Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative TheologyClarke, James Freeman
Islamic
Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative Theology
Clarke, James Freeman
Christianity and other religions; Religions
Having thus attempted, in the space we can here use, to give an account of
Brahmanism, we close by showing its special relation as a system of
thought to Christianity.
Brahmanism teaches the truth of the reality of spirit, and that spirit is
infinite, absolute, perfect, one; that it is the substance underlying all
existence. Brahmanism glows through and through with this spirituality.
Its literature, no less than its theology, teaches it. It is in the dramas
of Calidasa, as well as in the sublime strains of the Bhagavat-gita.
Something divine is present in all nature and all life,--
"Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air."
Now, with this Christianity is in fullest agreement. We have such passages
in the Scripture as these: "God is a Spirit"; "God is love; whoso dwelleth
in love dwelleth in God, and God in him"; "In him we live, and move, and
have our being"; "He is above all, and through all, and in us all." But
beside these texts, which strike the key-note of the music which was to
come after, there are divine strains of spiritualism, of God all in all,
which come through a long chain of teachers of the Church, sounding on in
the Confessions of Augustine, the prayers of Thomas Aquinas, Anselm,
Bonaventura, St. Bernard, through the Latin hymns of the Middle Ages, and
develop themselves at last in what is called romantic art and romantic
song. A Gothic cathedral like Antwerp or Strasburg,--what is it but a
striving upward of the soul to lose itself in God? A symphony of
Beethoven,--what is it but the same unbounded longing and striving toward
the Infinite and Eternal? The poetry of Wordsworth, of Goethe, Schiller,
Dante, Byron, Victor Hugo, Manzoni, all partake of the same element. It is
opposed to classic art and classic poetry in this, that instead of limits,
it seeks the unlimited; that is, it believes in spirit, which alone is the
unlimited; the _in_finite, that which _is,_ not that which appears; the
_essence_ of things, not their _ex_istence or outwardness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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