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CHAPTER VII.

Outline of Indian Chronology.

"The Hindú passes as it were a kind of spiritual existence in ages long since gone by."-Heeren, As. Res.

"Bei den Hindú hat die Religion alle Geschichte zerstört."-Benfey, in Lassen. . WHEN Blancombe had got so far, there was a kind of halfcomplimentary assent from the greater part of the company. It seemed also to be agreed that farther inquiry should be made about religious books, with a view of either seeing whether they had valid claims on our acceptance, or how far they warranted religions which professed to be extracted from them. "But here," said Vidyáchárya, "I can go no farther. You are all going to discuss the claims of different religions, and I am already fixed. Not that I should not be glad to profit by your superior wisdom, and ready to learn anything from you. But I foresee that you are going to overlook the great source of our knowledge on the subject. Or, at least, you are going to balance other books against the four Vedas, which we know to have come from Brahmá; while it is not possible that our earthly disputations should be able to teach better than what he has inspired. If, then, you are willing to take them as the foundation of your argument, good; but otherwise, I may as well be silent." "Well, I too have a difficulty in beginning this argument," said Blancombe, "and it is of the same nature as yours, though not exactly the same thing." "What is your difficulty?" asked Sadananda. "It is a doubt," answered Blancombe, "whether we are going to begin rightly." "How so?" asked the other. 'Why," he replied, "every place, and in the same way every truth, seems to have a road leading to it, and many which lead away from it. Just, then, as a man would not reach Benares by

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For even

walking towards Seringapatam, so we are not likely to find the true religion if we look for it in an irreligious manner." “You mean in an irreligious spirit?" again asked the other. "Just so," he answered, "that is part of my meaning; for one reason why mankind so often miss the truth seems to be that they set out with some principle of falsehood in their minds; and when they have called their corrupt passion, whatever it may be, by some holy name, they think it religion." "Then you mean to say," asked Sadananda, "that we must try to purify our minds of prejudice, and to come with a sincere love of truth, though it may happen to contradict whatever we have been accustomed to believe?" "I mean that," replied Blancombe, "and something more. our past belief, if it has led us in any way to worship God, must have been to us, in some measure, a way of access to Him. Supposing, then, we should lose such a belief without opening up any better way in the course of our inquiry, there may be danger of our becoming more remote from God than before. Hence, I would hardly advise any man anywhere to enter upon intellectual speculation as to the religion which has hitherto controlled his thoughts, without earnest prayer that the eternal and unseen Being, whom we confess to be imaged by all sorts of worship, though in a distorted mirror by most of them, would either enable him to hold fast whatever is good in his present faith, or else lead him into something far better. Let the Brahman, for example, use the text of the Gayatrí, praying for the most spiritual light of the Divine Ruler to illuminate his mind; and do you in the same way entreat the Preserver of the World to preserve you from mental evil, and to purge the gaze of your soul; and let the Saugata also endeavour both to purify his intelligence, and to associate it with deep feeling of that which is most Divine about us. For not without such prayers and aspirations do I think it either safe or holy to go about criticising the objects of our faith, and comparing those of other men. But amidst all

USE OF EXTERNAL HISTORY.

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;

