THE “gate that looketh toward the East,” of which Ezekiel wrote, has been to many others than the prophet the observatory
whence is seen the oncoming glory of the Eternal. A very old and very widespread
instinct is that which leads man, on entering his chamber for communion with
God, to throw open the window whose prospect is toward the East. Orientation
has a deeper meaning than our ecclesiastics fancy. The noblest form of Nature-worship
was that of which we may find traces on many a hill of England, where our fathers
gathered in the dawn of day to hail with sacred song the coming of the Sun.
As needs must be in a cosmos - a beautiful order, the core and centre of whose
physical system is a moral order - the cosmical truth enshrines an ethical
truth, and the symbolism of Nature becomes a sacrament of Spirit. Of the Light
which is “on-coming into the world,” as S. John says, it is true that “His goings forth are as the morning” - the pathway of Divine progress in humanity, an ascension of the Sun of Righteousness
toward the zenith. The history of man repeats the story of the natural order,
and “Westward the star of Empire takes its way”; civilisation and religion arising in the East, and moving thence in successive
effluences toward the West. Whither the Spirit of the Eternal led the soul
of Ezekiel, thither the same Divine Spirit has led other human souls in different
lands and at different critical epochs, to watch for signs of fresh light;
and they who have come down to their fellows with the glow of a new day on
their faces have, whether in Babylon, or Rome, or London, told the same story; “He brought me to the gate, even the gate that looketh toward the East; and behold
the glory of the God
of Israel came from the way in the East.
Once more, if men cry to the Watchers: “Watchmen, what of the night?” the answer floats down: “The morning cometh”; and the wise, in a profounder ritual than that of men, face
toward the East.
That a new flood of spiritual life must be soon due, he feels sure who has marked
well the movements of the tides of history and guessed the cycles of the stars.
The ebbing of the tide of materialistic speculation is felt beneath the feet
of them that reason well; and the sucking undertow of the social waters, in
a new wave of ethical enthusiasm, a fresh force of justice and brotherliness,
is heard by those whose ears are close to the sands of the shore. Whence is
the new tide coming on whose floods we are to float across the shallows of
the age? In every direction we see in society the evils of an excessive development
of the tendencies which are peculiar to our Western civilisation. The elements
which form our strength in the realms of thought, of feeling, and of action,
have been pushed beyond the golden mean; and the result is, as in all disproportion,
error and evil. If our human therapeutics at all shadow the divine dealings,
we might expect the correction of these disorders by the supply of the elements lacking in our own blood. The
qualities which the Western world lacks, the Eastern world holds in excess.
We might then look for the ordering by Providence of an infusion of the essence
of the East; the balm of Gilead for the wounds of England, the cordial of India
for the tire of
America.
Singular, indeed, to him who believes in no Destiny that shapes our ends, is
the re-discovery of the East by our century; the bringing of its mystic lands
from out the darkness; the establishing of close connections between the two
hemispheres; the unsealing of the sacred books of the East for the study of
the West.
Some years ago, when, being younger, I thought in my folly that I held a private
patent of expectation, I heard one of our wisest teachers of religion in this
city give me back my own dream, saying to me: “I look for a new religious impulse from the East.” And then it seemed that everyone who thought was saying with Tyndall: “Light will come again from the East.” We find ourselves, as by common instinct, standing in “the gate that looketh toward the East,” where rise, on our impatient eyes the streakings of a new and holy light, and
we
whisper: “Behold the glory of the God of Israel cometh from the
way of the East.”
Some over-hasty souls, like our famous American Theosophists, not content to
stand with the seer in the gate, have gone out into the East, to find there
the religion of the future. They are finding, I fancy, that which a friend
told me he had found for himself; when, driven away from traditional Christianity,
he had in the old world mastered the Pãli tongue, that he might search among the sources of Buddhism for the higher
light, only to come home again with the conclusion that, at least, there was
nothing there higher than the truth which is found in Christianity. What we
may reasonably expect is not the coming of a new religion from the East to
supersede Christianity, but the coming of the influences from the East to renew
and restore Christianity. Our lamps burn low, but we need not cast them away;
we should simply open them to the sacred oil from the East, which the High
Priest of the Temple is even now pouring in upon the wicks - when, lo! a new
flame in which we shall see and rejoice. Those who heard the dark-skinned Hindû Mozoomdar speak and pray in our churches, or who have more lately heard Swami
Vivekananda or Swami Abhedananda lecture must feel, as in no other way they
could have felt, that if our Western faith had aught to give them and their
countrymen, as we all believe, they have somewhat to give
us in return.
