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This is the religion of three-fourths of all the inhabitants of India and of nine-tenths of all those who are there reached by missionaries.

What is Hinduism? It is a mixture of Brahmanism, Buddhism and Devil-worship. As we have seen, the supplanting faith of Buddha was finally absorbed, so far as India was concerned, into the old faith. When, later on, the Brahmans moved towards the southern part of the peninsula they entered the region occupied by, and largely given over to, demonolatry. According to its wont Brahmanism, as modified by Buddhism, sought not to overthrow the primitive cult of the people, but to absorb it. Thus, in South India today, more than three-fourths of the people are devil worshippers. And yet, with their demons, they have been accepted into the higher faith of the Aryan; and, according to their mood and preference, give themselves to the worship of Hindu gods or village demons. Worshipping in pure Hindu temples is to that people but a pastime, a mere holiday diversion; while the appeasing of the demons at their village shrines and under old trees in their hamlets is the most serious concern of their life. And yet all of them are regarded, and rightly regarded, as Hindus. Indeed, in the Hinduism of today, especially [pg 063] as found in South India, can be found living amicably together and without any apparent sense of incongruity or conflict the lowest type of fetishism, an ardent devil-worship, an engrossing ceremonialism, a worship of the higher Brahmanical deities, a thoroughgoing pantheism and a pure theism. I have witnessed in our district, side by side, a hideous fetish, a gross idol of a local demon, an image of Vishnu who is the best of Brahmanical gods, while in an adjacent hamlet lived families who belonged to none of these cults but who gave themselves to a belief in, and practice of, a vague theism which is farther removed from the fetishism of their neighbours than is their religion from the highest type of Christian teaching.

Thus Hinduism may be viewed as an immense cloth of many colours; which colours have been patched together without any reference to harmony or consistency. In other words, that religion is a big mass of mutually inconsistent and undigested beliefs, practices and ceremonies. It has not only mutually antagonistic philosophies, it has also three different ways of salvation, 330,000,000 gods and as many laws and customs which, though binding as the laws of the Medes and Persians, are nevertheless, absolutely wanting in consistency and in unity of purpose and teaching. In the words of Sir Alfred Lyall—“The general character of Indian religion is that it is unlimited and comprehensive, up to the point of confusion; it is a boundless sea of divine beliefs and practices; it encourages the worship of innumerable gods by an infinite variety of rites; it permits every doctrine to be taught, every kind of [pg 064] mystery to be imagined, any sort of theory to be held as to the inner nature and visible operation of the divine power.”

It has been the wont of Brahmanism not to directly antagonize and overthrow the old and the opposing cults, but rather to absorb them. Note here its fundamental contrast with Christianity. It meets its rival with a smile of appreciation, then seeks to fraternize with it, after which it approves and appropriates and finally absorbs it.

In the Madura District of South India, where I have lived, the Brahmans, upon their first arrival, found all the people given to the worship of their village demons. They said to them, practically—“We do not wish to deprive you of your devil shrines and images and worship. We will take the leading demons which you worship and marry them to our great gods and then give to them a place in our pantheon and a part in our worship. Come ye also with them and we will welcome you into our temples and faith.” Thus “Meenatchi,” the old and the principal demoness of the primitive cult of that region, was married to the great god Siva and became the presiding goddess of the great Hindu temple of Madura; and all her old worshippers followed her into the new faith of Hinduism. So all those people are Hindus today. And yet they have not abated one jot of their interest in and practice of their demonolatry.

That which may be regarded as the more strictly Brahmanical development and manifestation of Hinduism is divided, at present, into two great cults. These are Saivism, or the worship of Siva, and [pg 065] Vaishnavism, or the worship of Vishnu. These two cults, while not mutually antagonistic, are nevertheless entirely separate—their devotees, respectively, being satisfied with their own god and his incarnation and manifestations.

The first god of the Hindu triad (Brahma, Vishnu and Siva)—has practically no shrines among Hindus today. His worship has been largely transferred to his so-called sons, the Brahmans; and Siva has, in the main, absorbed all his functions as creator. As it is only Vishnu, the preserver, and Siva, the destroyer and recreator that have anything to do with men, the Hindus devote themselves to these two only. Siva is the “great god,” the austere and terrible one whom the people fear. He is known chiefly through his phallic emblem, the linga, which emphasizes his creative activity. Vishnu is the benign god who has resorted to many incarnations whereby he might free the world of demons who were worrying and destroying our race. Siva has many manifestations; Vishnu alone has “descents” or incarnations, some of which were in brute, and some in human, form.

