538 THE ACHARYA'S REPUGNANCE TO CHANGE. But even if many of you understand our higher speculations, (which I have often doubted,) yet your authority in religion is inferior to the Divine. While then we are willing to learn from you, and to co-operate in what is good, without denying that perhaps Christianity may be better for you, we still should not feel justified in surrendering our own religion. So that when you refuse the name of Christian to all who do not openly give in their names to Christ, and accept His discipleship together with its benefits by means of the sacraments, I confess myself not quite prepared for such a transfer of allegiance. We too have our religious Bath; and we have the Sastras, so long considered sacred, if not actually the breath of Brahma's mouth ; and on these we think it safest to rely."

"But my dear and venerable friend,” replied Blancombe, "when you speak of reliance on the Sástras, upon which of them do you mean? For we have already seen, that their different parts neither agree with each other, nor the whole with histories of which we are most assured elsewhere. All our arguments on that head would appear clearer to you, if you had been in the habit of valuing history, as an accurate record of facts and characters and times. But when you suffer imagination to stretch over from the province of song into that of story, and are so careless of chronology that you seem to put thousands of years off or on at pleasure, and hardly a single mark of time can be fixed in India until we have foreign help, you can neither have authority on questions of historical evidence, nor appreciate it from others. Hence I am not sanguine of your being able to see all the weakness of your position, until some systematic education shall have taught you to distinguish periods and persons, instead of throwing over all alike a haze of indistinct antiquity. Yet it can hardly have escaped you, that we found the Vedas, the laws, the epic poems, and the Puránas, to differ in time, and in their characters. As the voices of infancy, of childhood, and of various stages of manhood differ, so are these expressions of the mind of your race the voices of different stages

YET FAILURE OF HINDÚ LITERATURE.

539

of society. You cannot adopt strictly as your religious code any one portion of your literature, without doing violence to some of the rest; still less combine them all, without endless inconsistencies. Such a variety would present no real difficulty to a faith which acknowledged a law of reason or of truth, higher than the books, and of which they were only instruments or expressions. Nor would it hurt a religion which should bring men to the living God, and make His unwritten will their law, and the perpetual indwelling of His Holy Spirit the means of teaching it to wise and simple, while yet the expression of like teaching of old might retain its sacredness and value. No variety of stages, or discrepancy of views, or frailty of agents, or humanity of narrative, need trench upon the higher principles of truth, holiness, freedom, conscientiousness, and love, which, with God their Author and Upholder, would be the special subject-matter of the faith, and from which all those supposed difficulties stand entirely on one side. But such variety is at once fatal to any claim of immutable authority for a body of books, on the score of a primeval communication of them with preternatural, or rather unnatural, infallibility. The two things are mutually destructive; for the variety has growth; but the claim presupposes immoveableness. Your Hindú religion really has grown; for we have traced some of its stages; so that to represent it as an original fabric divinely instituted, and to congeal accordingly (as you would, if circumstances permitted you,) all society into immobility, is to contradict your own sacred records, and to belie a course of Divine government, to which the Sástras in their way bear witness. I am the more bound to press this contradiction upon you, in proportion as any of you may urge the authority of the Sástras against better principles which God may breathe into the minds of your people. If any men should be outgrowing idolatry, or ashamed of licentious festival or worship, and yet be repressed by appeal to books said to contain an immutable revelation, we cannot too earnestly say that such claim of immutability has broken down. All your

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history, and your Sástras themselves contradict it. Even in the Vedas themselves are signs of growth, and of humanity. Such books, then, have no Divine authority as against any better lessons which God may teach us through conscience, or by His better breathing. Yet I doubt not, that the God of the spirits of all flesh may have put good thoughts in the minds of many of your people; for His Spirit is, as Christ has taught us, like the wind which bloweth where it listeth. So, if He has given you good hope of eternal life, I would not weaken, but rather bid you embrace it. But yet if such hope is clouded by a dread of degrading transmigrations, or by the mixture of fanciful dreams, or perhaps rendered less wholesome by a notion that it can be purchased by penances which are not acceptable to the God of our lives, I would make it clearer by bringing you to Him who gives it freely, and for ever. As to your question, whether such a doctrine was not taught earlier among the Hindús than among the Hebrews, I answer that the want of fixed data in your history renders it difficult to discuss such a claim fairly, and also impossible for you to substantiate it. You cannot tell how much in your later developments may have been imported indirectly from Christian sources. Nor does it much concern us, whether that knowledge of the Divine plan which the Hebrews had only as a preparation for something better, was more or less distinct. But please to notice, that there is not any ground for supposing the hope of life eternal to have formed part of the earliest Vedic religion; and when such a hope does appear, it is only as a hope, or as an instinct amounting perhaps to a prophecy, and as a speculation favoured perhaps by the highest reason, but as nothing more. No wonder that such a hope appears in strangely bewildered forms, and is mixed up with speculations which seem visionary dreams, or have at best no certain ground. Connected with this vagueness is the sad fluctuation in your thoughts of the supreme Deity, who ap

