with the Oriental mystic! What man among us answers not, in his soul's clearest, finest hours, to those words that were written, not by Hindu prophet dreaming on the Ganges' bank, but here in Cambridge, by a most manful citizen of the West, James Russell Lowell: — "Sometimes at waking, in the street sometimes, Or on the hillside, always unforewarned, A grace of being, finer than himself, That beckons and is gone — a larger life Upon his own impinging, with swift glimpse Of spacious circles luminous with mind, To which the ethereal substance of his own Seems but gross cloud to make that visible, Touched to a sudden glory round the edge." LECTURE V RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE OUTSIDE OP CHRISTIANITY In the third and fourth Lectures it has been my privilege to discuss two subjects of great importance to those who are interested in broader aspects of the human problem; namely, " The Essential Unity of the Hu- man Race and Temperamental Contrasts between East and West." I outlined certain tentative opinions bearing upon these as- pects, into some measure of sympathy with which I trust that I was able to bring my auditors. A brief review of these opinions should be made at this point. I began by describing the nature of an effective convic- tion of the unity of the human race. It is a conviction effective for ethical ends of ser- vice, because founded on more than an emo- tional or sentimental hope, even on reasoned and experimental belief. I recognized the fact that such a belief has its opponents and that their opposition can be accounted for. 180 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE In many it is the negative effect of lack of knowledge. The mind having been engaged with local interests has not had its attention directed toward the world. In the absence of information to the contrary, it assumes, vaguely, that fundamental differences be- tween races exclude the possibility of unity. Other opponents of this belief are controlled in their opinion by obvious and striking contrasts with all that is familiar and accept- able to the Occident, which press upon the view of the Western observer of Eastern life, manners, and thought. Still others succumb to that subtle alienation of sympathy that is called race prejudice. The instinctive racial egotism of the Anglo-Saxon powerfully af- fects his world-judgments. While allowing for these divergent opinions and respecting the sincerity of those who profess them, I ventured to express belief founded to some extent upon experience, that if one will go into remote regions of the Oriental world with a mind disburdened of race prejudice and eager for evidence on which to sustain a theory of the essential unity of mankind, he is bound to find that evidence in abun- dance, lying ready to his hand. RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 181 It is of various kinds. A comparative study of arts, both of design and of pro- duction, yields singularly rich evidence that the inventive capacity of the brain and the productive power of the hand are broad human endowments; in the exercise of which, interchanges between East and West at length may become practically unlimited. One who has heard the Japanese choir singing Greek liturgies in the Russian cathe- dral at Tokyo no longer doubts the catho- licity of art. Another line of evidence leads into the region of criticism. The East shows extraordinary keenness in discerning and interpreting motives governing West- ern life. It is no longer possible to mislead a credulous East; nor can deficiencies or excellences of the Occidental morale escape inquisition and judgment at the bar of the Oriental consciousness. Still another line of evidence for the essential unity of the race traverses psychological experience. The crude attempt of Anglo-Saxon preju- dice to dismiss contemptuously the thought and feeling of the East falls to the ground. All that the West apprehends in the region of sentiment seems to attain richer content 182 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE and to unfold more spiritual beauty when conceived in the soul of the Asiatic. The fundamental emotions acquire wonderful naturalness, simplicity, and depth. If we seek the most magnificent interpretations of honor, courage, compassion, forgiveness, faithfulness, love, we shall find them issu- ing from Eastern sources. Nor does there appear to be any literary form in which the West has uttered its most cherished senti- ment that may not be assimilated and re- incarnated by the sensitive East. A striking example of Eastern poetical feeling express- ing itself in Western modes appears in the writings of a young Indian woman, pub- lished recently in London under the title: " The Golden Threshold." * Sarojini Chatto- padhyay Naidu was the daughter of a dis- tinguished Indian scholar, Dr. Aghorenath Chattopadhyay, founder of the Nizam Col- lege at Hyderabad. Her father had illus- trated the intellectual homogeneity of the human race by taking the degree of Doctor of Science at the University of Edinburgh. Her mother, bound by social limitations, spoke only Hindustani. That her ancestry 1 William Heinemann, London, 1900. RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 183 was purely Oriental appears from one of her own letters: "My ancestors for thousands of years have been lovers of the forest and mountain caves, great dreamers, great schol- ars, great ascetics." Yet the poetic impulse of this child of the East utters itself in liter- ary forms that suggest Swinburne. I quote at random one of her poems called "Coro- mandel Fishers." One who has watched these fishers in early mornings on the Coro- mandel coast, flinging their catamarans into the surf, and riding out like water-fowl through the foam of the breakers, can un- derstand the charm of these verses, and their appeal to the Occidental consciousness : — " Rise, brothers, rise, the wakening skies pray to the morning light, The wind lies asleep in the arms of the dawn like a child that has cried all night. Come, let us gather our nets from the shore, and set our catamarans free, To capture the leaping wealth of the tide, for we are the sons of the sea. " No longer delay, let us hasten away in the track of the sea-gull's call, The sea is our mother, the cloud is our brother, the waves are our comrades, all. 184 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE What though we toss at the fall of the sun where the hand of the sea-god drives ? He who holds the storm by the hair, will hide in his breast our lives. " Sweet is the shade of the cocoanut glade, and the scent of the mango grove. And sweet are the sands at the fall o' the moon with the sound of the voices we love. But sweeter, O brothers, the kiss of the spray and the dance of the wild foams' glee; Row, brothers, row to the blue of the verge, where the low sky mates with the sea." But, while contending on these grounds for the essential unity of the human race, I pointed out, in my last Lecture, the pro- found temperamental contrasts that obtain between East and West. It was shown that the fundamental fact in Western thinking is a sense of the reality of the visible uni- verse. This fact chiefly determines the ways and manners, the ideals and attain- ments, of the West. The fruit of this sense of reality is a virile, resolute philosophy of energy, a zeal to do, a zest to be. The in- certitude of Hamlet, "to be or not to be," enters not largely or normally into West- ern life. Longfellow embodies the working RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 185 creed of Anglo-Saxonism in his line: "Life is real, life is earnest." Action, the fruits of labor, duty, character, conscience, God, are substantial verities. It is customary with average minds to take these verities for granted. Life on any other basis is unthink- able to most Englishmen and Americans. The intense realism of existence underlies, for the average, every thought, ambition, hope, or fear. At each extreme of the social order, this passion to live and to have, in a real world, works out into disastrous ab- errations. In the unsuccessful and illiterate poor, cast out like refuse from the machine of utilitarianism, failure to grasp the ma- terial prizes of existence produces often a stolid type of hopelessness, unbrightened by imagination or aspiration, such as sur- vives immortally in the least fortunate classes of the East. In the successful, who yet have not been spiritualized by the power of religion nor brought to that sense of self- restraint and altruistic responsibility which are among the finest fruits of higher cul- ture, the utilitarian passion for things works out into barbaric selfishness and physical contentment with luxury. It is doubtful 186 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE whether the world contains anywhere a class more blindly given over to the pursuit of the visible, or more careless of the rights of others in that pursuit. But these inev- itable deficiencies and overgrowths of a civilization founded upon appreciation of a visible universe do not detract from the value of the Western type of development, when the sense of reality is illuminated by the influences of Christian culture. Into every form of beneficial and productive ef- fort and research this sense of the actuality and usableness of the world has led the Western mind. It has led to discovery in every department of nature, to philosophi- cal treatment of all subjects, to extraor- dinary fertility in application of forces to ends of betterment. It has produced strong initiative, self-confidence, tendency to em- body ideas in results. It has developed clear vision in the ethical realm; senses ex- ercised by reason of use to discern between good and evil; vigor of the individual con- science; keenness of the sense of sin as an affront to the holiness of God. From it has come statesman-like power in organizing social forces on the side of righteousness; RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 187 the creation and upbuilding of useful insti- tutions. Professor J. Estlin Carpenter, in one of a series of lectures on "The Place of Christianity among the Religions of the World," strongly characterizes the value of the Occidental note of reality in religious and social thinking: "A new outlook is gained over fresh fields of thought [by the spirit of modern Christian culture in the West]. It rises in the nineteenth century with unexpected might, flies over continents, and wins homage in every zone from pole to pole. The noblest European literatures are permeated with it; philosophies de- light to bring themselves into accord with its teachings ; it endeavors to assimilate the last great product of the human spirit — modern science ; and it is preparing itself to conquer new fields ; it claims that its ethical ideals shall sway and regulate the relations of men as they have never done before. The alliance of Christianity with so many phases of social affairs, its union with so many forms of intellectual and moral energy, its power to create or vivify huge organiza- tions of worship, discipline, philanthropy; its influence over the most progressive na- 188 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE tions who have given their best endeavors to sustain it at home and diffuse it abroad — combine to raise it, considered solely as an historical phenomenon, to the highest eminence among the world's religions." In contrast with this vast activity of in- tellectual and religious effort in the West, intent on using to the utmost a visible world and lifting man's contemporary life to the highest level of efficiency, the root and basis of the Oriental consciousness (speak- ing broadly) is an assumption of the un- reality of things that are seen; a primary interest in the metaphysical Unseen, the ultimate essence of Being; and, finally, in the consummation of personal existence through some manner of union with, or absorption in, the metaphysical Unseen, whether by fusion, as the wave sinks in the sea, or by extinction, as the flame severed from the wick vanishes in illimitable space. Out of this primordial attitude of the Orien- tal consciousness have issued an inconceiv- able number of modifications, ascending to every height of idealism or lapsing to every depth of pessimism, and to every negation of serviceable power. RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 189 The sublimity of the East and the igno- miny of the East; the sustained strength of spiritual vision on the one hand and the relative languor and ineptitude of moral capacity on the other hand, are opposite results of one deep-seated temperamental tendency. It is the passion of the East to pursue, by the shrouded path of mysticism, distinctions that reach back into the depths of being, and to cultivate the soul in its relation to those depths of being, rather than to train the soul for efficiency in affairs of the visible world, or to exercise the soul in the discipline of practical virtues. It has appeared necessary to make this somewhat extended review of ground al- ready traversed in order to present with clearness the material of the present Lec- ture. I ask you now to look out into this great field of Oriental God-consciousness, and, in the liberal and sympathetic atti- tude of Jesus Christ, to consider religious insight and experience lying outside of those intellectual, dogmatic, and ecclesiastical boundaries to which we apply the term Christianity. It is not so very long since even a uni- 190 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE versity audience in the Western hemi- sphere would look with disdain upon this proposal. To-day, none can be more ac- ceptable to the mind of true culture and true humanism. We smile now at the whimsical absurdity of Dr. Samuel John- son's remark: "There are two objects of curiosity, the Christian world and the Mo- hammedan world; all the rest may be considered as barbarous." Yet it is not so long ago that many would have placed the Mohammedan world also in the category of the barbarous; unworthy of consideration in a study of real religious values. This mental attitude toward non-Christian faiths grew from the theory of which Mr. Glad- stone was an able defender, that the origin of religion was a primitive revelation to Israel which developed into the larger reve- lation of Christianity, and that beyond this there is no religion save that which is falsely so-called. Hence the familiar and mislead- ing division of religions into "true" and " false." This classification involves not an indifferent question of terms but a primary question of fact; namely, the nature of religion. It is not necessary to remind my RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 191 auditors that a larger and worthier concep- tion of the nature of religion now controls the mind of culture. Religion is seen to be the most august phenomenon in the circle of man's intellectual interests. A concep- tion of its nature has developed, worthy of the place occupied by religion in the history of the human race. This is, indeed, a glori- ous development. No one man has given us the clue to the whole truth, or made a complete answer to the question : What is religion ? But, one working from one point of view, and another working from another point of view, gradually there has unrolled before us the broad field of human experi- ence upon which the various phenomena of religion appear. We have had many masters in this science, and some of them have been gravely misjudged. Let us not fear to acknowledge our teachers, be they whom they may. David Hume and Auguste Comte, Ferdinand Baur and Herbert Spencer, were all prophets of this truth in some of its aspects, in that they pointed us away from dogmas, institutions, and tradi- tions straight to the heart of human life itself, to find the essential source of religion. 