-I-
The Eastern's thought of Nature may greatly help us of the West. Do we think,
in our egotism, that we have for the first time in the history of man studied
Nature? We may draw a just rebuke from our rapidly increasing knowledge of
those wise men who, in Egypt, and Chaldea, and India, observed and pondered,
and laid the foundations of the noblest of our physical knowledges. If we fancy
that we alone of the children of earth have divined the secret order of creation,
we may learn humility as we acquaint ourselves with the wonderful divination
by which they anticipated the greatest of our later guesses. And so coming
to appreciate the patient brooding thought over the problem of the cosmic,
the slow, sure following of the trail of Nature on the part of these dark-skinned
sages, we shall be prepared to allow, more modestly, that there may be something
in their view of Nature which we may need, as we know that there is much in
our view of Nature which they need. Our Western mind is analytic, logical; breaks up Nature into bits; conquers in the
sign of the test-tube and the crucible; deals with phenomena; pursues the sequences
of physical processes; familiarises itself with the action of forces and the
methods of laws; and, in so doing, does wisely and wins our wonderfully widening
knowledge. But our very development of power is, as always, in the parsimony
of Mother Nature, at the cost of other powers. Contrast our study of Nature
with that of the son of the East. His mind is sympathetic, constructive, intuitive;
he sees the unity under all diversity; the whole in every part. He is fascinated
by the conception of the substance, the reality, lying under all phenomena.
He passes without interest through the surface-fields of law and force, and
faces this eternal mystery of being, on which all phenomena of existence play,
as the bubbles thrown up for a moment upon the surface of the everlasting stream.
We call him an idealist, a dreamer. He calls us sense-blinded materialists. His limitations are plain
to us, and our limitations are as plain to him. Each sees through one eye.
Man needs both eyes focusing on Nature to get the true light. We may learn
to credit his vision as revealing an essential part of truth, as we find his
vision to be that of the profoundest thinkers of our Western world, from Plato
down to Hegel. We will never probably turn away from our scientific vision.
That is true, as far as it goes. But we may open the other eye and correct
its one-sidedness, and see that which it alone failed to reveal. Then all our
present miserable notion of a conflict of science and religion will vanish
like a ghost of the night. It will be seen to be a spectre of the twilight.
The East knew of our theory of Evolution centuries before Spencer established
it scientifically, or Darwin applied it to man’s story, or Huxley bore down with it so aggressively on faith. It was the cardinal
doctrine of the sages of India. But those calm minds, sitting beneath the palm
trees by the sacred rivers, thought through the problem in the outer meshes
of which our hastier minds are too easily detained. Their vision of Evolution
only deepened the mystery of the universe. The fact of an orderly and gradual
development of life, through the stages of creation, held nothing of the secret
of life itself. Such a process could be only the manner of the unfolding of
the ‘somewhat’ charged with all these marvelous potencies. That ‘somewhat’ - the substance or reality standing under all phenomena - was the Infinite Mystery,
to know which was to know the secret of being. No investigation of the materialist
could discover the secret of being which gave substance to our mental forms
in their subtle phantasmagoria. Mind alone, which pondered over this mystery,
could image its being. It was mind,
intelligence.
Out
of thought’s interior sphere
These wonders rose in upper air.
Confirmed idealist as was the Hindû philosopher (I speak of the dominant school of philosophy, that which permanently
characterised India), he could speak of the material world only in terms of
mind. Evolution became the doctrine of the progressive unfolding of life through
the action of an Infinite and Eternal Spirit. It was, it is, the history of
the Divine Being. It was, it is, a religion. And this Eastern wisdom our Western
world cannot reject as an alien conception when not alone idealist philosophers
like Berkeley hold it, but savants like Huxley confess that, as between the two conceptions of idealism and materialism,
they would have to take the first theory. True, they talk of a possible third
conception, the conciliation of both; of which it will be time to speak when
the shadow of any such thought looms above the
horizon.
Our Western world, gone daft over the fascinating theory of evolution, and fancying
that in it is solved the problem of being, in terms of matter, may turn to
the sages who had divined our pet theory centuries ago, and to whom it had
become a translucent symbol of the Divine Presence and action. Our own poets
who drink of the Castalian springs of Western philosophy are those who, like
Emerson, are interpreting for us the real significance of our scientific theories
and showing us how to worship where we only thought to study. Standing in the
gate that looketh to the East, these seers behold the glory of the Lord coming
upon our
wisdom of Nature by the way of the East gate.
