Ten Great Religions by James Freeman Clarke

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Sec. 7. Comparative Theology will probably show that the Ethnic Religions are
one-sided, each containing a Truth of its own, but being defective,
wanting some corresponding Truth. Christianity, or the Catholic Religion,
is complete on every Side.

Brahmanism, for example, is complete on the side of spirit, defective on
the side of matter; full as regards the infinite, empty of the finite;
recognizing eternity but not time, God but not nature. It is a vast system
of spiritual pantheism, in which there is no reality but God, all else
being Maya, or illusion. The Hindoo mind is singularly pious, but also
singularly immoral. It has no history, for history belongs to time. No one
knows when its sacred books were written, when its civilization began,
what caused its progress, what its decline. Gentle, devout, abstract, it
is capable at once of the loftiest thoughts and the basest actions. It
combines the most ascetic self-denials and abstraction from life with the
most voluptuous self-indulgence. The key to the whole system of Hindoo
thought and life is in this original tendency to see God, not man;
eternity, not time; the infinite, not the finite.

Buddhism, which was a revolt from Brahmanism, has exactly the opposite
truths and the opposite defects. Where Brahmanism is strong, it is weak;
where Brahmanism is weak, it is strong. It recognizes man, not God; the
soul, not the all; the finite, not the infinite; morality, not piety. Its
only God, Buddha, is a man who has passed on through innumerable
transmigrations, till, by means of exemplary virtues, he has reached the
lordship of the universe. Its heaven, Nirvana, is indeed the world of
infinite bliss; but, incapable of cognizing the infinite, it calls it
nothing. Heaven, being the inconceivable infinite, is equivalent to pure
negation. Nature, to the Buddhist, instead of being the delusive shadow of
God, as the Brahman views it, is envisaged as a nexus of laws, which
reward and punish impartially both obedience and disobedience.

The system of Confucius has many merits, especially in its influence on
society. The most conservative of all systems, and also the most prosaic,
its essential virtue is reverence for all that is. It is not perplexed by
any fear or hope of change; the thing which has been is that which shall
be; and the very idea of progress is eliminated from the thought of China.
Safety, repose, peace, these are its blessings. Probably merely physical
comfort, earthly _bien-etre_, was never carried further than in the
Celestial Empire. That virtue so much exploded in Western civilization, of
respect for parents, remains in full force in China. The emperor is
honored as the father of his people; ancestors are worshipped in every
family; and the best reward offered for a good action is a patent of
nobility, which does not reach forward to one's children, but backward to
one's parents. This is the bright side of Chinese life; the dark side is
the fearful ennui, the moral death, which falls on a people among whom
there are no such things as hope, expectation, or the sense of progress.
Hence the habit of suicide among this people, indicating their small hold
on life. In every Chinese drama there are two or three suicides. A soldier
will commit suicide rather than go into battle. If you displease a
Chinaman, he will resent the offence by killing himself on your doorstep,
hoping thus to give you some inconvenience. Such are the merits and such
the defects of the system of Confucius.

The doctrine of Zoroaster and of the Zend Avesta is far nobler. Its
central thought is that each man is a soldier, bound to battle for good
against evil. The world, at the present time, is the scene of a great
warfare between the hosts of light and those of darkness. Every man who
thinks purely, speaks purely, and acts purely is a servant of Ormazd, the
king of light, and thereby helps on his cause. The result of this doctrine
was that wonderful Persian empire, which astonished the world for
centuries by its brilliant successes; and the virtue and intelligence of
the Parsees of the present time, the only representatives in the world of
that venerable religion. The one thing lacking to the system is unity. It
lives in perpetual conflict. Its virtues are all the virtues of a soldier.
Its defects and merits are, both, the polar opposites of those of China.
If the everlasting peace of China tends to moral stagnation and death, the
perpetual struggle and conflict of Persia tends to exhaustion. The Persian
empire rushed through a short career of flame to its tomb; the Chinese
empire vegetates, unchanged, through a myriad of years.