192 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE One master emphasized one aspect of con- sciousness, another set forth another aspect, as affording the basis of religion. Each was contributing to the truth: Kant, when he laid emphasis on the ethical basis ; Hegel, when he unfolded a doctrine of the Abso- lute; Schleiermacher, when he turned, alike from morals and metaphysics, to seek the source of religion, as Carpenter well says, in "the feeling with which the soul con- templates the varied life revealed in na- ture and in man." There have been many others working at this splendid problem of religion; some from the side of philo- sophy, some from the side of anthropology, some from the side of philology. And whether it were Burnouf, or Bunsen, or Tylor, or Sir John Lubbock, or Max Miiller, or Theodore Parker, or Carlyle, or Emerson — all were, in fact, working at the one thing, aiming at the one end: to show that religion is not a limited gift bestowed upon one nation from without, in the con- crete form of a system of belief; — it is a universal estate; the effort of the human intellect in every race and nation to express and to organize the yearnings of the soul for RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 193 knowledge of the Infinite, which rise un- bidden and cry out after God; which exist only because implanted in the total human consciousness, by its Divine Author. Obviously it is impossible, within the limits of this course of Lectures, to enu- merate the distinctive ideas contained in the greater religions of the world. But certain important generalizations are pos- sible. To one who goes forth into the modern East, bearing an open mind and a rever- ent heart, the spectacle presented by non- Christian faiths is impressive in a high degree. The narrowing power of local as- sociations fosters in the average citizen of the West a misleading sense of religious monopoly. Accustomed to the perpetual struggle of the churches against irreligion and non-religion, witnessing the tendency of Occidental civilization to surrender to the instincts of godless materialism, he drifts toward the notion that Christianity, with its cognate Judaism, practically repre- sents the active force of religion in the world. But, as one advances into the East, there comes a widening consciousness, at 194 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE times an overwhelming consciousness, that immense non-Christian forces possess seg- ments of the field of religion more vast than those occupied by Christianity. He is amazed at the vitality of these forces ; the devotion of their adherents, the depth of their foundations, the elemental strength of their achievements. He perceives their cor- respondence with Oriental temperament, their naturalness, their historic perspective. He had been told that the non-Christian faiths were effete survivals; lingering in senility and weakness. On the contrary, they appear to possess great vitality and vigorous champions. Stately temples and mosques, many of modern date, attract, and apparently satisfy, thronging congrega- tions. Numerous priesthoods wield their spiritual powers with dignity. Colleges and schools adopt methods of Western pedagogy to transmit Eastern faiths. Institutions like the Central Hindu College of Benares and the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, each devoted to the propagation of anon- Christian faith by the best available processes of Western education, astonish one by their ardent enthusiasm. From the RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 195 Third Annual Report of the Central Hindu College I quote the following passage :* " The religious instruction in the year under report continued to be of the same character as in the preceding years. But the Com- mittee expect that it will shortly take more definite shape. After careful consideration and extensive discussion, the Board decided in December last on a scheme for a Text- book of Hinduism for the purposes of re- ligious instruction. This Text-book has since been drawn up, and proof-copies of it are now in circulation amongst the members of the Board of Trustees and the Managing Committee, and other learned Hindu friends possessing special knowledge on the sub- ject. It is hoped that the Text-book will be finally passed by the Board before very long; and therefore it is believed that not only this College, but many other institu- tions which wish, and whose circumstances allow them, to follow the example of this College, will find ready provided to their hands an outline of the basic principles of religion, which all Hindus, of whatever 1 Cf. p. 8 of the report published by the Board of Trustees, Benares, 1902. 196 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE special sect, will be glad to see in the hands and the hearts of their children." It is by collating examples like the foregoing that one is roused from the contented dream of ignorance touching actual religious condi- tions in the world, and is awakened to the fact that vigorous and eager faiths exist out- side of Christianity, and command the alle- giance and love of millions of our brethren. The momentum of these faiths cannot be estimated by superficial observation. One must regard them in perspective, in the light of their own histories, if one would know how and why they are wrought into the fibre of the East. It is well to remem- ber a saying of Confucius, most wonderful and pregnant as an utterance delivered five hundred years before Christ: "To under- stand the present we must study the past." As one gazes back into this past, one re- members that all the controlling religious forces of the world have been born in Asia. Asia is the breeding-ground of religions; the primal home of the religious conscious- ness of the human race. From that pri- mal home, that inexhaustible well of reflec- tion and feeling, have issued the dominant RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 197 faiths: Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrian- ism, Shinto, Judaism, Christianity, Moham- medanism. All were begotten in the Asiatic consciousness; all are living to-day. The indigenous religious conceptions of the West, aboriginal faiths of Europe and America, have vanished; swept away by tides of the religious consciousness that, under the forms of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, poured out of the East. The Western student of religion gazes wonder- ingly into these depths of Asiatic insight and experience, seeking the causes that produced them. Fear in the presence of in- calculable forces of nature has been named as the principal cause of religion. That the religious instinct may be stimulated by fear can hardly be denied. Yet, when one per- ceives the spirit of the Vedas, those Hymns before Sunrise composed fifteen hundred to two thousand years earlier than the New Testament literature, when one considers the wonderful joy and light that pervade them, one feels that other causes nobler than fear, and more powerful, gave to the Asiatic heart its passion for things divine. The sense of infinity was there. Inherent 198 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE in the soul of the East was the yearning for correspondence with the Infinite. And, on the other hand, an elemental joy was there, blended with wonder and reverence, in view of the beauty and power of nature. The splendid sky, the silvery sea, the sun, the moon, the stars, filled the Asiatic soul with a gladness but in part eclipsed by later pessimism. Men felt the strength of nature ; strong to destroy, strong to uphold. They adored the vitality of nature, with its mysterious potency of reproduction. In the days of primitive Aryan religion, these fer- tile powers of nature were believed to be so many manifestations of the Almighty God, and were symbolized as such. It is proba- ble that the Vedic faith of the early Aryans was not true polytheism, but rather a joyous and noble worship of the Almighty One in many symbolic manifestations on the broad, suggestive field of nature. That polytheism should eventuate from this highly emphatic symbolism was in the natural line of proba- bility. Strongly developed nature symbol- ism tends toward mythical personifications of the powers of nature. These are the precursors of strong, reactionary mysticism RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 199 in circles of culture, and the reign of crude polytheism over the popular mind. At some prehistoric stage in the develop- ment of Asiatic religious consciousness there emerged, I believe, from the mysticism of culture, reacting against the crudeness of polytheism, two strongly marked, opposite tendencies, which have not only persisted, but grown in power, and, thus far, have determined the religious history of the world. On the one hand is the tendency to philosophical and practical monotheism; the earliest, the strongest, the most virile tendency of religious experience. This has shaped the life of the West. On the other hand is the tendency to philosophical pan- theism, with its habitual lapses into popu- lar polytheism. This is the secondary, the passive, the reflective tendency of religious experience. Thus far it has dominated the life of the East. Let me undertake to show briefly how these two vast currents of religious insight and experience have poured like two great rivers, from a common source in the Asi- atic consciousness to the opposite sides of the globe. For reasons which may be in 200 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE part climatic and temperamental, and may remain in part unknown, the monotheistic tendency ever has been in its simplest forms a Westward tendency, that is to say, a ten- dency peculiarly suited to Western charac- teristics. One perceives it in the magnifi- cent conceptions of early Zoroastrianism, with its doctrine of the Supreme Spirit and its attractiveness for Greek minds. To describe Zoroastrianism as a simple dual- ism is, I think, to do injustice to its spirit, and to misinterpret the struggle of the soul which it portrays. Depleted and weakened as it is to-day, there are not wanting sugges- tions of its monotheistic majesty among the Parsis of India. I have had the pleasure of contact with that interesting, gracious, culti- vated community; the survivors of a Per- sia of the past, whose glories departed and whose chance of influencing the West disap- peared, under the overwhelming visitation of Islam in the seventh century after Christ. Still more forcibly does one perceive the monotheistic tendency, with all its vigorous ethical implications, in those Semitic devel- opments that reach their consummation in the religion of Israel, with its progressive RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 201 conception of the oneness, the sovereignty, the moral beauty and dignity of Jehovah, and its enormous influence on the religious thinking of Europe. The history of the Jews in Europe is the history of a race ren- dered inextinguishable by the virility of its monotheism. Through ages of dispersion and distress, the scattered race has main- tained ideal unity by intense devotion to a God objectively conceived. The God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, is the Shepherd of Israel forever. A fierce and aggressive monotheism is associated with the name of the great Ara- bian. Never was God more imperially personified than in the theology of Mo- hammed. It was essentially a conception suited to the West rather than to the East. Although the triumph of Islamic rulers in India was at one time almost complete, and the empire of the Delhi Mughals was the most splendid that ever arose beyond the Himalayas until the days of English sov- ereignty, it is interesting to see the uncon- scious assimilation of Hindu thought by hereditary followers of the Prophet. The student of religion in India can think of 202 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE Mohammedanism only as an exotic. It survives there, but as a plant diligently nur- tured, never domesticated. On the other hand, the monotheistic ten- dency is brought to its crown and its fulfill- ment in the religion of Jesus Christ. Here is monotheism which indeed lends itself read- ily to expression in terms of the Western temperament, yet has a vastness of design, a universality of content, a mystical depth by which it exhausts the Western power of interpretation and demands the prophetic insight of the East also. The religion of Jesus Christ is the religion of Divine mani- festation in the flesh, the Incarnation of the Son of God, to redeem the whole human race to right knowledge of God, through a mighty salvation of love and holiness. Alone among the religions of the world it holds within itself an amazing balance of Occidental and Oriental qualities. Looked at from our familiar point of view, it seems to be distinctively the religion for the West, so perfectly does it coincide with