-II-
This insistent idealism in philosophy, which the East may have again to teach
the world, lays the basis for religion, deep, and broad, and firm. Resting
upon this basis, the Eastern mind, through its peculiar spiritual sense, opens
the world in which the soul of man communes with God. The Oriental seems to
have developed a sense which is lacking in most of us children of the West.
One sees about him in our society hosts of men, excellent, admirable, noble,
upright and conscientious, faithful in every relation of life, who appear to
have no sense by which to apprehend God. He is an abstraction to them - a reality
in which they themselves believe, but of whom they have no personal consciousness;
with whom they feel themselves to stand in no actual relation. The story of
spiritual experiences comes to them in an unknown tongue. Their conclusion
concerning such matters is fairly expressed in the common account they give
of those who speak of such experiences - “You are peculiarly constituted; you are spiritually organised.” Now, the Eastern, whatever else he possesses, has the sense of God. Religion’s home is in the East. Its power there is almost tyrannous. That power never
fails. It ebbs, but rises again, fresh and inexhaustible. The Eastern walks
amid the forms of force of which we talk so glibly, and feels God. In the sun
and the wind, in the river’s ceaseless flow and the waving of the forest’s tops, he is sensible of an awful yet gracious Presence. He hears whispers,
and catches the light of glorious garments trailing by. As in Macdonald’s charming story, he is ever surprising the gods at play. Those who have listened
to Babu Mozoomdar must have felt a singularly sweet devoutness breathing through
the rich eloquence of the speaker. Without pre-arrangement, as though it were
to him the natural conclusion of his talk with man, he is wont to finish his
address with a simple, child-like prayer to “Our Father who art in heaven”. At family prayer, in my house one morning, sitting after the custom of his
people, in his chair, he talked to God in such a way as hushed our hearts into
a new feeling of the Presence of Him in whom we live and move and have our
being. There were no petitions, but an exhalation, so to speak, of his consciousness
of the All-Father, an aroma in the spiritual atmosphere, as when the morning
sun draws from the flowers of the field the fresh fragrance in which their
life streams up toward its source. I realised then what I had been told of
him: “He lives in God.” The words of Chunder Sen concerning the Hindû gift of Yoga, the faculty of apprehending and communing with the Divine Presence
came to my mind; and I perceived how truly there was active in this race a
spiritual sense which seems numbed and dormant in our Western peoples. That
evening I turned, as he had asked me to do, to the Upanishats, “where,” said he, “breathes the early and deep Hindû consciousness of God” - and I knew afresh what a revelation there may be to us, who have so much religion
and so little living sense of God. As the Hindû spirit breathes in our spirits, we, too, shall find quickening in us this blessed
sense of God. So was I brought to “the gate that looketh toward the East,” and I beheld “the glory of the God of Israel coming from the way
of the East.”
-III-
The East will help us, through its insistent idealism and its deep abiding sense
of God, to a freshened feeling of the true nature of man. As with Nature so
with man, our Western thought tends to play upon the surface of the problem.
We are intensely busy with our studies of man’s nature, and are learning wonderful things about his organisation, truths full
of value to the race, for the lack of which the world has lain so long in sickness
of body and in superstition of mind. We are coming to know the elements out
of which we are composed, the laws of their combination, and the methods of
the working of the mysterious forces which fashion us. The human anatomy is
laid bare to our eyes, and the wonders of physiology are coming out into the
light. The puzzle of the convolutions of gray tissue which make the brain of
man is fascinating our wise men, and they cherish swelling hopes of yet guessing
the secret of the relations of mind to matter. We have traced so far the broken
links of the story of the coming into being of the human race that we have
already titled the future history of man, one day to be written, and announced
duly to the world the forthcoming book of Genesis. We have analysed the moral
nature of man and resolved it into its several elements. We have shown how our ideals of goodness have slowly formed through
man’s social necessities and clothed themselves with impressive sanctions, until
at length they stand so awfully sacred in the inner shrine of the soul, that
we bow before them in worship. And having done all this invaluable work, we
think that we have solved the problem of man; so that he can be expressed in
a chemical formula and labeled in the Museum of Natural History. Having done
all which, the East smiles in acquiescence, her eye, as in a vision, fixed
upon a ‘somewhat’ within this chemical compound, and whispers: “And God [the Eternal] formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” That which we miss in the focus of our microscopes, which casts no weight in
our balances and slips away in the fires of our crucibles, the Eastern discerns,
even as he sees through Nature to its substance, and he knows that man is,
in essence - spirit, mind. He will quite humbly receive our Western knowledge
concerning the physical constitution and the historic development of man, but
then he will return to us that deeper wisdom which reveals the inner and essential
being of man. Our crude fancies about an automaton-man will disappear, in the
acute sense quickened within us of that spiritual being which is free to will
and responsible for its action, as becometh the child made in the image of
the Eternal Spirit, the Father of our human spirits. There will come to us
the true significance and the deep reality of that ancient belief that in the
human spirit speaketh the Divine Spirit; that, as our Hindû-American seer tells us, we are “always spoken to from behind”; that truth is, as the ancient Hebrew said, the voice of God. Inspiration will
then be no theory of the scholar, but the consciousness of the faithful soul.
