And Who Will Say That Their Conservatism Has Not Been
Effectual?
"Assuredly," says a French translator, speaking of
the antiquity and durability of the Chinese and Indian nations,
and of the wisdom of their legislators, "there are there some
vestiges of the eternal laws which govern the world."
Christianity, on the other hand, is humane, practical, and, in a
large sense, radical. So many years and ages of the gods those
Eastern sages sat contemplating Brahm, uttering in silence the
mystic "Om," being absorbed into the essence of the Supreme
Being, never going out of themselves, but subsiding farther and
deeper within; so infinitely wise, yet infinitely stagnant;
until, at last, in that same Asia, but in the western part of it,
appeared a youth, wholly unforetold by them, - not being absorbed
into Brahm, but bringing Brahm down to earth and to mankind; in
whom Brahm had awaked from his long sleep, and exerted himself,
and the day began, - a new avatar. The Brahman had never thought
to be a brother of mankind as well as a child of God. Christ is
the prince of Reformers and Radicals. Many expressions in the
New Testament come naturally to the lips of all Protestants, and
it furnishes the most pregnant and practical texts. There is no
harmless dreaming, no wise speculation in it, but everywhere a
substratum of good sense. It never _reflects_, but it _repents_.
There is no poetry in it, we may say nothing regarded in the
light of beauty merely, but moral truth is its object. All
mortals are convicted by its conscience.
The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality; the best
of the Hindo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality. The reader
is nowhere raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or _rarer_
region of thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta. Warren Hastings, in
his sensible letter recommending the translation of this book to
the Chairman of the East India Company, declares the original to
be "of a sublimity of conception, reasoning, and diction almost
unequalled," and that the writings of the Indian philosophers
"will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long
ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of
wealth and power are lost to remembrance." It is unquestionably
one of the noblest and most sacred scriptures which have come
down to us. Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of
their topics, even more than by the manner in which they are
treated. The Oriental philosophy approaches, easily, loftier
themes than the modern aspires to; and no wonder if it sometimes
prattle about them. _It_ only assigns their due rank respectively
to Action and Contemplation, or rather does full justice to the
latter. Western philosophers have not conceived of the
significance of Contemplation in their sense. Speaking of the
spiritual discipline to which the Brahmans subjected themselves,
and the wonderful power of abstraction to which they attained,
instances of which had come under his notice, Hastings says:
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