the senti- ment of the Western heart and the genius of the Western intellect. But, as our know- ledge of religious insight and experience RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 203 outside of Christianity increases, we per- ceive qualities in the Oriental mind and tendencies in the Oriental temperament for which the religion of Jesus Christ seems especially provided; we become conscious of depths in that religion which can be sounded only by those who have the mind and temperament of the East by birth or by sympathetic assimilation. We begin to realize that Christianity is vaster than we knew. The churches of the West which have looked upon themselves proudly as the dispensers of this religion may have mas- tered its rudiments only. The mystery of God in Christ, which was hid from ages and generations, until the Incarnation of the Living Word was accomplished in the full- ness of time, may contain inner glories as yet undreamed of; glories not accessible until the eager West consents to sit as a disciple at the feet of the ancient East, learn- ing through the Oriental consciousness, to search the deep things of God. The history of the Western world has been the history of the assimilation and ex- pression of Christian monotheism in char- acteristic modes determined by the genius 204 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE and temperament of the Occidental con- sciousness. In the foregoing Lecture I pointed out that the sense of external reality is the fundamental factor in Western think- ing. For the average European no veil of maya enwraps the actuality of existence. All is real, and as it seems to be. The personal Ego is without illusion. The phenomenal universe on which it looks is as real as itself. Relationships are real. Society is a fact of experience. At the background of the Cosmos is the infinite, eternal, personal Real, of whom are all things, through whom all things consist: the actual God, "unchangeable in His Being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth." It was inevitable, even as also it was desirable, that the Occidental con- sciousness, moving in the realm of religious insight and experience, should assimilate and accentuate aspects of Christian mono- theism making direct appeal to the sense of external reality. It has therefore been the distinctive function of the West to deal with the more plain and obvious sides of the Christian religion, as distinguished from its esoteric and mystical depths. Speaking RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 205 broadly, the outcome of religious insight and experience in the West has been two- fold; profound appreciation of the insti- tutional side of Christianity, and profound insight into its ethical values. From the beginning of Christian civilization in the West, the Church, with its institutions, gov- ernments, and forms, has been the major in- terest. While near, in time, to its Eastern sources, the issues under debate were chiefly metaphysical; projections into the West of the East's eternal interest in the Unseen. There have been recurrences of these pro- found solicitudes of faith, as in the Arminian and Calvinistic discussions of Divine mys- teries. But, as Western civilization has at- tained fuller self-consciousness, it has moved away from the esoteric and concerned itself with the institutional. Even the Protestant Reformation was largely an institutional movement. External questions were in- volved; the authority of the pope, sacerdotal powers, liberty of access to Holy Scripture, freedom of the lay conscience. It is in- teresting to reflect that the enormous mag- nitude gained by questions of episcopacy and presbytery, exhibits the strength of the 206 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE Western passion for institutions. The Baptist controversy is over a question of external mode. Independency in all its forms is, in the last analysis, an external question. An Oriental mind, to which churches are nothing as compared with mystical relationships of the soul with God, looks with amazement, not unmixed with disdain, at the stormy annals of Western ecclesiasticism, and the rivalries of sects holding common faith in matters of the spirit, yet dividing on matters of adminis- tration. It is difficult for an Oriental to understand that, in this emphasis upon in- stitutional religion, and this activity of con- science in matters of form and order, the West has been fulfilling itself normally, and has been working out, through the painful process of sectarian struggle, certain stages in the evolution of truth, as well as certain problems of civilization, which, in the long outcome, shall work together for the good of the world. It is no fatalism to say that the history of Christianity in the West could not have been other than it is. Given the qual- ities of the Occidental consciousness, and the religious result must have been what it RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 207 is. Churches and sects have their weak- nesses, and those whose major interest is churchmanship have their limitations; yet it is necessary for the ultimate balance of the world's religious thinking that some- where in the world truth shall be made con- crete through formulation and conscience shall be made virile through loyalty to in- stitutions. But the outcome of religious insight and experience in the West is some- thing greater than an appreciation of the in- stitutional side of Christianity. The same qualities that have achieved this result have rendered a larger service to humanity. The Western genius for institutions proceeds, as we have seen, from the sense of external reality. From the same source comes that profound insight into the ethical values of Christian monotheism, which is the glory of Western religious experience. The sense of personal reality carries with it the entire category of ethical relationships, Divine and human; the morality of God; the morality of duty; the moral value of conduct in every empirical sphere, personal, domestic, social; the excellence of virtue, the sinfulness of sin. It belongs to the Western conception 208 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE of religion to interpret God and human life in terms of character. The glory of the Divine being is discovered to be good- ness; the end of the Divine purpose is right- eousness; the goal of the human individual is conformity to the ideal, which is Christ. These observations are the more worthy of attention because they seem to ignore the long indictment brought by the East against the ethics of Western Christianity. With the gravity of truth the East charges the West with unscrupulous infraction of every ethical principle; it points out the discrep- ancy between the Christian ideal and the political, commercial, and social practices of Christian nations. The points in this in- dictment are well taken; the West cannot justify itself before its Oriental accuser. With my sympathy and admiration for Eastern peoples I should be the last to ignore the ghastly chronicle of injustice, irregularity, and intolerance written in the annals of the West. I neither ignore nor minimize the burden of sins, national and international, laid at the door of our Chris- tianized civilization. But I am conscious of a fact in the life of the West that lies RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 209 deeper in the heart of things than these lamentable infractions of morality. It re- mains true that the Occidental conscience repudiates and condemns these unethical excesses with a strenuous detestation born of a growing appreciation of the relation of Jesus Christ to the affairs of common life. It may not be offered as an excuse for the crimes of Western civilization that it is still in the season of youth as compared with the hoary institutions of the East ; but it can be affirmed with certainty that the wrong-doing of men and nations is continually becoming more abhorrent to the Western social con- science, and that the desire for cleanness and righteousness of procedure at home and abroad is the distinctive form under which religious insight and experience manifests itself throughout the Western world at the present time. The " ethical revival " is con- sidered by right-minded Christians insep- arable from any substantial religious pro- gress in individuals or in communities. This is admirable, and may well give courage to those that have been cast down by the ex- cesses of Western civilization, with its mad- ness for things and its insatiate delight in 210 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE the visible. Yet it is not probable that any "ethical revival," in the form of temporary- stimulation of the social conscience, or tem- porary rehabilitation of ideals, can correct a deficiency in Western religious development which, by the most thoughtful, is recognized as not only grave but, possibly, increasing. To many who look intently upon our Occi- dental life, in its relation to the spiritual realm, there appears the suggestion of in- creasing shallowness and externalism. The Western craving for the concrete and the visible is, apparently, impinging on the do- main of the soul, and attempting to satisfy its vast aspiration for the unseen and the ultimate with codes of social morality and regulations of philanthropic duty. Religion is tending more and more to confinement within the sphere of practical ethics. The great metaphysical beliefs, which were as wings to the souls of prophets and apostles, are being folded up and put aside, as in- compatible with the active interests of a world of men. In other words, the mystical side of religious experience — that which contemplates the soul of the worshiper as in immediate communion with the Divine RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 211 Essence — is in danger of being thrust aside by the eager will to do. The value of med- itation is underrated. Action controls the attention of the age too exclusively. The worth of religion is estimated by its immedi- ate effect as a social dynamic. This is stim- ulating, and imparts to the Church some- thing of the energy and bustle of the street. Nevertheless, it is also perilous. We are paying too high a price for what is called practical or applied Christianity. Modern Christianity cannot afford to sacrifice mys- ticism to machinery. Amiel's lament can- not forever go unheeded, as the sigh of a dreamer: "We have lost the mystical sense: and what is religion without mysticism? A rose without perfume." 1 I do not forget that Christianity in the West always has had its mystics ; those to whom the contem- plative life was more real than the life of action. But the mystics of the West always have been somewhat in disrepute. The boast of the Occidental is his plain common sense, tuned to the hard facts of existence. He is wont to pity or condemn the mystic as lacking this admirable quality. To this ele- 1 Cf. Journal Intime, vol. i. p. 178. Macmillan, 1895. 212 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE vation of institutionalism above mysticism, of the outward organization and the out- ward scientific demonstration above the in- ward immediateness of contact with God, I trace the ominous limitations that appear in our modern religious thinking, and, in particular, the decline of reverence in Amer- ican thought and manners. "The world is too much with us." The power of the Unseen, the majesty of the Infinite, lie too lightly on hearts that, by the discontinu- ance of meditation, are becoming strangers to themselves and God. There is reason to hope that a reaction has begun in certain quarters. It is possible that, in part, our better understanding of the spirit of the East, and, in part, our study of psychology, are tempering our externalism and, in a measure, restoring the balance on the side of the spiritual. One cannot but study the religious signs of the times with grave solici- tude. It is evident that there remains much to be desired in the religious development of the West. It would be in accord with the large equities of time, that the thoughtful East, for which our ardent realism may have a helpful message, should be to the RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 213 Occidental world of the twentieth century a prophet and mediator of the Unseen. I have referred, in a former part of this Lecture, to monotheism as the earliest, the strongest, and the most virile tendency of religious experience that appears in the de- velopment of the early Asiatic conscious- ness. I have shown that it moved toward, and shaped the life of, the West. From that primal spring of the world's prehistoric spiritual life there moved also a river of experience that set toward the East. It seemed to follow a course made necessary by climate, by physical and psychological conditions. Its tendency was toward philo- sophical pantheism. Its modes of self-reali- zation were idealistic, reflective, esoteric. Inherent in the religious consciousness of Indian civilization was the spirit of other- worldliness, combined with intensity and constancy of religious feeling. The im- pulse toward speculative inquiry was con- stitutional, and became strongly reinforced, as the doctrine of maya, the unreality of the visible world, developed into a fundamental tenet of philosophy. The relation of poly- theism to this sense of the unreality of the 214 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE visible world is obvious. For cultivated minds polytheism was in effect a sacramen- tal suggestion of the invisible. Each idol and idol-symbol was but a symbol of some esoteric fact, condition, or personality sub- sisting beneath the visible. But for the common mind polytheism had not this eso- teric background. It became, in itself, of ultimate value ; and, so becoming, its degen- eration was continual and enormous. The Aryan nature-symbolism, at first splen- didly suggestive, assimilated low Dravidian, and other non-Aryan, forms of animism, growing corrupt, puerile, and hopelessly intricate. Popular Hinduism and popular Buddhism are degenerate forms of their great originals. They have preserved for centuries aspects of the most unsatisfactory character. Perhaps the most regrettable element in the present situation is the hold which these degenerate forms of religious experience have on the imagination and the moral sense of the masses. It is with