Auld lang syne. Second series : $b My Indian friendsMüller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
History
Auld lang syne. Second series : $b My Indian friends
Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
India; Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max), 1823-1900 -- Friends and associates
I should never have understood the real motives and the true objects of
these Indian reformers but for my personal intercourse with Dvârkanâth,
years ago, and more recently with Keshub Chunder Sen. Though I did not
know Rammohun Roy personally, I knew several of his friends who had
known him at Bristol, and though I had no personal intercourse with
Dayânanda, I learnt something of him also from some of his personal
friends and followers. Still, we want to know a great deal more of the
chief actors in a reformation which affects a far larger number of human
beings than did the Reformation when it reinvigorated the whole of
Europe in the sixteenth century. Some of the questions now being
agitated in India are just the same as the questions which led in the
end to the reformation of our own Church. If with us the chief question
was that of the authority of the Bible replacing that of Pope and
Councils, with them it is the authority of the Vedas. And if it was the
first printed edition of the Greek New Testament by Erasmus that gave
the strongest impulse to our Reformation, it was the first printed
edition of the Veda that gave the most powerful incentive and the
strongest weapon to the founders of the Brâhma-Samâj in India. Let us
hope that India may be spared a Thirty Years’ War before it can
consolidate the work so courageously begun by Rammohun Roy, and so
valiantly carried on by my departed friend, Keshub Chunder Sen.
It may very naturally be asked, but what is to become of the religion of
India, and more particularly of the religion of Keshub Chunder Sen and
his friends and followers, after the very foundation of their ancient
faith has been withdrawn, or, at all events, has been deprived of its
sacred and infallible character? What would become of us if, say, by the
discovery of ancient papyri in Egypt, it were suddenly placed beyond the
reach of reasonable doubt that the Old and the New Testaments had been
composed by some well-known Rabbi or philosopher in Egypt? Keshub
Chunder Sen himself might have thought that all was gained after the
heavy incubus of the Vedas had once been removed from his conscience;
but some even of his best friends thought, not unnaturally, that all was
lost. The idea that whatever truth was contained in the Vedas remained
the same, whether with or without supernatural credentials, and that its
acceptance without any such credentials required even a greater amount
of honest conviction or faith than its acceptance on the ground of an
assurance of its superhuman authorship, and that assurance given by
human individuals like ourselves, seems never to have been entertained
by the former believers in the Veda. To most of us the Bible would
probably remain the same, whoever might be proved to have written it.
But it was not so, as far as I can see, with the members of the
Brâhma-Samâj. And yet it was felt that their Samâj or Church, if it was
to strike root, required some kind of sacred code after the momentous
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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