So again we find that “the glory of the Lord” cometh by the way of the gate whose prospect is toward
the East.
-IV-
The East will help us to a better view of Christ. Whatever the object of the
vision, the image of it on the human retina will be largely determined by the
nature and condition of the retina itself. Christianity has seen Christ, not
as he really was, but as he had appeared to its eyes. Our Western eyes have
seen him westernised, distorted in the lenses of Grecian speculation, of Roman
institutionalism, of Medieval scholasticism. To German and Scotchman, and Englishman
and American, he necessarily shapes himself as best as possible upon their
natures.
How grievously the image of Jesus has suffered in this transference, scholars
know right well. The image of Jesus which the Christian Church has framed in
its theologies is far from a counterpart of the original and real Jesus, so
far, that, were most Christians carried back into the age when He was upon
earth, and set down in His own Galilee, He might pass them, never known or
recognised. How can we ever get back to that far-off age and see Him as He
was? Simply by getting over into the position of those who today reproduce
the life and spirit of His day. In the East, time is not. Today is as yesterday,
and our century as eighteen centuries earlier. As the East now reads Him, coming
to Him in a free and natural manner - that we may be sure is the nearest approach
which we can get to a true image of Him. For Jesus was an Oriental, and only
by the Orientals can He be interpreted. A foretaste of what is before us in
this recovered view of Jesus we have already, in that touching book of our Hindû preacher, The Oriental Christ. At every touch of the Eastern hand the familiar incidents take on fresh lights,
and the story stands forth in a new and vivid realism. Renan told us, years
ago, that in Judea the story of Jesus became strangely real, and, writing in
the East, his book became, with all its faults a revelation of the actual man
who walked the land of Galilee eighteen centuries ago. We shall gain a new
sense of the veritable actuality of the Man of Nazareth, and we shall never
doubt that He was an historic personality. We shall form, as by a new sense
opened in us, a perception of what was really the meaning of the words of Him
who spake as never man spake. Luther, disputing with Zwingle, his finger on
the text - “This is my body” - closing thus every appeal of the reason against the dogma of transubstantiation,
will no longer be possible, when the East reads for us those words. The poetic
utterance of the consciousness of the man who felt Himself so completely one
with the Father that His own consciousness was, as it were, the consciousness
of God, will cease to be hard prosaic proposition for the metaphysic of the
schoolmen, and will become the plastic, palpitating words of the Eastern Mystic
whose thoughts are feelings, and whose words must therefore needs be poems.
When the Oriental comes to them he knows what was meant by them, and we must
learn of him. We may thus lose the form which we thought was our Christ - though
without the Eastern touch that is fading fast enough from our eyes - but we
shall gain a figure which we shall know to be the true Christ. And that will
be an image sweet and gracious, holy and, in the deepest sense, divine, before
which, in new passion of reasonable reverence, we shall bow most worshipfully, and from whose touch our lives shall flame
anew in sacred passion of most loyal
love.
One cannot read that Oriental Christ without a fresh sense of Jesus and of His good-spell
upon the soul.
Thus I believe, Jesus will come again to us of the Western World, and we shall
all follow Him with new abandonment of love. Let us each ask, as this Hindû asked: “Not that I might speculate about Jesus but that I might learn to do as He bids
me.” Thus as we stand in “the gate that looketh forward the East” the “glory of the Lord” cometh “from the way of the
East”.
-V-
The East will help us in many ways to better general conditions for the religious
life. Our occupation amid external activities keeps us aloof from the deep
inner life of the spirit. The multiplicity of outward affairs distracts our
minds and exhausts our energies. We are too hurried to “wait upon the Lord”. God may be in the wayside bush speaking to us, but what can we hear as we thunder
past in the ‘Lightning Express’? How shall we catch the low whispers of the still, small voice, amid the babel
of tongues of the Exchange? How, in our chronic tire, shall we climb the heights
of contemplation, where our tryst is appointed with the Eternal? We need somewhat
of the peace and quiet of those calm Easterns, who have time to pray and leisure
to think, and who know the way within the innermost recesses of the soul, where
is the Holy Place
of God.