rever- ence that I refer to these painful matters. In lands like India and Japan, the natural feelings and sympathies of the people are rich and deep. The influence of religion RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 215 touches and interprets every aspect of life. It is therefore with the emotions of one witnessing a tragedy that one considers the effect upon sensitive and spiritual natures of immersion in influences emanating from degenerate popular polytheism. One can hardly speak too strongly of the evil and sorrow wrought thereby. The complexity of popular polytheism is relatively disas- trous to the ethical sense. The life of the individual cowers, as before a dust-storm, in the vortex of swarming deities. No opportunity remains for the soul to lift itself up, to attain the simplicity of one ethical attitude; to worship and to love. Sir Alfred Lyall, in his "Asiatic Studies," has depicted with extraordinary fidelity the complexity of polytheism in a single district of North India. One obtains a similar view in Sir William Hunter's "Annals of Rural Bengal," and, in a different way, but not less effectively, in the monographs and tables of the Imperial Indian Census of 1902. The confusion of the moral sense, induced by the complexity of polytheism, is, it may be feared, increased by practices of flagrant immorality associated with some 216 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE polytheistic cults. In the interest of truth and justice one should speak most guard- edly of the dark aspersions cast by public rumor upon certain non-Christian sects. It is to be remembered that similar reports were circulated, whether through misappre- hension or through enmity, concerning Christian sects of the first century. Un- happily the probability is strong that there is substantial truth in the current surmise, and that a degree of animalism blends with certain forms of religious practice. Beyond question, however, the note of pessimism accords with the general outcome of poly- theistic religion. Sinister possibilities dog the steps of the living and ambush the path of the dead. In certain instances the bitter- ness thus infused into sorrow is exquisite. I know no more striking example of this religious intensification of natural sorrow than is presented at one of the Japanese shrines, the Tennoji Temple at Osaka. I have to acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. John E. Hail of Osaka, who at my request obtained at first hand from Japan- ese parents the statements of belief here recorded. The historical statements are RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 217 sustained by the authority of Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain and Sir Ernest Satow. In the southeastern section of Osaka, within an inclosure of one hundred and forty acres, stands the Temple of Tennoji, which is said to be the oldest Buddhist temple in Japan. It was founded by Umayado no Oji, born a. d. 572. A prince of noblest spirit, he served as regent under the Empress Sui-ko. At his death the title Shotoku, " Holy Good- ness," was conferred upon him. Shotoku- Taishi, the Saint-Prince, became patron saint of deceased children, and, amidst the numerous sacred buildings within the Osaka inclosure, are the shrines of children, filled with dolls, toys, and children's clothing, offered in commemoration by bereaved parents. The Japanese are accustomed to use the figure of a mountain, dark and lonely, to express the idea of death. To such a mountain the spirits of little children must be conveyed at death, being ferried across the black waters of a silent river. Hence a small sum of money is put in the little round coffin, with the dead, to pay the ferriage across the black river. A small candle is put into the little hand. The 218 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE candle is to furnish light to find the narrow path that leads over the dark mountain of death. The baby feet are expected to totter up the path, over the mountain, to the half- light, half-dark country which lies on the other side. But the mountain way over which the children must make their journey passes through gloomy forests. At times the wind sweeps down through the tall pines and across the path the little feet must tread. If by chance the wind blows out the tiny taper, then the infant pilgrim must grope its way in the dark, wandering there forever- more. Spirits of evil assign unchildlike tasks, that weary the little hands. A Japan- ese mother has given utterance to her an- guish in the following lines, translated by the wife of Bishop Harris of Tokyo : — "The mountain of death is lonely and drear, And the dusk of its shadows the bravest might fear; How then, my daughter, my wee, winsome child, Wilt thou grope thy way o'er the mountain so weary and wild ? Thou knowest not reason, nor thoughts high nor deep, Thou art wise enough only low grievings to weep. Thy little feet totter, so tremblingly slow, How canst thou over the mountain thus motherless go ? Oh! the heart of thy mother is breaking with grief here below." RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 219 The parents, after the burial of their child, go to one of the children's shrines in the Temple grounds, and, giving in the name of their dead child, together with an offer- ing, receive in return therefor a strip of wood on which is written the new name of the child. This is deposited in a fountain whose water issues from the mouth of a huge stone turtle. If the name-slip remains within the basin of the fountain, it is a sign that all is going well with the child. If the waters bear the name-slip out of the basin, it is a sign that prayer has been in vain; the unhappy spirit of the child must wan- der forever. I reproduce the detail of this belief as an illustration, which seems to me singularly pathetic as well as singularly ap- posite, of the sadness that broods over the shrines of popular polytheism, reflecting it- self often in the faces of those who worship there. It is impossible, within the space at my disposal, to treat adequately this pessi- mistic tendency, as it has found expression in institutions, customs, and ideas devel- oped under polytheistic conditions. Some of these exhibit lugubrious and horrifying characteristics. Of such quality was the 220 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE cult of Thagi, a priesthood of murderers, of which the late Colonel Meadows Taylor has given the most striking account in litera- ture. The practice of Sati, the self-immola- tion of widows, needs to be understood from the point of view of Indian self-conscious- ness, in order to discover the august sur- render that entered into it. Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, from whom already I have quoted, gives in her exquisite verses insight into the heroic passion of Sati : — "Lamp of my life, the lips of death Have blown thee out with their sudden breath; Naught shall revive thy vanished spark — Love, must I dwell in the living dark ? "Tree of my life, Death's cruel foot Hath crushed thee down to thy hidden root; Naught shall restore thy glory fled — Shall the blossom live when the tree is dead ? " Life of my life, Death's bitter sword Hath severed us like a broken word; Rent us in twain who are but one — Shall the flesh survive when the soul is gone ? " 1 I might speak also of the principle of Karma, "the doctrine of the dead," which, although probably Dravidian and not prim- 1 Op. cit., p. 40. RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 221 itive,has overspread Oriental life with a sin- ister pathos not devoid of majesty. Karma is an attempt to give a philosophical state- ment founded on transmigration, concern- ing the sorrow and evil of life. It is an interpretation of suffering as penalty in- flicted under a self-acting system of justice, for faults committed in some previous life. Such are examples of the atmosphere of pessimism cast over existence as the out- come of polytheistic tendency. They might be multiplied. They grow more subtle in ethical illusiveness as philosophy under- takes to press through the crude objectivity of popular polytheism and find a way back into the esoteric. The most subtle pessi- mism is that of the Vedanta philosophy. The end of existence is the liberation of the soul from bondage; ignorance is the cause of bondage ; salvation is through knowledge. But knowledge is the property of the soul, which is separate alike from the mind and the body, having no contact with nature and no interest in the ethics of conduct and personal character. The soul finds its emancipation in absolute idealism, leaving the mind and the body to follow their natu- 222 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE ral impulses, which, being part of the encom- passing system of phenomenal distinctions, possess but an apparent reality. Thus far, in touching the subject of re- ligious insight and experience beyond the boundaries of Christianity, I have confined my observations to the side of Oriental con- sciousness, which, to the European, seems inscrutable, not to say repellent. There is reason to fear that much Western criticism of the more obscure aspects of Oriental re- ligious thinking has been unintelligent as well as unsympathetic. Race prejudice is a dangerous dynamic in any set of circum- stances. It is especially dangerous in the field of religious criticism. When compli- cated with lack of insight into the higher sym- bolism of the Oriental faiths, it may result in extraordinary obscurantism amounting sometimes to grotesque misapprehension. Nothing is more becoming in those who de- sire the Christianization of the world than reverent reserve of criticism in the pre- sence of matters and manners pertaining to ancestral religious institutions of the East. There may be much, even in institutions and practices obviously irreconcilable with RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 223 Western ethical tradition, which holds for the Oriental consciousness spiritual mean- ings that we have not conceived and that we, the offspring of other traditions, would be slow of heart to comprehend. Rather should we, who aspire toward the attitude of Jesus Christ in relation to foreign races and religions, meet with open-minded re- spect each expression of Eastern thought that points, however vaguely, toward mo- notheism, even if unaccompanied by the specialized modes of Christian thinking. There is rugged justice in words written by Charles Kingsley to Miss Susan Wink- worth, in a letter dated " Eversley, April 18, 1870." He writes : " I trust that no bigotry here will interfere with men who, if they are not at the point to which St. Paul and St. John attained, are trying honestly to reach that to which Abraham, David, and the Jewish prophets rose; a respectable height, I should have thought." * The large fact to be considered by those who would look with sympathy into the religious insight and experience of the East, is the age-long struggle for philosophical 1 Cf. Life and Letters of Charles Kingsley, vol. ii. p. 318. 224 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE monotheism. Projecting itself more and more into the foreground, the monotheistic instinct of the Aryan is asserted under tem- peramental conditions predisposing to pan- theism. The outcome promises to be the most profound mystical conception of a personal Deity to which man has yet at- tained. This, for example, is the deeper meaning of Vaishnavism; a thirsting after the personality of God. This spirit breathes in the Gita — that Divine Song rightly called "the loveliest flower in the garden of Sanskrit literature." It may be affirmed that the soul of the East has never rested in abstract pantheism, much less in popu- lar polytheism. Always, in its own way, that is to say, with the mysticism born of the pantheistic temperament, the East has experienced reactions toward the earliest faith of the Aryan consciousness, faith in a personal almighty God. Even the philo- sophical atheism of the Higher Buddhism has not been exempt from these reac- tions. At the present time thrilling interest in- vests this situation in all parts of the East- ern world. Not only is the current of the RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 225 higher Oriental religious thinking setting away from the idol-temple and the confus- ing ethics of polytheism, but, with a confi- dent accent in startling contrast with the tone of Oriental thought at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the personality of God is affirmed as the necessary object of that enormous religious fervor which is the glory of the East. That affirmation of personality is not, and cannot be, identical with the theism of the West. It shrinks — and may forever withhold itself — from the extreme anthropomorphism that has been the characteristic limitation of Western the- ologies. It is true — and may forever re- main true — to that pantheistic dread of definition, the absence of which dread has tended to externalize the religion of the West. But, after the manner of its own temperamental tendency, the soul of the East seeks the living God. It would be rash to predict the further reconstructions of religious thinking that may occur in communities and nations of the East. It is not for us to know the times and the sea- sons, which are in the hand of God. Yet, without risk of prejudging open questions, 226 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE one may refer to certain activities in the modern East that indicate a widening in- terest in the Christian point of view. A new social spirit is organizing itself at many points. Its solicitudes are essen- tially Christian. Fundamental questions of knowledge and virtue press upon the hearts of men, developing in them ethical sim- plicity of purpose founded on intelligent worship of Divine Personality. As an ex- ample (selected from among many) I tran- scribe some of the principles of the Arya Samaj (Vedic Church), published by au- thority at Lahore, India, in 1900: — The Primordiac Root — the Eternal, Unseen Sustainer — of all true knowledge and of objects made known by true knowledge — is the Supreme God. God is the personification of True Existence, Intelli- gence and Bliss. He is Formless, Almighty, Just, Benevolent, Unborn, Endless and Infinite, Unchangeable, Beginningless, Incomparable, Support of all, Lord of all, All-pervading, Omniscient, and Controller from within of all, Undecaying, Imperishable, Fearless, Eternal, Holy, and Maker of the whole creation. To Him alone is worship due. We should ever be ready to accept truth and to renounce untruth. All acts should be done in accordance with Dharma, that is, after deliberating what is Right and Wrong. RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 227 The prime object of the Arya Samaj — Vedic Church — is to do Upkar to the world, that is, to promote Physical, Spiritual, and Social Good. Our conduct toward all should be actuated by Love, Righteousness, and Justice. Every one should not be content with promoting his own good only; on the contrary, he should look for his own good in promoting the good of all. All men should subordinate themselves to the laws of society calculated to promote general well-being ; they should be free in regard to laws for promoting individual well-being. Instruments like the above, breathing the spirit of large tenderness, moral earnestness, and true reverence, are multiplying through- out the East, quite beyond the formal limits of Christian society. In like manner, the appreciation of childhood on its ethical and intellectual sides is growing strong and definite. The words of the President of the Mohammedan Educational Conference, Nawab Imad-ul-Mulk Syed Hosain Bil- grami, in a recent address before the Con- ference at Rampur, India, give a fair ex- ample of the seriousness with which, in the heart of the ancient East, throbs the same yearning for the ethical protection of the young that is one of the finest notes of modern Christianity. 