* * * * *

If Brahmanism and Buddhism occupy the opposite poles of the same axis of
thought,--if the system of Confucius stands opposed, on another axis, to
that of Zoroaster,--we find a third development of like polar antagonisms
in the systems of ancient Egypt and Greece. Egypt stands for Nature;
Greece for Man. Inscrutable as is the mystery of that Sphinx of the Nile,
the old religion of Egypt, we can yet trace some phases of its secret. Its
reverence for organization appears in the practice of embalming. The
bodies of men and of animals seemed to it to be divine. Even vegetable
organization had something sacred in it: "O holy nation," said the Roman
satirist, "whose gods grow in gardens!" That plastic force of nature which
appears in organic life and growth made up, in various forms, as we shall
see in the proper place, the Egyptian Pantheon. The life-force of nature
became divided into the three groups of gods, the highest of which
represented its largest generalizations. Kneph, Neith, Sevech, Pascht, are
symbols, according to Lepsius, of the World-Spirit, the World-Matter,
Space and Time. Each circle of the gods shows us some working of the
mysterious powers of nature, and of its occult laws. But when we come to
Greece, these personified laws turn into men. Everything in the Greek
Pantheon is human. All human tendencies appear transfigured into glowing
forms of light on Mount Olympus. The gods of Egypt are powers and laws;
those of Greece are persons.

The opposite tendencies of these antagonist forms of piety appear in the
development of Egyptian and Hellenic life. The gods of Egypt were
mysteries too far removed from the popular apprehension to be objects of
worship; and so religion in Egypt became priestcraft. In Greece, on the
other hand, the gods were too familiar, too near to the people, to be
worshipped with any real reverence. Partaking in all human faults and
vices, it must sooner or later come to pass that familiarity would breed
contempt. And as the religion of Egypt perished from being kept away from
the people, as an esoteric system in the hands of priests, that of Greece,
in which there was no priesthood as an order, came to an end because the
gods ceased to be objects of respect at all.

* * * * *

We see, from these examples, how each of the great ethnic religions tends
to a disproportionate and excessive, because one-sided, statement of some
divine truth or law. The question then emerges at this point: "Is
Christianity also one-sided, or does it contain in itself _all_ these
truths?" Is it _teres atque rotundus_, so as to be able to meet every
natural religion with a kindred truth, and thus to supply the defects of
each from its own fulness? If it can be shown to possess this amplitude,
it at once is placed by itself in an order of its own. It is not to be
classified with the other religions, since it does not share their one
family fault. In every other instance we can touch with our finger the
weak place, the empty side. Is there any such weak side in Christianity?
It is the office of Comparative Theology to answer.

The positive side of Brahmanism we saw to be its sense of spiritual
realities. That is also fully present in Christianity. Not merely does
this appear in such New Testament texts as these: "God is spirit," "The
letter killeth, the spirit giveth life": not only does the New Testament
just graze and escape Pantheism in such passages as "From whom, and
through whom, and to whom are all things," "Who is above all, and through
all, and in us all," "In him we live and move and have our being," but the
whole history of Christianity is the record of a spiritualism almost too
excessive. It has appeared in the worship of the Church, the hymns of the
Church, the tendencies to asceticism, the depreciation of earth and man.
Christianity, therefore, fully meets Brahmanism on its positive side,
while it fulfils its negations, as we shall see hereafter, by adding as
full a recognition of man and nature.

