A Tour of the Missions: Observations and ConclusionsStrong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
A Tour of the Missions: Observations and Conclusions
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
East Asia -- Description and travel; Missions
There are signs of an approaching reformation in India which will
supplement its intellectual renaissance. Just as the growing power of
Christianity in the second and third centuries of our era was shown by
the competition of new and imitative religions like that of Mithra, and
by spasmodic attempts on the part of the old heathenism to interpret
its mythology symbolically and to reform its moral practice; just as the
growing power of the gospel in the fifteenth century led the Roman
Church to slough off some of its abuses and to tolerate among its
adherents reformers before the Reformation; so in India the new learning
from the West and the missionary proclamation of the gospel have brought
about a state of religious unrest which could only be allayed by efforts
on the part of Hindus and Moslems alike to interpret their faiths more
rationally and to prove that these faiths were equal if not superior to
Christianity itself. The Brahmo-Somaj, which Ram Mohun Roy founded at
the end of the eighteenth century, largely as a result of his horror at
the murder of his sister by suttee, has led to the abolition of that
cruelty. Ram Mohun Roy sought to purge Hinduism of its corruptions by
appealing to its earlier and purer scriptures. He was the first to
establish a vernacular press in India, and, with Alexander Duff, the
first English schools. Though he did not formally profess Christianity,
he studied our Christian Scriptures, acknowledged their value and
influence, and published a book entitled "The Precepts of Jesus."
Another Hindu who exerted great influence during the half-century just
passed was Keshub Chunder Sen. He passionately adored Christ as his true
Master. Yet he was practically Unitarian, and his later years belied the
promise of his brilliant beginnings. Though a member of the
Brahmo-Somaj, he split the body in two by his violation of its
prohibition of child-marriage, and wasted his strength in attempts to
combine Western rationalism with the ecstatic fervors of the East. As
the result, the Brahmo-Somaj has declined, until in numbers and
influence it has now hardly more than five thousand adherents in all
India. Mozumdar was one of its representatives who sought to give
Oriental interpretation of Jesus, but one without ethical or saving
power. The Arya-Samaj is a more consistent effort to reform Hindu
religion by bringing it back to the purer standards of the Vedas. Swami
Dayanand was the founder of the society. He was led to renounce idolatry
by seeing a mouse eat food offered to an idol and run without hindrance
over the idol's robes and hands. Of all the reforming bodies, the
Arya-Samaj most retains the confidence of the masses in the north of
India. But its tenets are not acceptable to the educated classes of the
south, and it needs a further infusion of both science and religion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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