228 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE The Nawab says : (the English is his own) "The infant mind, moralists teach us, is a tabula rasa, except for the few indelible marks left on it by heredity and other pre- natal influences ; the rest of the tablet is left to be written up by the child's own conduct in life; and the tablet has this peculiarity about it, that evil deeds cloud and corrode it, while good deeds add to its brightness and lustre. The first righteous act makes the next easier; just as the first act of sin paves the way for further sinfulness. Such is the law of moral development; but in- tellectual and physical development is gov- erned by an analogous law, and therefore the early formation of proper habits is the most important part of the functions of a teacher. It is only when the three march together in their due balance, that youth develops into complete and proper man- hood. Now it is obvious that to succeed in such a comprehensive scheme of education, we must take our youths in hand in their tender years, place them with teachers of undoubted ability and high moral character, and surround them with influences that shall mould their character in lessons of RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 229 self-knowledge, self -reverence, and self-con- trol, repress evil propensities and promote all the nobler impulses of manhood." Even more typical of present develop- ments in the East, of religious insight and experience outside of Christianity, is the ferment of interest concerning Christ and the more esoteric teachings of the New Testament. The Oriental consciousness, long indifferent to these themes because of prejudice against the West, with which they were seriously confused, is now, consciously and, to an immensely wider extent, uncon- sciously, engaged in differentiating the in- herent Orientalism of Christianity from the modifications imposed on it in the course of Western civilization. Under the influence of an irresistible temperamental affinity, the East is directing its superb gifts of spiritual insight toward Christ, whose formidable influence upon the world's history can no longer be ignored. It is too soon to say that the East is preparing to render to Jesus Christ, as the Son of God, the allegiance of a spiritual faith. But it is certain that Christ's influence, like the searching rays of sunrise, is penetrating the remotest fields 230 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE of Eastern thought, and arousing there in- quiries and dispositions of mind, the poten- tial significance of which cannot be over- stated. As might have been anticipated, it is the mystical rather than the historical aspects of Christianity that chiefly are at- tracting attention. The Fourth Gospel (re- ceived to-day with startling incredulity and apathy by many a Christian of the West on whom has fallen the paralysis of an over- confident criticism) is finding to-day, in Hindu and Mohammedan circles of culture, students who approach its sacred mysteries with an enthusiasm and reverence worthy of the apostolic age. Meanwhile, where as yet is no disposition to admit the Divine claim of Jesus Christ, there is in process a remarkable assimilation of His spirit, to- gether with an appreciation of the hopes and ideals of the Christian life. There are not wanting suggestions of an Oriental Christianity which, moving along other lines of experience, and accenting the mys- tical rather than the institutional elements of Christian revelation, may ultimately ad- vance beyond the West in spiritual inter- pretation of the doctrine of Christ. The RELIGIOUS INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE 231 tasks of God are too great for haste. Slowly but surely He shall accomplish this vast work; the liberation of the latent powers of insight and worship in the glowing soul of the East — the organization and consecra- tion of those powers in the service of the Universal Saviour. From the Prayer-book of Babu Keshub Chunder Sen, a Hindu to whom, in part, the vision of Christ came, I take this prayer, written by his own hand, as a symbol of religious insight and experience outside of Christianity, which seems to me prophetic of greater spiritual unfoldings yet to pro- ceed from the heart of India. It is called a "Congregational Prayer," for the Brahmo Somaj : — "We thank Thee, O Beneficent God, that Thou hast gathered us again in this sacred place of worship to glo- rify and adore Thee. The blessed hour to which we were earnestly looking forward amidst the anxieties and troubles of the week has now arrived. Permit us to approach Thee, and prepare our hearts that we may feel Thy sacred presence. O Thou, Light and Love, Thou art everywhere ; Thou art before our eyes in all the objects we behold; Thou dwellest in the inmost recesses of the heart. Everywhere is Thy benignant Face, and Thy loving arms are around us all. Help us so to con- 232 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE centrate our souls in Thy all-pervading Spirit, so to feel Thy holiness and purity that each corrupt desire, each worldly craving may perish, and all the sentiments and feelings of the soul may be brought to Thy feet. May not the pleasures which we now enjoy in Thy company be transitory; may they sweeten our whole lives and con- tinue to endear Thee to us everlastingly. Vouchsafe to keep us always under the shadow of Thy protection, and guide our steps in the thorny paths of the world. Amidst the woes and sufferings of the world be Thou our joy; amidst its darkness be Thou our Light; amidst its temptations and persecutions be Thou our Shield and Armor. Promote amongst us good-will and affection, sanctify our dealings with each other, and bind us into a holy brotherhood. May we aid each other in doing and loving that which is good in Thy sight. Teach us, O Lord, to spend all our days in Thy service, and aspire to be partakers of the rich bounties and lasting joys of the next world. Be Thou with us always, Thou Affec- tionate Father, and enable us to grow steadily in Thy love. Bring all men under the protection of the true faith. May Thy dear Name be chanted by every lip, and mayest Thou find a temple in every breast. And unto Thee we ascribe everlasting glory and praise." * 1 The Ministers' Prayers, 3d Edition, Calcutta, Brahmo Tract Society, 1900. LECTUKE VI CHRISTIAN MISSIONS AND THE MODERN WORLD In this Lecture I wish to show the conclu- sions toward which we are led by the argu- ment in the foregoing pages. In order to do this it becomes necessary to remind ourselves of certain positions taken at the outset. It will be remembered that the general theme of these Lectures is "The Attitude of Jesus Christ toward Foreign Races and Reli- gions." The problem with which we have attempted to deal is a problem of mental attitude : How shall we order the mind, adjust the judgment, train the affections, and determine effort with reference to races and religions not our own ? The first Lecture contained a review, in outline, of some general positions that have been taken in the matter of religious atti- tude. We considered the policy that was enjoined on Israel when it became a nation. It was a policy of the sword; of destruction of opposing interests; of abhorrence of the 234 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE gods of the nations and contempt for idolatry. The fruit of that policy was Se- mitic monotheism, the worship of one Holy God, springing from the dry ground into the fruitful tree of salvation. With its immediate severity and its strenuous segrega- tion, this policy, imposed by Divine com- mand, was, in fact, a policy of inclusion rather than exclusion. In the comprehen- sive view of ultimate purpose and result, it appears that the segregation of Israel was in order to larger service for the world. Israel was trained aloof from the world that the seed of Abraham might draw the world from idols to the living God. This policy of segregation was abrogated by the example and teaching of Jesus Christ, who pro- nounced a gospel of love, and directed His disciples to cultivate world-wide relation- ships, thereby to gather from all races the membership of a universal society. Never- theless, are crudescence of the spirit of Jew- ish exclusiveness and hate occurred in the guise of Christianity, and, from time to time, has affected the course of Christian ecclesiastical history. The spirit and tem- per of Christ have been misapprehended by CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 235 multitudes of His followers. The Crusades, the Inquisition, later sectarian acts of repres- sion, tyrannies of power that have marred the course of the Church up to the present time, bear witness to widespread misappre- hension of the Spirit of Christ, and persistent reaction toward Semitic ideals. The advancement of science and the growth of tolerance have produced modern attitudes toward foreign races and faiths quite in contrast with those developed by primitive ignorance and mediaeval bigotry. The amiable curiosity of the holiday-maker leads him to the ends of the earth, whence he returns amused, instructed, refreshed, yet without concern for those by whose strange manners and customs he has been diverted. If he remembers them, it is as the recollec- tion of matters between which and his own life there is nothing in common. The scientific student of religious and social phenomena welcomes every opportunity to observe and classify the facts that crowd the field of Oriental religion, but the quality of his interest in those facts is academic rather than spiritual. The ardor of re- search is not incompatible with disdain or 236 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE with passionless verification of data. These mental attitudes, though far less objection- able than those of a former age, in that they make no attempt to interfere with the liber- ties of others, are, in fact, relatively unsatis- factory. They represent merely a transition from the active form of intolerance, which is persecution, to the passive form, which con- sists in the absence of love, and of solicitude born of love. The self-centred amusement of the mere holiday-maker, or the cultured disdain of the mere man of science, lack the unifying elements of Christian feeling. They pass by on the other side; the vital aspira- tions and spiritual sufferings of Eastern races in quest of the soul's satisfaction are unheeded, if not uncomprehended. From these passive forms of intolerance we have made it our business in these Lec- tures to turn away. We have attempted to estimate and understand the mental attitude of Jesus Christ toward races and religions, with which, regarding Him in the light of His Jewish ancestry, He could not be ex- pected, antecedently, to be in sympathy. We saw the complete exemption of His mind from limitations that have bound His CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 237 followers, as well as from those that affect His contemporaries. His world-sympathy was like an atmosphere through which He saw all people and all questions, in which He lived and moved and had His being. His appropriation of Isaiah's splendid pro- phecy of the tolerance of the Messianic Servant is sweetly characteristic. "Behold, My Servant whom I have chosen; My Beloved in whom My soul is well pleased: I will put My Spirit upon Him, And He shall declare judgment to the Gentiles. A bruised reed shall He not break, And smoking flax shall He not quench, And in His Name shall the Gentiles hope." * He loved the world; lived for it; died for it. His attitude was one of large friendliness toward the world. He conceived of His own influence as capable of diffusion through- out the consciousness of every species, grade, and class of humanity. He offered Himself as a gift of light to the world, and antici- pated His own death as an opportunity to draw the whole world unto Himself. As we fastened our minds upon this unique 1 Cf. Matt. xii. 18-21. 