The positive side of Buddhism is its cognition of the human soul and the
natural laws of the universe. Now, if we look into the New Testament and
into the history of the Church, we find this element also fully expressed.
It appears in all the parables and teachings of Jesus, in which man is
represented as a responsible agent, rewarded or punished according to the
exact measure of his works; receiving the government of ten or five cities
according to his stewardship. And when we look into the practical working
of Christianity we find almost an exaggerated stress laid on the duty of
saving one's soul. This excessive estimate is chiefly seen in the monastic
system of the Roman Church, and in the Calvinistic sects of Protestantism.
It also comes to light again, curiously enough, in such books as Combe's
"Constitution of Man," the theory of which is exactly the same as that of
the Buddhists; namely, that the aim of life is a prudential virtue,
consisting in wise obedience to the natural laws of the universe. Both
systems substitute prudence for Providence as the arbiter of human
destiny. But, apart from these special tendencies in Christianity, it
cannot be doubted that all Christian experience recognizes the positive
truth of Buddhism in regarding the human soul as a substantial, finite,
but progressive monad, not to be absorbed, as in Brahmanism, in the abyss
of absolute being.

The positive side of the system of Confucius is the organization of the
state on the basis of the family. The government of the emperor is
paternal government, the obedience of the subject is filial obedience.
Now, though Jesus did not for the first time call God "the Father," he
first brought men into a truly filial relation to God. The Roman Church is
organized on the family idea. The word "Pope" means the "Father"; he is
the father of the whole Church. Every bishop and every priest is also the
father of a smaller family, and all those born into the Church are its
children, as all born into a family are born sons and daughters of the
family. In Protestantism, also, society is composed of families as the
body is made up of cells. Only in China, and in Christendom, is family
life thus sacred and worshipful. In some patriarchal systems, polygamy
annuls the wife and the mother; in others the father is a despot, and the
children slaves; in other systems, the crushing authority of the state
destroys the independence of the household. Christianity alone accepts
with China the religion of family life with all its conservative elements,
while it fulfils it with the larger hope of the kingdom of heaven and
brotherhood of mankind.

This idea of the kingdom of heaven, so central in Christianity, is also
the essential motive in the religion of Zoroaster. As, in the Zend Avesta,
every man is a soldier, fighting for light or for darkness, and neutrality
is impossible; so, in the Gospel, light and good stand opposed to darkness
and evil as perpetual foes. A certain current of dualism runs through the
Christian Scriptures and the teaching of the Church. God and Satan, heaven
and hell, are the only alternatives. Every one must choose between them.
In the current theology, this dualism has been so emphasized as even to
exceed that of the Zend Avesta. The doctrine of everlasting punishment and
an everlasting hell has always been the orthodox doctrine in Christianity,
while the Zend Avesta probably, and the religion in its subsequent
development certainly, teaches universal restoration, and the ultimate
triumph of good over evil. Nevertheless, practically, in consequence of
the greater richness and fulness of Christianity, this tendency to dualism
has been neutralized by its monotheism, and evil kept subordinate; while,
in the Zend religion, the evil principle assumed such proportions as to
make it the formidable rival of good in the mind of the worshipper. Here,
as before, we may say that Christianity is able to do justice to all the
truth involved in the doctrine of evil, avoiding any superficial optimism,
and recognizing the fact that all true life must partake of the nature of
a battle.

The positive side of Egyptian religion we saw to be a recognition of the
divine element in nature, of that plastic, mysterious life which embodies
itself in all organisms. Of this view we find little stated explicitly in
the New Testament. But that the principles of Christianity contain it,
implicitly, in an undeveloped form, appears, (1.) Because Christian
monotheism differs from Jewish and Mohammedan monotheism, in recognizing
God "_in all things_" as well as God "_above all things_." (2.) Because
Christian art and literature differ from classic art and literature in the
_romantic_ element, which is exactly the sense of this mysterious life in
nature. The classic artist is a [Greek: poietes], a maker; the romantic
artist is a troubadour, a finder. The one does his work in giving form to
a dead material; the other, by seeking for its hidden life. (3.) Because
modern science is _invention_, i.e. finding. It recognizes mysteries in
nature which are to be searched into, and this search becomes a serious
religious interest with all truly scientific men. It appears to such men a
profanity to doubt or question the revelations of nature, and they believe
in its infallible inspiration quite as much as the dogmatist believes in
the infallible inspiration of Scripture, or the churchman in the
infallible inspiration of the Church. We may, therefore, say, that the
essential truth in the Egyptian system has been taken up into our modern
Christian life.

