Pioneers and Founders: or, Recent Workers in the Mission fieldYonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
History
Pioneers and Founders: or, Recent Workers in the Mission field
Yonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
Missionaries
The man seems to have been one of those of whom there are now only too
many in India, who have thrown off their old superstitions only to
believe in nothing, save the existence of a Supreme Being, and who fancy
that all other religions can be simplified into the like. This is the
class that has, for the seventy years during which Christianity has been
preached in earnest, been the alternate hope and anxiety of the
missionary; intellectually renouncing their own paganism, but withheld by
the prejudices of their families from giving up the heathenish customs of
caste; admiring divine morality, but not perceiving the inability of man
to attain the standard; and refusing to accept the mysteries in the
supernatural portion of Revelation. Such was probably Serfojee; such was
the celebrated Brahmin Ram Mohun Roy, with whom Bishop Middleton had much
discussion, and of whom he had at one time many hopes, a man of very
remarkable powers of mind and clear practical intelligence. Roy's
endeavour at first was to purify the native forms of religion, and,
recurring to the Vedas, to find a high philosophy in them; but he and the
friends he gathered round him soon became convinced that these contained
no system of reasonable theology, still less of morality, and they then
constructed for themselves a theory culled from Christianity, but
rejecting whatever did not approve itself to their intellect, in especial
the holy mysteries regarding the nature of the Godhead and the
Incarnation of our Lord. This teaching, called Brahmoism, from Brahma,
the purest and highest of Hindoo divinities, is, under another form, the
Neo-Platonism of the Greeks, or the Soofeeism of the Persians. There was
even the germ of it in the grotesque medicine-man encountered by David
Brainerd. It is the form of opposition which the spirit of evil always
stirs up, wherever the natural character is elevated enough to appreciate
the beauty of Christian morality. It only prevails where there are
refined and cultivated men, afraid of all belief in the supernatural, as
a humbling of their intellect to superstition; and just at present a form
of it is very prevalent in India, owing to the amount of education which
the natives receive, which uproots the old belief, but does not always
implant the new. Whether it will become a stepping-stone to
Christianity, or whether it has substance to become a separate sect,
remains to be proved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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