238 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE mental attitude, occurring in unquestionable historical reality, yet strikingly out of rela- tion to anything that went before it or that surrounded it, we found ourselves sharing an impulse that has never ceased to re- appear in every age since His own. It is the impulse to answer the question pro- posed by Himself: "Who do men say that the Son of Man is ? " x We observed the involuntary belief, recurring in each age, that Jesus Christ is more than the incidental appearance of a human life of extraordinary beauty and efficiency. Amid many different interpretations of the Person of Christ there is found one common term. All who study Him seem to agree that, in some unique way, there lies behind and within the brief chronicle of that "perfect Life of Love," a permanent disclosure of facts that are uni- versal, of qualities that are infinite. His local appearance upon earth has seemed to call for interpretation in terms of the universal, as a revelation given under the form of an historic event. His mental atti- tude toward humanity has appeared to stand for more than the disposition of liberality, 1 Matt. xvi. 13. CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 239 shared by many of the greater minds; it has seemed an embodiment of principles involving the actual attitude of God toward the world, the intrinsic worth of man con- sidered apart from accidents of environment, the fundamental unity of the human race. In a word, Jesus Christ has seemed to be the Incarnation of God. In following this train of thought through the foregoing Lectures, I have not sought to obtrude upon your notice my own personal faith concerning the divinity of Christ, in His inward and esoteric corre- spondence with the essence of the In- finite. Yet I have not refrained, nor can I now refrain, from confessing with deep humility how real is that belief in my religious experience. Constantly it is taking on in my thought a more precious and more deep reality; constantly it re- veals a deepening significance in connec- tion with Christ's attitude toward foreign races and religions. Evidently the signi- ficance and the authority of that attitude are determined by the meaning that the Person of Christ has for us in our religious thinking. If He be, for us, only a man, 240 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE then however admirable and chivalrous His attitude toward the world, the moral sug- gestion contained in that attitude is of no greater authority than that which, ordinarily, obtains in connection with the spirit and acts of heroic persons. But if He appears to us to be far more than a mere human incident of extraordinary beauty, even "the Image of the invisible God" (in whatever metaphysical sense we may individually de- fine that splendid and striking term) ; if He seems to be the one unique, unhindered expression of the life and fullness of the Godhead — then all is changed. Assum- ing Christ to reveal the Father, in this trans- cendent mode, the implications contained in His attitude toward humanity are indeed sublime, for hereby we learn the actual attitude of God toward the world. The thinking of Christ appears to be con- trolled by three great generalizations, on the basis of which He lives and dies : The Father's impartial interest in humanity; the unqualified value of human life; the essen- tial unity of the human race. Into the last of these three great generalizations we have been looking in the third, fourth, and fifth CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 241 Lectures of this course. We have been try- ing to determine grounds on which to regard (not in the momentary rush of impulse, but in the stability of calmly reasoned convic- tion) the many branches of the whole hu- man family as one in essence; one in God's thought of them; one in their potential representation in the Incarnation of the Son of God. We have been trying to in- terpret aright the temperamental variations between Eastern and Western races; to view them, not as nullifying the unity of the race, but of establishing it on deeper foundations, because of the conformity of these racial variations to the general law of temperamental variation that obtained in the smaller unities of the single nation, the single family, even the single individual. We have been trying, especially in the Lec- ture immediately preceding, to understand and to give full value to, the religious signi- ficance of what we find in races and faiths different from our own. We have sought to treat with due regard religious insight and experience outside of Christianity. It was pointed out that Asia is the immemo- rial spring of the world's dominant religious 242 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE consciousness. Asia is the alma mater of every great religion: Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and its far spreading cognate, Mithraism, Confucianism, Shinto, Judaism, Mohammedanism, Christianity. From that immemorial spring flowed two rivers of religious insight and experience. The one set its course westward. Climatic and psy- chic conditions determined that course. It bore in its current the earliest, strongest, most virile tendency of the Asiatic con- sciousness, the tendency toward philosophi- cal and practical monotheism, with strong accent on the external and institutional aspects of religion, which has shaped the life of the West. The other river of religious insight and experience moved eastward. Its course and volume were determined, likewise, by climate and racial temperament. It bore in its flow the secondary, the more supple, the weaker and more enervating tendencies of Orientalism. These have gov- erned, thus far, the life of the East. They are, in substance, tendencies toward philo- sophical pantheism and practical polythe- ism, with strong accent on introspective and speculative propositions. CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 243 By means of this recapitulation, we bring before us the existing religious situation, as between East and West; we exhibit, in prin- ciple, the essential divergence between the Occidental consciousness and the Oriental consciousness. The way is thus prepared for a practical question: What can be done, what ought to be done, by the West, to mod- ify the religious situation in the East and to promote a more advanced and intelligent in- terchange of religious thinking throughout the world? This question is contained by implication in my present theme : " Chris- tian Missions and the Modern World." It is proper to consider at the outset a suggestion urged by those who are dis- affected toward Christian missions. The policy of non-action is not without strong advocates. It is proposed that nothing further be done to promote the Christian- ization of the world, that Judah no longer vex Ephraim. It is advised that the zealous West let the East alone, joined comfortably to its idols and its philosophies; that the West withdraw, and content itself with what, judging from appearances, is no inconsider- able task, — keeping alive its own altar fires 244 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE of Christianity. It cannot be doubted that this advice is often given in good faith, in the supposed interest of the brotherhood of nations and the common peace and better- ment of the world. And the value of the advice is greatly affected by its com- plete impracticability. Judah does not vex Ephraim religiously merely because he de- sires to do so, but because under a profound law of inheritance he cannot refrain from doing so. One can no more prevent Chris- tian influences and Christian efforts from flying eastward, than one can keep carrier pigeons from their homing. Christianity came out of the East, and to the East it must return. The matter is not in our hands. Psychology and the Spirit of God, which is as the wind that bloweth where it listeth, determine it. Furthermore, one cannot divide East from West in the matter of re- ligious interaction any more than in the matter of commercial interaction. The trade routes from West to East were open fifteen centuries before Christ, we know; they may have been open thirty centuries before Christ; they will remain open until there shall be no more sea. Neither can the CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 245 highways of the common spiritual con- sciousness of mankind be blocked, nor thought be hemmed in behind mountain ranges and desert. God is one; the race is one; the interactions of race conscious- ness are inevitable effects of that oneness. "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." Moreover, as I pointed out in the preced- ing Lecture, the East will have it so. Her acute discernment of religious values marks Christianity as her own. The mother knows her offspring. And this, notwithstanding deep-seated Oriental opposition to institu- tions and theologies of Western churches. The East denounces Western Christendom, yet in spirit approaches nearer and nearer to the worship of Christ. The East has persecuted and put to death missionary representatives of Western churches, yet, to an extraordinary extent, assimilates Christian conceptions in its higher thinking. This is not a senseless contradiction. The quar- rel is not between the East and Christ, but between the East and Christ's successors. Not hatred of Christ, but scorn and distrust of the West, explains the opposition of the 246 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE Orient to Occidental missions. I think it safe to say that the eyes that to-day are searching most eagerly the face of Christ, the minds that are most anxiously weighing Christianity in the balance of judgment, are eyes and minds of Orientals, turning from long aberrations of pantheism and pessimism to consider the Lamb of God "which taketh away the sin of the world." To speak of withdrawing Christianity out of the Oriental consciousness would now be to speak of withdrawing light out of sun- shine, sound out of music. One may not rashly predict lines of development and points of accentuation that will distinguish the future of Christianity in the East, but it is certain that the seed of the Christian gospel is rooted in the Oriental conscious- ness, and every Western analogy suggests extensive and characteristic development, to occur in due course; first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. These considerations increase the prac- tical interest and importance of the theme now before us: " The Place of Christian Missions in the Modern World." Every at- tempt to identify and delimit the sphere of CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 247 missionary effort in the present stage of the world's development should be made in the spirit of the Confucian maxim: "To under- stand the present we must study the past." It is desirable to consider the evolutionary changes that have taken place in the motive of Christian missions. For better or for worse, new elements have entered the mo- tive; complicating, and, at times, obscuring its original simplicity. Perhaps no moment in the life of Christ is more splendid in its statesmanlike sweep of intention or more affecting in its suggestion of deep yet well- controlled emotion, than the moment in which He unfolds before the apostles His purpose to Christianize the world. Already He had given evidence of the sincerity and depth of His love for the world; sealing the testimony with His blood. He chooses now a felicitous place and moment wherein to convey to His future representatives an adequate sense of their vocation. He leads them out of the precincts of the city, where one's thoughts are likely to be hemmed in by the nearness and height of stone walls. He advances into the open, to Galilee, where the great sky line of hills and the arch 248 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE of the blue and the sailing of clouds like ships in a sea make one think of spaces and of people beyond the range of the local. Standing amidst these suggestions of a broader world, He delivers to the apostles a charge, which, by its catholicity and cos- mopolitanism, introduced a new element into the religious thinking of man. "Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost : teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you: and lo, I am with you all the days, even unto the consummation of the age." 1 The mental attitude of Christ in the delivery of this charge is apparent. In these words He concentrates and declares the essence of His soul-purpose. Behind and around them extend the far-reaching lines of His ministry and the prophetic intimations of world-redemption that preceded His min- istry. Beneath these words, as invincible presuppositions, he the fundamental ex- periences and emotions of the heart of Christ. One can feel in them, as one feels 1 Cf. Matt, xxviii. 19, 20. CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 249 the pulse beating within the living organism, Christ's most treasured and most charac- teristic convictions: His sense of oneness with the whole world ; the nobleness of His great love for the whole world, inclining Him toward the formidable mystery and anguish of sacrifice; His generous appre- ciation of possibilities latent in all nations, awaiting the day of knowledge and libera- tion to give forth their response to Him as World-Saver. Christ's sense of oneness with the world is one of His most amazing and (if one may use the term) fascinating characteristics. As for local domicile, He has none. But this is incidental. He is at home in the world. Man is his brother. One may think of Christ as rejoicing in His humanity, with wide, unfettered happi- ness. The sting produced by opposition and indignity coming from a faction in Israel, He assuaged by immersing His spirit in great purposes of world-wide affection. For the joy that was set before Him, He endured the cross, despising the shame. Nor did He doubt the possibility of response to His love and appreciation of His purpose, ultimately to emerge from all parts of the 250 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE world, fulfilling His hopes, satisfying the travail of His soul. Christ treated the reli- gious nature of the human race as a basis for Divine operations, to be consummated in the Christianizing of remote peoples. "Many," He declared, "shall come from the East and the West, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven." 1 He recognized re- ligious insight and experience outside of Judaism, and appealed to it as a basis for yet higher and more adequate modes of communion with God. Such, I believe, was the actual mental attitude of Christ in the delivery to the apostles of the charge to conduct throughout the world the missions of Christianity. I have not read into that mental attitude elements that are not there in fact. The danger is not that one shall overstate the catholicity of Jesus Christ, but rather that one shall be incapable of shaking off the fictions of ecclesiasticism sufficiently to perceive, even approximately, the immense breadth of the Saviour's mind. His mental attitude was fairly appreciated and shared by His immediate successors. 