And how is it, lastly, with that opposite pole of religious thought which
blossomed out in "the fair humanities of old religion" in the wonderful
Hellenic mind? The gods of Greece were men. They were not abstract ideas,
concealing natural powers and laws. They were open as sunshine, bright as
noon, a fair company of men and women idealized and gracious, just a
little way off, a little way up. It was humanity projected upon the skies,
divine creatures of more than mortal beauty, but thrilling with human life
and human sympathies. Has Christianity anything to offer in the place of
this charming system of human gods and goddesses?

We answer that the fundamental doctrine of Christianity is the
incarnation, the word made flesh. It is God revealed in man. Under some
doctrinal type this has always been believed. The common Trinitarian
doctrine states it in a somewhat crude and illogical form. Yet somehow the
man Christ Jesus has always been seen to be the best revelation of God.
But unless there were some human element in the Deity, he could not reveal
himself so in a human life. The doctrine of the incarnation, therefore,
repeats the Mosaic statement that "man was made in the image of God."
Jewish and Mohammedan monotheism separate God entirely from the world.
Philosophic monotheism, in our day, separates God from man, by teaching
that there is nothing in common between the two by which God can be
mediated, and so makes him wholly incomprehensible. Christianity gives us
Emmanuel, God with us, equally removed from the stern despotic omnipotence
of the Semitic monotheism and the finite and imperfect humanities of
Olympus. We see God in Christ, as full of sympathy with man, God "in us
all"; and yet we see him in nature, providence, history, as "above all"
and "through all." The Roman Catholic Church has, perhaps, humanized
religion too far. For every god and goddess of Greece she has given us, on
some immortal canvas, an archangel or a saint to be adored and loved.
Instead of Apollo and the Python we have Guido's St. Michael and the
Dragon; in place of the light, airy Mercury she provides a St. Sebastian;
instead of the "untouched" Diana, some heavenly Agnes or Cecilia. The
Catholic heaven is peopled, all the way up, with beautiful human forms;
and on the upper throne we have holiness and tenderness incarnate in the
queen of heaven and her divine Son. All the Greek humanities are thus
fulfilled in the ample faith of Christendom.

By such a critical survey as we have thus sketched in mere outline it will
be seen that each of the great ethnic religions is full on one side, but
empty on the other, while Christianity is full all round. Christianity is
adapted to take their place, not because they are false, but because they
are true as far as they go. They "know in part and prophesy in part; but
when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be
done away."

Sec. 8. Comparative Theology will probably show that Ethnic Religions are
arrested, or degenerate, and will come to an End, while the Catholic
Religion is capable of a progressive Development.

The religions of Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, have come to an end; having
shared the fate of the national civilization of which each was a part. The
religions of China, Islam, Buddha, and Judaea have all been arrested, and
remain unchanged and seemingly unchangeable. Like great vessels anchored
in a stream, the current of time flows past them, and each year they are
further behind the spirit of the age, and less in harmony with its
demands. Christianity alone, of all human religions, seems to possess the
power of keeping abreast with the advancing civilization of the world. As
the child's soul grows with his body, so that when he becomes a man it is
a man's soul and not a child's, so the Gospel of Jesus continues the soul
of all human culture. It continually drops its old forms and takes new
ones. It passed out of its Jewish body under the guidance of Paul. In a
speculative age it unfolded into creeds and systems. In a worshipping age
it developed ceremonies and a ritual. When the fall of Rome left Europe
without unity or centre, it gave it an organization and order through the
Papacy. When the Papacy became a tyranny, and the Renaissance called for
free thought, it suddenly put forth Protestantism, as the tree by the
water-side sends forth its shoots in due season. Protestantism, free as
air, opens out into the various sects, each taking hold of some human
need; Lutheranism, Calvinism, Methodism, Swedenborgianism, or Rationalism.
Christianity blossoms out into modern science, literature, art,--children
who indeed often forget their mother, and are ignorant of their source,
but which are still fed from her breasts and partake of her life.
Christianity, the spirit of faith, hope, and love, is the deep fountain of
modern civilization. Its inventions are for the many, not for the few. Its
science is not hoarded, but diffused. It elevates the masses, who
everywhere else have been trampled down. The friend of the people, it
tends to free schools, a free press, a free government, the abolition of
slavery, war, vice, and the melioration of society. We cannot, indeed,
here _prove_ that Christianity is the cause of these features peculiar to
modern life; but we find it everywhere associated with them, and so we can
say that it only, of all the religions of mankind, has been capable of
accompanying man in his progress from evil to good, from good to better.