these, the more vividly we can fix our mind's gaze upon the certainty of a supreme Iswara who will hear and guide us, and the more clearly we can conceive of Him as the Spirit of very truth, therefore as something disengaged from all fictions, and idolatries, and compromises, the more likely we are to obtain from Him availing help. Yet this is not all. For supposing that He whom we seek should already have given, in any region of the world, a true revelation of His own being, we cannot well escape the blame of pride and negligence, if we disdain examining all the credentials of such a revelation; or if we suffer ourselves to be ignorant of the history which records it. We could not consistently pray for light, or expect to have such prayers favourably heard, unless we avail ourselves of whatever light is already given. Hence I do not see how we are to discuss the sacred records of any religion, without first laying a sound historical foundation." "But why is that so important?" asked Sadananda ; "for if the books are good they will teach us of themselves." "Perhaps they may," replied Blancombe, "if we give them an opportunity of doing so by taking them fairly in our hands. But if we set out with a prejudice that one set of books is as good as another, and read false rather than true ones, or if we accustom ourselves to say there is no more confirmation in the outward world for a Koran than a Purána, or for a Bible than a Koran, the best books in the world may then have no chance of teaching us. Hence it may be very important for us, and especially for learned inquirers, to have some knowledge of history, and not to mix all nations and generations into a confused mass, but to know what came before, and what after, and who lived in countries where sacred events are said to have happened, as well as who lived in other countries at the same time. For thus we may acquire tests of natural probability, and be able to say whether events are in themselves credible, whether the persons recording them were true witnesses, and whether any collateral testimony can

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be derived from other nations whose prepossessions may have been of another kind. So important is all this kind of external probability, that any books which do not answer such tests may fairly be suspected, or, at least, cannot be put on the same ground of credibility as books which do answer them. Especially books may become very suspicious, which are of so uncertain an origin that their date may be conjectured, without violence, to have been a thousand years earlier or later. In the same way, books in the hands of a whole people, and especially of any community extending over many nations, are, on the first look of things, less likely to have been altered, either to insert prophecies, or for any other wrong motive, than a volume in the hands of a mere priesthood; and yet if the priests were either obliged or accustomed to read and expound their volume at short intervals to the people at large, this distinction need not be so emphatic. Then, again, as to the internal contents of religious books, we have to inquire whether they agree in character with the manners of the times, and especially in narrative with the accounts given more or less by other nations as independent witnesses; for the testimony of a stranger is one of double strength. But such an inquiry can never be satisfactorily conducted, unless we have first our groundwork of history laid out as a map before us. Hence, I almost venture to say, that nations in whom the historical instinct is not strong, or who have no conscientious. and clear record of facts in their own history, can never claim to have been the depositories of a Divine revelation, at least for mankind. You see yourself, such people furnish us with no data by which we can test their books; or probably such data as they give bear record against them. Indeed, the very fact of not having been inspired with a conscientious regard to truth in recording events, may be said to put men out of the court of the nations as witnesses. Thus, if I read anywhere that a prince had brought all the earth under one umbrella,' when other authorities informed me that many independent

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kings lived even in the same country, I should be afraid that the imagination of such a writer might carry its exaggerating tendency into religion, and paint a common event as a miracle, or any mendicant faquir as a great saint. Again, if I found the ordinary teachers of any religion represented not merely as earnest and conscientious, but as gifted with superhuman infallibility, and free from the common accidents of men, I should regard any reality answering to this description as at least sufficiently rare to be unlikely, and as requiring, therefore, more than usual testimony. The same rule would apply to events so strange as not to be traceable to the ordinary links of causation in nature. For although the Saugata justly argues that the Divinity may teach men often, and I should add always, yet, if we have discovered by large induction, that the Divine method of teaching men is by providence and blessing upon experience and aspiration, we may expect that method to be maintained with some such regularity as other great processes in nature and history, except where extraordinary results may seem called for by extraordinary need, and again certified by no common witness. Moreover, such wonders, as I have before hinted, will be less probable, in proportion as they are less instructive. For instance, if a religious book should tell us of an incarnate Divinity holding up a mountain as a parasol, merely in order to protect certain Gopis* or shepherdesses from a thunder-shower, we ought in all soberness to ask whether such a story is credible; what moral lesson can it convey; or with what sort of stories is it mingled, and by what curious contemporaries attested, that we should believe a thing so much at variance with the Divine government of the world? What, indeed, should we be better for believing it?

"It is only in passing that I throw out the suggestion, if the doctrines about the Deity recorded in sacred books are very obvious, the fact of their being trivial will rather detract from their value; or, again, if they are quite contradictory to our * This is told of Crishna in the Sri Bhagavat Purána.