'Matt. viii. 11. CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 251 When we consider their provincial training, the hereditary hindrances that clung to them, their relative ignorance of the world, their inability to obtain that inestimable humanism which is fostered by extensive travel and familiar intercourse with foreign civilizations, the cosmopolitanism of the apostles is astonishing. We cannot account for it on strictly naturalistic grounds. The day of Pentecost, the effusion of the Spirit, alone supplies a clue to the world-statesman- ship of that group of untraveled men. That Peter the Apostle hesitated to visit Corne- lius the Centurion until reinforced by spe- cific instructions, is an incident of exquisite naturalness. In this he was true to every instinct of ecclesiasticism. The occurrence * exhibits, by the force of contrast, the superb deliverance from religious narrowness ac- complished in the apostolic circle, as the inner eye, purged by Divine intervention, was adjusted to the radiant catholicity of their Lord and Master. How magnificent is the spectacle of apostolic Dispersion. The gates of the world opened; and they issued, eastward and westward, as strong 1 Cf. Acts x. 252 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE men to run a race; casting aside every weight of racial prejudice, and looking with glad eyes to their Forerunner in the world- course, the Author and Finisher of their faith. Two moments in the life of St. Paul are indescribably refreshing, as ex- uberant outbursts of humanism, attaining, at a bound, the measure of the stature of Christ. One is at Antioch of Pisidia when jealous sectaries, contradicting and blaspheming, attempt to stand between the truth and an uncircumcised world. Like the sound of a torrent breaking with joy through puny barriers, in its glad rush from the hills, is the answer of him who had found in Christ his own soul-liberty: "It was necessary that the word of God should first be spoken to you. Seeing ye thrust it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles. For so hath the Lord commanded us, say- ing, I have set thee for a light of the Gentiles, That thou shouldest be for salvation unto the uttermost part of the earth." 1 The other moment is the famous one in Greece, where, after the manner of an epic, the man 1 Acts xiii. 46, 47. CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 253 who had learned cosmopolitanism through Christ's liberating touch upon his own life, speaks, in words robust with hope, of the Divine world-purpose. "The God that made the world and all things therein, He, being Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is He served by men's hands, as though He needed anything, seeing He Himself giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and He made of one every nation of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us : for in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain even of your own poets have said, For we are also His offspring." * Such was the original conception that prevailed in the mind of the Church, touch- ing the Christianizing of the world. It was a conception Homeric in its simplicity, divine in its humanism. It was as free and as buoyant as the wind. It was as broad in its luminous expansiveness as the light- 1 Acts xvii. 24-81. 254 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE ning of which Christ speaks, "coming forth from the east, and is seen even unto the west." For a time the impulse of the origi- nal conception remained, then slowly died away. Two influences operated against the survival of the original conception: one, the gathering interests of ecclesiasticism; the other, the rise of Islam. As for the former, without entering into the merits of the ques- tion, one may say that the gathering interests of ecclesiasticism furnished a diversion, pro- found and active, from the large purpose of the Lord and His first successors. The Church had many new questions to con- sider and new institutions to safeguard and administer. The accent shifted to matters incredibly remote from those that occupied the attention of Christ and, apparently, were by Him estimated as of the greatest impor- tance. I do not presume to say that this altered situation could have been avoided, nor that it was not necessary, in the evolu- tionary struggle of a religion destined to ultimate universality. That the Christian con- sciousness could not have attained intellectual self-realization save through controversial periods, and that the Christian conscience CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 255 could not have been educated to ethical maturity without the pressure of institu- tional authority, are propositions incapable indeed of proof, yet not open to rational denial. In any case the growth of ecclesiasti- cism profoundly obscured the simple inten- tion of Christ and diverted the interest of the Church from it; and the respective and in- harmonious conceptions of catholicity enter- tained in the Latin and Greek communions brought about a situation for which Christ made no obvious provision, and the continu- ance of which to the present day has indefi- nitelv obstructed ends that He had in view. The rise of Islam was a second, and melancholy, diversion from the irenic pur- pose of Christ toward nations remote from the Palestinian centre. Islam, as I have pointed out in a former Lecture, inter- posed a practical barrier between East and West; arresting the ordinary course of traffic and discouraging such sporadic mis- sionary effort as may have survived the rise of churchmanship. It is necessary to take account of Islam, not only as a barrier to Christian effort for the world, but as an irri- tant of Christian civilized sentiment against ?56 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE the Oriental world. One can scarcely over- state the acute offensiveness of Islam to the Christian sense of Europe, both ecclesi- astical and monastic. It has more offen- siveness than the Orientalism of the Farther East, because having the aspect of a de- generate offspring of Judaism. The Chris- tian scorn of Moslems constituted one of the most lamentable aberrations of the Church from the temper of Jesus Christ. Nor is there to be found, readily, a more horrible contrast within the field of religious history than the passion of the Crusades set off against the attitude of the Saviour toward foreign races and religions. I do not forget Sir John Seeley's eloquent apology for the Crusaders. "It was," he says, "the want of enlightenment, not the want of Christian humanity, that made it possible for men to commit these mistakes. Those Syrian battlefields where so many Crusaders com- mitted their pure souls unto their Captain, Christ; the image of Christ's death turned into an ensign of battle; the chalice of the Last Supper giving its name to an army — these things may shock, more or less, our good sense, but they do not shock, they CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 257 rather refresh and delight, our humanity. These warriors wanted Christ's wisdom, but they had His spirit, His divine anger, His zeal for the franchises of the soul. The ostensible object of such horrors was Chris- tian, and the indignation which professedly prompts them is also Christian; and the assumption they involve, that agonies of pain, and bloodshed in rivers, are less evils than the soul spotted and bewildered with sin, is most Christian." x This is splendidly said, and beyond doubt the words of the Regius Professor refer justly to the divine anger of the Son of God and His zeal for the franchises of the soul. But could we dis- solve the atmosphere of romance infolding the Crusades, and measure in the plain light of fact the passions of hatred, prejudice, and adventure that fanned the zeal of the Cru- saders, it is possible that we might hesitate to invoke the sanction of Christ's example in support of those passions. "Vengeance is mine; I will repay," is a word that sug- gests caution in an attempt to identify the religious frenzy of an age of ignorance with the holy wrath of God's Anointed. 1 Cf. Ecce Homo, p. 97, ed. Macmillan, 1904. 258 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE Yet, for the manifestation by the West of any other spirit toward the East than that which found expression in the Crusades, one must wait until the power of Islam was relatively broken and the blockade of the East lifted. With the re- vival of letters the East came once more upon the horizon of Europe, evoking the maritime spirit and its close ally, the im- perializing spirit. The Portuguese and Spanish Jesuit missions of the sixteenth cen- tury, imperialistic in character, shrinking not from the use of torture as a stimulant of faith, are a mysterious and striking instance in the history of religious propagandism. Identified with them were some heroic and saintly souls, to whom the dream of extend- ing Christ's sceptre over Asiatic races was a haunting vision of delight, in pursuit of which death was encountered with rapture. Yet — alas ! — military and commercial con- quests were not alien to these dreamers, and brought down upon them the fury of the patient East. Japan exacted terrible repris- als in the sixteenth century, trampling the Cross underfoot and exterminating its ad- vocates. Nor have three hundred years CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 259 sufficed to allay, in the mind of the East, distrust of Christian approaches. The Pro- testant Reformation in Europe was unaccom- panied by any immediate reaction toward the purpose of Christ for the Christianizing of the world. Institutional and contro- versial interests at home consumed the time and absorbed the attention of religionists. From the Moravians of Southern Eu- rope emerged the first manifestations of missionary devotion pointing to the reap- pearance of the world-sympathy of Christ. Through the Moravians the missionary spirit touched Denmark, Saxony, and (dissemi- nated through Northern Germany and Hol- land) England. It appeared in England simultaneously with the dawn of Wesleyan- ism, and, to some extent, in consequence of that revival. By reason of the spiritual reaction of Wesleyanism upon the Church of England, a divine solicitude (stoutly op- posed by some power of the Establishment as well as by commercial conservatism) spread through many cultured and brilliant minds. In the close of the eighteenth cen- tury and the beginning of the nineteenth in England, Christian men were asking them- 260 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE selves : Did not our Lord and Master thus and thus declare regarding the nations that lie out on that far eastern line, where brood the clouds of pantheism and polytheism? The spirit of Christ's world-sympathy began to return. Its advent in an atmosphere charged with ecclesiastical and theological intensity, not unmixed with ignorance of Oriental thought, was marked by character- istic elements of feeling. Philanthropic pity for vaguely apprehended suffering, and the supposition that the Christian gospel is the forerunner of improved physical and moral conditions, were blended with dogmatic in- tensity of definition regarding the non- Christian world. The dominant theology feared not to carry to a conclusion its terrific inquiry into the eternal doom of the non- Christianized world. The dynamic of that aggressive theology was, without doubt, tremendous. It clothed with tragic realism each attempt to snatch as brands from the burning the members of Oriental races. The later theological evolution, abounding in so-called "reconstruction," has almost totally withdrawn the accent from this point. It may be questioned whether the CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 261 relative elimination of the former tragic interest in the destiny of non-Christian races has not been accompanied with grave loss of momentum in certain large regions of Christian thought and effort. As time has gone on, other important changes have oc- curred in the elements forming the con- temporary motive of Christian missions. The' modern re-discovery, and immediate ethical application, of the historic realism of Jesus Christ, has augmented immensely the force of the motive. The appeals to obedience, to loyalty, to courage in fulfill- ment of Christ's actual command to Chris- tianize the world, have formed strong sub- sidiary grounds on which to summon the chivalry and devotion of culture, in the pre- sent age, to the ethical and religious ser- vice of Asiatic and African races. The striking words of Bishop Heber represent the nature of the appeal or challenge founded on Christ's work for, and among, men: — " The Son of God goes forth to war, A kingly crown to gain ; His blood-red banner streams afar: Who follows in His train ?" 