These two cults obtain universally throughout India. Vaishnavism (the worship of Vishnu) has many popular sects which wield extensive influence throughout the country. The one established by Vallabha-Swami, in the sixteenth century, is a worship of Krishna and is given to the indulgence of the passions and is characterised by gross licentiousness.

The sect founded by Chaitanya in the fourteenth century is one of the most celebrated, and is very popular in Bengal. It subordinates everything to [pg 066] faith (bhakti) even making this more important than caste. Contemplation, rather than ritual, was Chaitanya's pathway to salvation and he gave supreme value to the virtue of obedience to the “guru” or religious guide.

In South India the cult of the religious reformer, Ramanuja, who flourished in the twelfth century, has extensive popularity. He was a man of great thought, and his special type of Vedantic philosophy is much in vogue today. He proclaimed the unity of God under the name of Vishnu. He received converts from every caste. It is an interesting fact that nearly all, in the long list of religious reformers in India, took a position of hostility to the caste system. But it is also significant that none of these reform movements has persisted through the centuries in that attitude, but has fallen into line with orthodox Hinduism in absolute submission to the caste demon.

“Sakti” worship has also attained great influence and extensive predominance in many parts of India. This is the worship of the Sakti or the female half of the great deities of the land. The Saktar preëminently worship Kali, the goddess of blood, and the other consorts of Siva. It is a worship of power (“Sakti” means energy or power), and usually power of the maleficent type. It is perhaps the lowest form of Hinduism and easily lends itself to a gratification of the lowest passions of men. This tantric cult (the tantras are the sacred books of the Saktar) is the only one in modern Hinduism which indulges in bloody sacrifices—Kali and her sisters being satisfied by blood as by nothing else. This attests the non-Aryan origin and character of this worship, inasmuch [pg 067] as Brahmanism, since the days of Buddha, abjures all bloody sacrifice.

Let it not be supposed, however, from the above remarks, about the multiform and self-contradictory character of the amorphous thing called Hinduism, that it is therefore impossible for us to understand and measure its nature and power. For Brahmanism, through all ages, has not been without a definite tendency, an underlying philosophy and pervasive fundamental beliefs. It is indeed more a congeries of faiths than a simple religion, like Christianity. And yet, amid all its hosts of contradictions and ways of salvation and sects and cults there have sounded, as a diapason through all the centuries, the fundamental teachings of Vedantism. A few doctrines such as pantheism, transmigration, “karma,” “bhakti” and final absorption into the Supreme Soul are all but universally held by the people of all sects and divisions, however much at variance with these their peculiar beliefs may seem to be.

The prominent staple of Hindu religious thinking in all ages has doubtless been Vedantism—that subtle form of pantheism which has charmed and bewildered not a few of the great minds of the Occident also. The paramount influence of this philosophy upon all religious thought and life in India is unmistakable today, as it has been through the centuries. Of this Max Müller says—“If the people of India can be said to have now any system of religion at all … it is to be found in the Vedanta philosophy, the leading tenets of which are known to some extent in every village. … Nothing will extinguish that ancient spirit of Vedantism which is breathed by every Hindu [pg 068] from his earliest youth, and pervades, in various forms, even the prayers of the idolater, the speculations of the philosopher, and the proverbs of the beggar.”

We may therefore, without hesitation, so far as Hinduism is concerned regard as philosophic Hinduism those basal doctrines and their corollaries which, from the earliest days, have been the stock in trade of all Indo-Aryan thinkers and at the same time the source and solvent of all the mysteries of their faith.

By a study of these one may easily reach the heart of Hindus and of Hinduism and can weigh and measure the forces which enter into their religious life and thinking, and can compare them with the teachings and institutions of Christianity.

This study will bring a twofold blessing to Christians of the West, especially to missionaries who have given themselves to the regeneration of India. It will give them a larger degree of respect for that great people of the East and a new appreciation for Hindu thought and religious speculation. We of the West have been imbued with too much of an intellectual arrogance and a spirit of contempt for “the benighted Hindu.” Even if we ever learned, we certainly have too easily forgotten, that many, many centuries ago—when our ancestors were grovelling in the lowest depths of primitive savagery—the rishis of India were engaged in perhaps the highest self-propelled flights of religious speculation the world has ever known and were working out a philosophy, or more correctly a system of ontology, which is today the wonder and admiration of Western savants.