See Note, above, p. 295, or Grant's Bampton Lectures.

THE GOSPEL A FULFILMENT TO HEBREWS AND TO GENTILES. 541

pears now as the visible sky, or as the storm, or fire, or some other creature, and then becomes a cold abstraction, and is again one, or all, or none, of many conflicting deifications, an idol perhaps for the crowd, and a vague spiritualisation of visible nature for the few. In short, you have a lively picture of the searching instincts and weary wanderings of the human mind in every direction, rather than a fulfilment of its highest hope: whereas among the Hebrews, not through any special merit, but because God made them His national apostles to mankind, we have in the Old Testament one Eternal God, distinct from the creature, yet friendly and akin to men, who having given life is able to renew it, and whose kingdom is an everlasting one throughout all generations. Then in the New Testament we have the Son of God made man, reconciling together those whom sin had divided, and not speculating about eternal life, or hoping it, but giving it as a free gift out of His Father's eternal purpose, and manifesting His power to do so, which is our triumph, in His own person, as He had also shared our humiliation and sorrow. The creature, says one of His apostles, is not willingly subject to vanity, but has a hope of being delivered. Such a hope perchance you have; but it is Christ who brings us the deliverance, and gives us the gift. Might I not then say, your prophecies, or at least your desires, are fulfilled in Him? Here is a difference. from anything elsewhere, which shews that we are not offering a mere rival creed, but proclaiming the good news from God of that gift of eternal life in His dear Son, which you so earnestly seek. But He who thus brings the gift, has the best right to decide in what language it shall be described. We humbly use those terms respecting it, which we have learned from the resurrection of our Lord. Since He thus taught us them, we think them the fittest; and although the admitted imperfection of our knowledge as to the future life may render speculation on this point more innocently reconcilable with our faith than it would be on plainer ones, yet experience shews, that as no religion gives so tangible a pledge of immortality as the Christian, so no

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CHRISTIAN PHRASEOLOGY JUSTIFIED.

language brings home the hope of it to mankind so definitely as the Christian, and there is at least no proof that, consisting as we do of body and soul in this life, we may not have an analogous duality in the life to come. Rather many speculations imply that we must. So that the Christian language of the resurrection is at least the fittest expression of immortality for time, and it may turn out the truest for eternity. We do not therefore acknowledge, that what you call imperfections in our doctrine are really so, even if they should be in some respects parables. For whatever subtleties may be thought about time and space, nor would I deny that all such limitations seem to fall away from the purest Intelligence, and therefore from things of faith and of the soul, when clearly apprehended,—yet in such a framework our human conceptions are almost necessarily cast, and we gain little for truth as applicable to life, by attempting to transcend them. Rather perhaps there may be danger to some of losing themselves by such a process in an ocean of vagueness. But here surely you should remember what you said of knowledge being Divine. God who gives us the life, has also taught us how to describe it. He best knows how to regulate our modes of thinking on earth, though it is not impossible that His gifts in heaven may exceed all we can think, as well as ask. Again, as our thankfulness for the clear glimpse He has given us of a light whose fulness transcends our present vision, teaches humility in thought and speech, so should it inspire faithfulness in act. Had you known the gift of God, and who Christ is that offers you redemption, and Himself, and in Himself life, you would not fear or hesitate to enrol yourself under His banner, but rather bless and thank Him for inviting you, and throw aside whatever scruples hold you back from the truth, and the new world into which you might enter. Nor if you thought worthily of God, would any distinctions of castes of men appear to you great as in His sight; nor if you knew His infinite love, would you despair, as you seem to do, of His giving to all the truth and the life. No scruples, then,