We have merely suggested some of the results to which the study of
Comparative Theology may lead us. They will appear more fully as we
proceed in our examination of the religions, and subsequently in their
comparison. This introductory chapter has been designed as a sketch of the
course which the work will take. When we have completed our survey, the
results to which we hope to arrive will be these, if we succeed in what we
have undertaken:--

1. All the great religions of the world, except Christianity and
Mohammedanism, are ethnic religions, or religions limited to a single
nation or race. Christianity alone (including Mohammedanism and Judaism,
which are its temporary and local forms) is the religion of all races.

2. Every ethnic religion has its positive and negative side. Its positive
side is that which holds some vital truth; its negative side is the
absence of some other essential truth. Every such religion is true and
providential, but each limited and imperfect.

3. Christianity alone is a [Greek: plaeroma], or a fulness of
truth, not coming to destroy but to fulfil the previous religions; but
being capable of replacing them by teaching all the truth they have
taught, and supplying that which they have omitted.

4. Christianity, being not a system but a life, not a creed or a form, but
a spirit, is able to meet all the changing wants of an advancing
civilization by new developments and adaptations, constantly feeding the
life of man at its roots by fresh supplies of faith in God and faith in
man.

Chapter II.

Confucius and the Chinese, or the Prose of Asia.

Sec. 1. Peculiarities of Chinese Civilization.
Sec. 2. Chinese Government based on Education. Civil-Service Examinations.
Sec. 3. Life and Character of Confucius.
Sec. 4. Philosophy and subsequent Development of Confucianism.
Sec. 5. Lao-tse and Tao-ism.
Sec. 6. Religious Character of the "Kings."
Sec. 7. Confucius and Christianity. Character of the Chinese.
Sec. 8. The Tae-ping Insurrection. NOTE. The Nestorian Inscription in China
of the Eighth Century.

Sec. 1. Peculiarities of Chinese Civilization.

In qualifying the Chinese mind as prosaic, and in calling the writings of
Confucius and his successors _prose_, we intend no disrespect to either.
Prose is as good as poetry. But we mean to indicate the point of view from
which the study of the Chinese teachers should be approached. Accustomed
to regard the East as the land of imagination; reading in our childhood
the wild romances of Arabia; passing, in the poetry of Persia, into an
atmosphere of tender and entrancing song; then, as we go farther East into
India, encountering the vast epics of the Maha-Bharata and the
Ramayana;--we might naturally expect to find in far Cathay a still wilder
flight of the Asiatic Muse. Not at all. We drop at once from unbridled
romance into the most colorless prose. Another race comes to us, which
seems to have no affinity with Asia, as we have been accustomed to think
of Asia. No more aspiration, no flights of fancy, but the worship of
order, decency, propriety, and peaceful commonplaces. As the people, so
the priests. The works of Confucius and his commentators are as level as
the valley of their great river, the Yang-tse-kiang, which the tide
ascends for four hundred miles. All in these writings is calm, serious,
and moral They assume that all men desire to be made better, and will
take the trouble to find out how they can be made so. It is not thought
necessary to entice them into goodness by the attractions of eloquence,
the charm of imagery, or the fascinations of a brilliant wit. These
philosophers have a Quaker style, a dress of plain drab, used only for
clothing the thought, not at all for its ornament.

