Читать книгу India's Problem, Krishna or Christ - John P. Jones - Страница 20

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What do these two religions promise to do for those who embrace them? The work which Christianity proposes to itself is difficult and glorious. It takes fallen, sin-sodden, man and leads him out into a new life of holiness; it opens out to him a long and broad vista of life with an ever-enlarging, blissful, activity. Christ said that He came into the world that men might have life and have it abundantly. He came not only to save the lost but also to develop all the grand possibilities of the soul to their utmost, and to launch the human bark upon a voyage of everlasting life, which means unceasing growth in all its noblest qualities, activities and enjoyments.

Hindu philosophy and faith, on the other hand, unite in commanding that human endowments be starved, qualities suppressed, activity of all kinds stayed, ambition and every other desire, even the noblest and purest, quenched. All the essential elements of life itself are to be mortified that the soul may, unhampered by its own entanglement, reach that consummation which is supposed to be final. And what is it? Who can tell? The Aryan philosopher himself stands mute in its presence. All [pg 088] that we can predicate of it is not life and happiness, according to any standard of human experience known or imagined. The idea that the individual soul will finally sink into and blend with the Absolute Being as a drop of water returns to and mingles with its mother ocean may seem plausible to the philosopher; but of such an hypothetical existence we know absolutely nothing and can expect nothing that would inspire hope and kindle ambition.

In Hinduism there are heavens many and not a few hells. But unlike the places of reward and punishment connected with Christianity, they represent nothing final. They are more like the purgatory of the Catholics, and represent only steps in the progress of the soul towards emancipation.

Concerning the general view of human life, its import and outcome, the two faiths are antipodal. Christianity is brightly optimistic. The future of every Christian is to be as the sun shining more and more until the perfect day. Unceasing progress and eternal expansion are held out before him. His is an heritage that will abide and will resound in an ever increasing anthem of praise throughout time and eternity. Nothing can occur hereafter to rob him of that crown of glory which is the gift of God and which is to result in likeness to Him.

Hinduism, on the other hand, is essentially pessimistic. It teaches that human life is totally and irremediably evil. Every power of the soul must be exercised in the endeavour to shake off this terrible burden of separate human existence and escape all the conditions of this life. That is the only relief [pg 089] possible. To the Hindu the question so often discussed in Christian lands—“Is life worth living?”—has no interest, since it has but one answer possible. And even if the Indian sage forgets his present conditions and pessimism long enough to gaze down the long and dismal vista of numberless births to the final consummation (Sayujya)—the final union with God—he finds in that nothing which the Christian does not discover in tenfold richness and beauty in the Bible. To be partaker of the Divine Nature is a blessed reality to the Christian without his forfeiting, in the least, the dignity of self-identity and the glory of separate personal consciousness. To have the “life hid with Christ in God”; to be able triumphantly to exclaim—“I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me”; to experience the blessedness and power of abiding in Christ and to realize the answer to Christ's own prayer to the Father—“that they also may be in us”—all this is the joy and hope of the Christian in a manner and to a degree utterly impossible to the Hindu whose union with the supreme spirit is the loss and end of self, including all those faculties which are capable of enjoyment.

Looking from another standpoint, we perceive that the aim of the religion of Christ is the banishing of sin from the life and the establishing of character. Sin is the dark background of Christianity. It explains its origin and reveals its universality. Its whole concern is with the emancipation of man from the presence and power of sin. To the Vedantin, on the other hand, sin, in the Christian sense of it, is an impossibility. Where God is all and all is God there can be no separate will to antagonize the divine [pg 090] will. Monism necessarily, in the last analysis, carries every act and motive back to the supreme Will and establishes an all-inclusive necessitarianism which is fatal to human freedom; and it therefore excludes sin as an act of rebellion against God. Much is made of sin, so called, in the Hindu system, as we shall presently see; but nowhere is more care needed than here that we may distinguish between ideas conveyed by this word in these two faiths. In Christianity the ethical character of sin is emphasized. It is described as a thing of moral obliquity and spiritual darkness. According to the Upanishads the only defect of man is an intellectual one. He is in bondage to ignorance. Plato made ignorance the chief source of moral evil and proposed philosophy as a remedy for the malady. The Vedantin differs from the Greek philosopher only in his more absolute condemnation of (avidya) ignorance as the mother of all human ills. Remove this—let a man attain unto a true knowledge of self, of the fact that he has no real separate existence and is one with the Supreme Soul—and he becomes thereby qualified for his emancipation and ends his long cycle of births. Moreover, in the polytheism of the Puranas and in the laws and customs of Manu sin generally means only ceremonial defilement and the violation of customs and usages.

Hinduism, therefore, has never addressed itself to the task of helping man as a sinner—of regenerating his heart, of establishing within him that beautiful thing known in Christian lands and philosophies as a well rounded, symmetrical and perfect character. For many reasons and in many ways [pg 091] it has aimed at a very different consummation in man from that consistently sought by Christ and His religion.