I argue for a study of those teachings which, [pg 069] though hoary with age, are today all-important as the foundation upon which the many-aisled temple of Hinduism is built and (if I may change the figure) as the cement which binds the whole structure together.

A few years ago it was generally thought that Brahmanism was little else than the insane ravings of well-meaning, but unguided, or, worse still, misguided, denizens of darkness; the whole literature was considered a mass of intellectual and moral rubbish. How much the verdict of Western scholars upon this subject has changed during the last quarter of a century I need not mention. All men who have investigated the subject give today unstinted praise to the heart and intellect of those sages who produced much of the ancient religious literature of India. They will not endorse the statement of the great German philosopher who exclaimed, “In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life—it will be the solace of my death.” And yet many claim that its truths are numerous and spiritually helpful. Hopkins writes7:—“The sincerity, the fearless search of the Indic Sages for truth, their loftiness of thinking, all these will affect the religious student of every clime and age, though the fancied result of their thinking may pass without effect over a modern mind.” And Barth truly remarks8:—“The religion of India has not only given birth to Buddhism and produced, to its own credit, a code of precepts which is not inferior to any other; [pg 070] but in the poetry which they have inspired there is at times a delicacy and bloom of moral sentiment which the Western world has never seen outside of Christianity. Nowhere else, perhaps, do we meet with an equal wealth of fine sentences.” Of their intellectual acumen Dr. Matheson says: “It is not too much to say that the mind of the West, with all its undoubted impulses towards the progress of humanity, has never exhibited such an intense amount of intellectual force as is to be found in the religious speculations of India. … These have been the cradle of all Western speculations; and wheresoever the European mind has risen into heights of philosophy, it has done so because the Brahman has been the pioneer. There is no intellectual problem in the West which had not its earliest discussion in the East; and there is no modern solution of that problem which will not be found anticipated in the East.” These words of the Scotch divine are doubtless strong; too strong, I think. And yet they may be serviceable, if they warn us against that proneness to depreciate the intellectual value and serious purpose of the religious books of that land. It is worse than useless to confidently descant upon the errors, inconsistencies, the follies and absurdities of these writings without acknowledging at the same time the profound thought, the deep spiritual yearning and the sublime poetic beauty, which characterize some portions.

In this connection the question of the origin of Hinduism is important.

It was formerly laid down as a postulate of the Christian's belief that Hinduism is of the devil; and [pg 071] that, coming from below, it must be shunned as a study and denounced root and branch as a thing purely satanic. This theory has entirely given way to a more rational belief. The question whether the truths of Hinduism, with those of other ethnic religions, have filtered down from some primitive revelation and are the relics of a vanishing faith, divinely communicated to some of the earliest members of our race; or whether God has directly, from time to time, guided the thoughts and answered the deep yearnings of the soul of the Indo-Aryan, is one which is still discussed. But modern scholarship is practically of one voice in maintaining that God hath not left Himself without witness among the many nations of the earth—a witness that has indeed been comparatively feeble—a revelation that is dim and starlike as compared with the noonday brightness of the Sun of Righteousness in the Christian religion. The day has come when the Christian must accept and believe that God has been dealing directly with this people through the many centuries of their history, leading them to important truths, even though their evil hearts and worse lives have caused them, in many cases, to “change the truth of God into a lie and worship and serve the creature more than the Creator.” Many of the truths which are imbedded in the religion of that land find their solution in no other hypothesis than this.

This study of Hinduism will also lead us to realize the important truth of the many points of contact between that faith and our own. A knowledge of their sympathies cannot be of less importance than that of their antipathies. And this knowledge is indispensable [pg 072] to the Christian worker in India as it gives a new and a most direct way of approach to the Hindu heart, and a fresh and all-potent argument with them in behalf of Christianity.

This process also best illustrates the method and Spirit of Christ. Dr. Robson aptly remarks that “while no religion has done more to overthrow other religions than Christianity, no religious teacher has said less against other religions than Christ. We have from Him only one short saying condemning the Gentiles' aim in life, but not even one reflecting on the gods they believed in, or the worship they paid them. Was not this because He came not to destroy but to fulfill?”

I can refer to only a few of these common points and belief in the two faiths.