And surely we ought not to ask for any other attraction than the subject
itself, in order to find interest in China and its teachers. The Chinese
Empire, which contains more than five millions of square miles, or twice
the area of the United States, has a population of five hundred millions,
or half the number of the human beings inhabiting the globe. China proper,
inhabited by the Chinese, is half as large as Europe, and contains about
three hundred and sixty millions of inhabitants. There are eighteen
provinces in China, many of which contain, singly, more inhabitants than
some of the great states of Europe. But on many other accounts this nation
is deeply interesting.

China is the type of permanence in the world. To say that it is older than
any other _existing_ nation is saying very little. Herodotus, who has been
called the Father of History, travelled in Egypt about 450 B.C. He studied
its monuments, bearing the names of kings who were as distant from his
time as he is from ours,--monuments which even then belonged to a gray
antiquity. But the kings who erected those monuments were possibly
posterior to the founders of the Chinese Empire. Porcelain vessels, with
Chinese mottoes on them, have been found in those ancient tombs, in shape,
material, and appearance precisely like those which are made in China
to-day; and Rosellini believes them to have been imported from China by
kings contemporary with Moses, or before him. This nation and its
institutions have outlasted everything. The ancient Bactrian and Assyrian
kingdoms, the Persian monarchy, Greece and Rome, have all risen,
flourished, and fallen,--and China continues still the same. The dynasty
has been occasionally changed; but the laws, customs, institutions, all
that makes national life, have continued. The authentic history of China
commences some two thousand years before Christ, and a thousand years in
this history is like a century in that of any other people. The oral
language of China has continued the same that it is now for thirty
centuries. The great wall bounding the empire on the north, which is
twelve hundred and forty miles long and twenty feet high, with towers
every few hundred yards,--which crosses mountain ridges, descends into
valleys, and is carried over rivers on arches,--was built two hundred
years before Christ, probably to repel those fierce tribes who, after
ineffectual attempts to conquer China, travelled westward till they
appeared on the borders of Europe five hundred years later, and, under the
name of Huns, assisted in the downfall of the Roman Empire. All China was
intersected with canals at a period when none existed in Europe. The great
canal, like the great wall, is unrivalled by any similar existing work. It
is twice the length of the Erie Canal, is from two hundred to a thousand
feet wide, and has enormous banks built of solid granite along a great
part of its course. One of the important mechanical inventions of modern
Europe is the Artesian well. That sunk at Grenelle, in France, was long
supposed to be the deepest in the world, going down eighteen hundred feet.
One at St. Louis, in the United States, has since been drilled to a depth,
as has recently been stated, of about four thousand.[9] But in China these
wells are found by tens of thousands, sunk at very remote periods to
obtain salt water. The method used by the Chinese from immemorial time has
recently been adopted instead of our own as being the most simple and
economical. The Chinese have been long acquainted with the circulation of
the blood; they inoculated for the small-pox in the ninth century; and
about the same time they invented printing. Their bronze money was made as
early as 1100 B.C., and its form has not been changed since the beginning
of the Christian era. The mariner's compass, gunpowder, and the art of
printing were made known to Europe through stories told by missionaries
returning from Asia. These missionaries, coasting the shores of the
Celestial Empire in Chinese junks, saw a little box containing a
magnetized needle, called Ting-nan-Tchen, or "needle which points to the
south." They also noticed terrible machines used by the armies in China
called Ho-pao or fire-guns, into which was put an inflammable powder,
which produced a noise like thunder and projected stones and pieces of
iron with irresistible force.