xiv PREFATORY REMARKS. mindless service of the idolater; but it never can exalt the man,- —on the contrary, it dwarfs him. If the intellect therefore of India be, according to Mr. Buyers, in his deeplyinteresting "Recollections of Northern India," ethnographically Caucasian, formed on the highest type of thought, idolatry is crushing it, drugging by error into impotence and sleep that which requires only the living power-the quickening touch that makes the Western world-and Britain especially, formed in the same model, and belonging to the same physiological tribe-the moving mind of the earth! Give India Christianity, —and thought that now only dreams, or wastes itself in the fantasies of image worship, or displays its force in rude and momentary action, is gifted with steady, heroic, happy energy! The death of Hindu idolatry is the resurrection of Hindu understanding! When I urge this, let me not be supposed to advocate rash measures or political plans for destroying idolatry. I protest with equal firmness against Government patronage of, and Government opposition to idol worship. I am no idolater, nor am I an iconoclast. Break the image, and you do not terminate its worship. Nay, the fragment, or the fragments rudely joined, may, like a cracked Oriental cup, become more precious than a new one. Awe for the entire, untouched god, may be tinged with pity for the broken one. The destruction of the idol, and the overthrow of idolatry, are not identical. To expel the darkness, admit the light, is Lord Bacon's principle. To demolish the idol, exalt Christ, was the experience of Polynesia. Fill the heart of the Hindu with Christ, and Juggernant is no more,—his history a lie, and his image a barbarous and monstrous relic of darkness and licentiousness. The sword and idolatry give place to a more recent theory PREFATORY REMARKS. XV the Hindu and the schoolmaster, — -India and education and that, in almost any phase, is an improvement on its predecessors. Whatever shakes the understanding from error may prepare it for truth. The weeding out of the patch of a desert may prepare the spot for a garden. But it may not. The same nook may be overrun with other weeds. Above all, it must be so, if the germs of true and healthy vegetation are systematically excluded. It can be made a garden only by sowing garden seeds. Every reader can see the point of analogy. Adopt the governmental system, and teach these Hindu youths astronomy; and before the Newtonian philosophy, whose theory is not more stern than its poetry is sublime, the astronomic science of Hinduism falls. But that science is essential to the religion of Hinduism; it is integral; it is part of it; and with its overthrow crumbles the whole theology built up with it. I cannot imagine a graver question than this,-What shall occupy its place? You have the ruin― the ground crowded with the fragments of a fallen superstructure. What is to rise on it? Man must have something real or imaginary on which to rest. Banish Hinduism, or Muhammadanism, still he pants and gasps after an object. Infidel education has set him loose-created desires without furnishing a central and centralizing object-annihilated the past without unfolding the future undeified his gods, and presented no other,—in a word, left him the victim of pantheistic fancy, or of heartless atheism. Such education is imperfect; it needs a higher element. science the temples of superstition. be erected by truth, through Christ alone. The You may shake by eternal temple can Impart the largest amount of knowledge to India; stir as much as you may its stagnant waters,—and it is well to see their ripple: but that xvi PREFATORY REMARKS. alone which can heal them, and make them vivifying, is a branch, it may be a twig, or even a leaf from the tree of life! t are they doing Popery never India and the Crucifix are terms suggestive of another order of influence to elevate the country. Rome, indeed, for years has been working there. Where does it not? In the growing empires of the East, or the Antipodes, it aims after power; but in Europe, with its usual craft, it diverts the mind from its large foreign projects, by stirring up more petty, but more absorbing, because domestic controversies. Romanism is active now; its Indian ecclesiastical staff is not less than eight or nine hundred bishops and priests. And what have they done for the heathen? with Protestant missionaries and the changes; and they who know its past know-I had almost said intuitively-its present, and, prophetically, its future. An old expression graphically pourtrays the converts and the system,- "Heathenized Christianity." One might dispute the definition, and ask,-Is this even Christianity heathenized ?— at least the result of its wretched form has been not even to widen the line of demarcation between Christianity and idolatry. The history of this system is the progessive substitution of one error for another,—I will not say, of one error equally and universally as gross as that which it supersedes; but still of an error that degrades Christ and imperils souls. With a natural antipathy, Romanism in the land of idolatry or Muhammadanism is the bitterest foe of evangelical truth;— the next in the scale of enmity being the half-fledged AngloCatholicism of Calcutta, whose supercilious contempt of evangelical missionaries inversely measures the dignity of their own character. One thing is clear, from the history of all PREFATORY REMARKS. xvii Romish propagandism in relation to heathenism,—the latter may- the former cannot tolerate us. Rome hates Calvary more than Mecca does. Let any one examine the life of Schultze, or even survey Popish movements at the present time, and this fact will be fully confirmed,—that Protestantism may anticipate a fiercer conflict with the Crucifix than the Crescent. Amid the certain failure of these agencies to elevate India, to evolve its resources, to educate its mind, to consecrate its heart, we are thrown on the influence which never has failed in such designs-INDIA AND THE GOSPEL: not the gospel reduced into a dry formalism, frittered away into meaningless ceremonies, associated with the feuds of sectarianism, or incorporated with the errors of the superstition it professes to assail, and thus ingratiating itself with the minds it seeks to win; but the spiritual, unsophisticated, harmonizing, apostolic truth that triumphed in Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. Let this be the watchword of the Church, firmly and faithfully uttered, and urging on its members into holy action, and India becomes part of THE EMPIRE OF CHRIST, and under His sway more closely and lastingly associated with Britain, by the affinities and sympathy of the Christian brotherhood, than by the mere power of political connection or martial subjugation. Deeply impressed with these views, and painfully aware of the formidable nature of the obstacles to their realization, in the largeness of the field to which they relate, and the swarming almost unassailable masses of Hindustan;—in the rooted prejudices of the natives in the different provinces, their idolatrous rites and sacrifices, so severe and self-denying, and yet so exemplary to the Christian,-for though error to us, idol xviii PREFATORY REMARKS. atry is truth to them;-in the insidious perseverance of Romish propagandism;—in the immorality of too many European residents; and in the withering influence of the climate upon the constitution of our European agents;-obstacles these, smiting the timid into the inaction of despair, but rousing the courageous into dauntless and unceasing exertion;—I am conscious, at the same time, that the gospel can conquer these frowning and apparently insurmountable difficulties, and the gospel alone can. I therefore most cordially recommend this volume to the British churches, with the earnest prayer that it may stimulate them into fervent and sustained zeal to subdue India to Messiah, by the Word of truth and the Spirit of power! THOMAS ARCHER. April, 1850. |