We are oppressed with the multitudinous miseries of earth, the wretchedness and
woe of this weary world, and we turn the forces of our religious life out upon
the work of bettering society. We cannot do otherwise in our Western world,
to which Providence has given the powers for the righting of these disorders.
The establishment of the divine order in human society, the creation of the
proper social conditions for the kingdom of God, is of co-equal importance
with the inspiration of the inner personal life. But our ideals suffer in this
constraint of work that is upon us. Philanthropy and piety would together form
a heavenly pattern for our aspirations. But philanthropy without piety, philanthropy
as a substitute for inward experience, for the life hid in God - this can but
fashion a maimed and mutilated image. We measure men by their charities, not
by their holiness, and find the notes of the true church in the number of their
benevolent societies, rather than in the saintly beauty of the lives which they nourish. We condone the faults of him
who subscribes freely to our schemes of reform. We gauge the river of life
proceeding from beneath the throne of God by the power which it supplies to
our mills of reform, and value it because of the wheels it turns. Thus doing
comes to dispense with being. We think Christ came to found a society for the
organisation of soup-houses and hospitals. Ah! we greatly need the spirit of
those child-like peoples, who stand confused amid the whirl of our vast social
mechanism, valuing somewhat lightly our great charities and our brilliant reforms,
and dreaming that the kingdom of God is to come without observation; that outward
institutions and laws are to crystallise upon a society breathing the spirit
of brotherliness and love; that the world is to be lifted into righteousness
under the spell of lives all luminously good, and saved from sin by the touch
of men in whom is felt the living God. Our Western races are called to the development of earth’s resources, and, under the ancient command, to master the earth and “have dominion over it”. Thus, as we see, is the wealth produced in the division of which all may ultimately
share, and the store-houses filled from which the poorest may draw in the time
of need. Only thus is society so far advanced already beyond the civilisation
of the East that the famines, which there sweep off human beings like flies
at the touch of frost, are impossible in Christendom. But in thus being “not slothful in business” we find it hard to be “serving the Lord”; and before we are aware of it we find our devotedness to business has become
a real devotion, a worship of the Power once known as Mammon, whose altars
are in our homes and our exchanges, and on which we offer - ourselves. As every
careful, honest student of society sees and tells us, our real religion is
a worship of wealth; from which fearful apostasy our wise men see not well
how to rescue us; but from which infidelity we would soon be delivered if the
higher Eastern spirit breathed upon us its simplicity, its indifference to
material possessions, its disregard of riches and the goods that they can buy,
its respect for poverty, its sublime upliftedness above the hunger that eats
the heart out of our life, its ideals which seem to us as those of some other
world, where the question “What is he worth?” cannot be answered by inspecting a man’s bank-book, or opening his coupon-box in the Safe Deposit. The political economy
which expresses our ideals of civilisation finds it hard to fit into its order
that Son of Man who had “not where to lay His head”. His ideals it finds unreasonable; His aspirations wild, quixotic dreams. We
are told that it is impossible to live a Christian life, that to pattern our
lives upon the Master’s story would be to undo Society. And thus, our finest impulses and our most
generous aspirations, we are taught to smother; and our received theories rally
to the aid of our native selfishness, until the language of our Communion Consecration
becomes a bitter mockery, which I am sure the disciples of Christ often shrink
from repeating - “And here we offer and present unto Thee O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies,
to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto Thee.” An Order of ‘The Consecrated’ as been formed in the Brahmo Samâj; an order whose members, continuing in their daily vocations, consecrate most
of their gains to God. As we Christians hear of Hindûs doing this, we may well look around us in the Christian Church, to see where
are ‘the consecrated’ among us who follow the Christ.
Oh! for one generation of the climate of the soul in which were born all the
great enthusiasms of self-consecration; the contempt of the world which filled
the desert with anchorites and the monasteries with men vowed to poverty; the
hunger for sacrifice which inspired a buddha, and the greater than a Buddha
- Jesus Christ, our Lord. We could safely trust our Western world to set bounds
of moderation to this passion of devotion, to keep the altar on which these
heavenly fires were lighted from burning up. But oh! for the flame coming down
from heaven upon our altars!