262 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE Together with this revived sense of the actual historicity of Jesus Christ, other modern influences have enriched and en- larged the motive of Christian missions. One of these influences is the growth of humanism. This may be described, in gen- eral, as the outcome of a richer and more mature culture, which has eventuated in the civilization of leading Western nations. It may be affirmed, more particularly, of the English-speaking group, wherein has oc- curred in the last half-century prodigious advance in education, with its normal accom- paniment, a silent and extensive growth of democracy. The power of certain old fic- tions of authority has been challenged; the bases of authority in matters of faith and in matters of social relationship and duty have been broadened and deepened, becoming increasingly subjective and ra- tional. This has involved the relative decline of extravagant animosities and pre- judices between nations, the growing sense of race unity, the purging of social ideals, the elevation of social ethics. The situa- tion remains unsatisfactory at many points, but there is reason for hearty thankfulness. CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 263 The primitive question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" returns with fresh force and new meaning. The content of the idea of bro- therhood augments, and extends into the realm of the spirit. A conception of the nature of religion, undreamed of in the age of Cromwell, has grown from the scientific study of nations and their monuments. The soul-action of remote races is becoming intelligible. The science of religion grows from the once unconsidered human mass, like the figure of an angel from the un- chiseled block. The wings are seen where once were noted only fangs and claws. We are beginning to reverence alien and repellent faiths, as marks of divine poten- tiality awaiting liberation and self-know- ledge. In the meantime we are learning to apprehend larger meanings in the In- carnation of Christ; meanings that involve the race, taking it up into the thought and purpose of God, investing it with value and sanctity, sealing it with the mark of high destiny. The growth of humanism has been con- temporary with our increased knowledge of the East, and with portentous changes in 264 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE the political and religious conditions of Asia. It is important to consider the remarkable changes that have occurred in the state of our knowledge of the East, and in our in- voluntary attitude toward the East resulting from that altered state of knowledge. Limi- tation and error characterized the situation one hundred years ago. It could not be otherwise in view of the very limited facili- ties then available for the accumulation of accurate knowledge. Geographical and his- torical knowledge of Asia, classified and confirmed, now is abundant. The philo- sophical study of Eastern religions has at- tained, there is reason to suppose, relatively correct insight into the fundamentals of Oriental thinking. Means of travel to and in the East have improved greatly. Con- tinuous interchange of communication is maintained. An immense and trustworthy literature is in existence, touching all aspects of Eastern life. A remarkable Europeaniza- tion of large portions of the East has oc- curred; partly through the instrumentality of governments, partly through the direct and indirect influence of Christian mis- sions long since established. The East has CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 265 gained very widespread theoretical ac- quaintance with the literature, institutions, and representatives of Western Christianity. In addition to this knowledge by hearsay, the East now possesses at many points an indigenous Christianity of much vitality and self-possession, flourishing without Occi- dental assistance. The effect of these con- siderations is to establish certain interest- ing conclusions, which are not arbitrarily formed but develop naturally from existing conditions. These conclusions bear upon the psycho- logical attitude of those addressing them- selves to the work of Christian missions in the modern world. They bear equally upon the nature and implications of the work itself. It is profitable to reflect upon the change in psychological attitude necessarily tak- ing place in those who address themselves to the work of Christian missions in the twentieth century. It corresponds with the changes occurring in the more advanced Asiatic nations. One hundred years ago the relative absence of correct knowledge concerning the East and the absence of 266 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE testimony from predecessors gave to pro- spective missionary life the aspect of a vague and threatening experience; a leap of faith in the dark. Time has dispelled in great measure this cloud of obscurity. In "Les Miserables" occurs a striking passage on the inherent tendency of that which is indistinct to identify itself with that which is terrible. The passage is found in connection with the memorable barricade in the Quartier Saint- Denis. "The necessary tactics of insur- rection are to drown small numbers in a vast obscurity, to multiply every combatant by the possibilities which that obscurity con- tains." These words suggest the ominous and formidable aspect of the East as re- garded a century ago by men and women who from the remote colleges and univer- sities of New England resolved, amidst fear- ful searchings of heart, to plunge into the "vast obscurity" of Asiatic life, and to encounter the possibilities which that ob- scurity contained. They appeared to them- selves and to their friends to be leaping from the solid ground of regulated and safe- guarded existence into the yawning abyss. How great was the heroism of those early CHEISTIAN MISSIONS 267 missionaries? Perhaps no sterner trial of nerve is possible than deliberate advance into the unknown. The conditions amidst which the modern youth advances from the American university to Asiatic missionary service are almost completely reversed. A long tradition of residential service in the Far East is at the disposal of the new can- didate for service. A great literature about the East is accessible; including extensive scientific examination of the phases of Oriental life. There has taken place a general Europeanization of the East, which has not only given the Occident its own his- torical tradition in the Orient, but has re- acted in an extraordinary degree upon the East itself. In illustration of this may be cited the extensive and admirable use of the English language throughout Indian and Sinhalese circles of culture. Within this general Europeanization of Eastern life there exists a specific and most interesting Europeanization, in the form of missionary establishments; many of them already ven- erable and looked upon in many instances by the local leaders, even of the non-Chris- tian community, as valuable and welcome 268 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE accessions to the general good. In addition to all this, there has come to be through- out many parts of the East a firmly rooted Christianity, which grows independently of European effort to sustain it; which is developing after the characteristic type of Oriental insight and experience, and which would continue so to develop were European influence to be withdrawn. This indige- nous Christianity of the East takes up into itself and assimilates eternal elements of truth contained in the ancient faiths. It is likely, for example, that the future Chris- tianity of Japan will retain forever that desirable essence of reverence for the past and loyalty to the departed which is the useful and admirable trust enshrined in ancestor-worship. These new elements in the modern Asiatic world strikingly modify the psycho- logical attitude of those who, at the present time, approach missionary service with adequate intelligence. The old sense of uncertainty and remoteness is gone. The entire East, once a vast obscurity whose terrors were multiplied by the possibilities which that obscurity contained, is brought CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 269 within the modern world. In many parts of the East the sense of pioneering, once the sole conception of those entering the for- eign service of Christianity, no longer is applicable. This is now exchanged for the sense of entering, and becoming a part of, an order of things long and well established. The mind contemplating Asiatic missionary service in the twentieth century will do well to move away from the primitive idea of being solely the evangelist of an unknown Saviour. It is necessary to adjust one's self to the fact that, as the result of a half century of Christian missionaries and print- ing-presses in China and Japan, and a cen- tury and a half of the same in India and Ceylon, direct and indirect acquaintance with the leading Christian ideas is now widespread. It is scarcely necessary to re- vert to former erroneous beliefs held in the West touching the universal ignorance and barbarism of the Orient. These figments of an age of ignorance vanish from mod- ern educated circles. One recalls them with the same antiquarian interest awakened by grotesque maps of the East drawn by the early cartographers. Every well-informed 270 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE Occidental now knows that one looks in the East for the same variations of culture and ignorance that one finds in the West. The self-possession of Oriental Christianity is beginning at length to be realized by some Western Christians. Resentment of eccle- siastical dictatorship by Oriental Christian leaders comes as timely advice to Occi- dental churchmanship, that henceforth the relation of missionaries to the cultured classes of the East must change from that of control to that of cooperation. It will be a happy augury for the continuance of close relations between Christians of East and West if the young men and women now preparing in American and English colleges for Asiatic service can be delivered altogether from the old tradition of con- descending pity toward the Oriental world. In place thereof let them entertain the thought of cooperation with Eastern Chris- tians ; their equals in intelligence and devo- tion, their superiors in knowledge of local conditions and insight into local modes of procedure. All that I have just said with regard to changed psychological attitude on the part CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 271 of those preparing intelligently for lives of service in India and the Far East leads naturally to matters with which I shall close this Lecture. It is evident that new im- plications and larger meanings must be connected, henceforth, with Christian mis- sions in the modern world. I shall speak of three of those larger meanings as they relate themselves respectively to the Chris- tian educator, the Christian physician, and the Christian minister, in the East. The Christian educator in the East must, in the coming time, stand for the larger meaning and function of education, growing out of the relation of modern knowledge to the ancient religions. We have only to turn our eyes homeward to see that the mod- ern history of religion in the West has been a series of readjustments to an advancing standard of knowledge. Many attempts have been made to protect religious think- ing from the influence of scientific discovery and philosophical rectification. In the end these attempts have been unsuccessful. The tide of knowledge rises above all bar- riers of authority, prejudice, or devotion. Truth is irresistible. The most vital lesson 272 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE learned in the modern world is that the readjustment of religious thinking to the growth of knowledge means the safeguard- ing rather than the destruction of pure and living faith. The Christian educator in the East will grasp the fact that the prob- lem of the higher Oriental thinking to-day is to effect a reorganization of the religious consciousness. This is to be done, not by ignoring nor vilifying the old religions, but by seeking to assimilate with the distinctively Christian elements of truth whatsoever in the ancient Aryan heritage of religion and philosophy can be held in connection with modern knowledge of nature and personality. The Christian physician in the East must, in the coming time, stand for the larger meaning of medical work as an offset to the philosophy of pessimism. That philosophy very largely grew out of animistic concep- tions of nature. It attributed disease to the revengeful or malignant action of deities who were to be combated by necromantic charms and propitiatory sacrifices. The in- capability of these methods of dealing with disease led to the increase of misery, which must, of course, precipitate ultimately the CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 273 conclusions of pessimism. The whole the- ory of the scientific treatment of diseases rests on quite another conception of the universe and of law. It moves toward optimistic conclusions. Nothing is more needed, in order to affect the ethical and spiritual reconstruction of Oriental life, than deliverance from a pessimistic view of the universe. As the Christian physician in the East learns to use his position of van- tage not only for immediate ends of mercy to individuals, but as a contemporary force making for profound philosophical recon- struction, he will achieve results even more magnificent than those now reached. The Christian minister in the East must, in the coming time, stand for the larger meaning of the Incarnation of the Son of God. He goes as an ambassador for Christ; but, more and more, he must go as an ambassador of the mysterious and uni- versal Incarnation of Christ in the whole human race. He must take the position that, as yet, Christ has been but partially interpreted through the evolution of the Western religious consciousness. He must point out to the finest minds of the East that 274 CHRIST AND THE HUMAN RACE there are gifts and qualities in the Oriental religious consciousness which, when they will fully undertake the interpretation of Christ, of Christian Scripture, and of Chris- tian experience, may open deeper depths and more splendid vistas of soul-power than the West, with its genius for institutions and for practical ethics, has yet discerned. It is not, then, wholly as the giver, but also as the receiver, that the West is to approach the East, bearing the Gospel of Christ. She is not to say: This is the Gos- pel which I know and which I teach you; but rather: Here is the Gospel which I know in part, according to the gifts and insight of the West. Share it with me, O Soul of the Eastern World; help me to know better, through you, that Gospel and that Christ! Gentlemen of the University: At the out- set of this course of Lectures I expressed the hope that my observations on the Attitude of Jesus Christ toward Foreign Races and Religions might lead some of the most thoughtful and gifted among the under- graduates to perceive the breadth and dig- nity of the Christian ministry as a life-work CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 275 and to choose that life-work as their own. I close my term of duty here with an ex- pression of the same hope. What is more worthy of a man of liberal culture, in the modern world, than to set before himself this as the goal of earthly ambition : to be an interpreter, and, so far as possible, a representative of the Spirit and attitude of Jesus Christ toward the world of men? What is more needed to-day, both at home and abroad, than the presence in every community of educated interpreters and representatives of the Spirit of Jesus Christ ? What manner of life may prove more reward- ing, as one looks back on it all in those quiet hours of remembrance and reflection that shall remain when our working years are over ?