pertained merely to the outward life, the cruelties and wrongs to which it gave rise would at least have admitted of one all-important mitigation. The inflated pride of Brahma, the helplessness of the pariah, the fatalistic indifference of all classes alike would have been modified by the fact that there was a limit beyond which social inequalities could never penetrate. States of society there have been, such as medieval feudalism, as has been remarked, so far analogous to caste, that in them the social position and calling of individuals were practically determined by birth, and escape from a lowly or degrading occupation or station in life was almost impossible. But in these cases religion has formed the supreme corrective of social inequalities. In the instance just specified there was, indeed, an order or caste of ecclesiastics separated from the laity, but the separation was not absolute. Even as respects outward rank and dignity, religion constituted a principle of equalisation, inasmuch as admission to holy orders was possible to all, and the highest dignities of the spiritual order were attainable by the son of the peasant alike with the son of the peer. But the power of religion to modify outward inequalities goes far deeper than this. The idea of the moral dignity of man-the idea that to each human being, as possessor of a spiritual nature, there belongs an inviolable freedom with which not other may tamper, that each has a spiritual Hife to live, involving rights and duties with which no earthly power can interfere, this idea, which has received in Christianity its highest expression, is obviously one which op poses an insuperable obstacle to the ingression of class distinctions and inequalities into the sphere of religion. It becomes in the minds that are penetrated by it a principle which preserves self-respect under the most degrading outward conditions, and arrests the tendency to fatal - istic apathy under the most cruel social injustice and wrong. Moreover, by making union with God and participation in a divine nature, possible to all, Christianity raises the meanest human being to an elevation which dwarfs all earthly greatness, stamps insignificance on all finite distinctions, and opens up to us a destiny in the contemplation of which the dignities and degradations of time alike disappear. Finally, in Christianity, religion becomes the solvent of class distinctions by its doctrine of the organic unity of the Church or household of faith. The ideal which it sets before us is that of a common or corporate life in which individual or class exclusiveness vanishes—a community in which the loftiest cannot say to the lowliest, I have no need of thee-from which pride and envy, scorn and hatred, all forms of human selfishness are eliminated, and wherein the life and happiness of the whole becomes dearer to each individual than his own. To crown all, Christianity finds the highest finite manifestation of God in the person of one who was neither sacred nor great by birth or caste, who linked infinite greatness to the lowest earthly humiliation,-the Son of God and the carpenter's son, the incarnation of Deity and the companion of the pariah and the outcast, the friend of publicans and sinners. But, as we have seen, Brahmanism, by its institution of caste, is a religious system in all respects the opposite of this. In it arbitrary distinctions enter into the inmost sphere of the religious life, and, instead of being modified or annulled by religion, constitute its very essence. Instead of breaking down artificial barriers, waging war with false separations, softening divisions and undermining class hatreds and antipathies, religion becomes itself the very consecration of them. The Brahman is by birth nearer to God than other men, standing in a special re lation to Him which is independent of character and moral worth, and to which no other mortal can aspire. No others can be his brethren. There are those among them whose very touch is contamination. To associate with them, eat with them, help them in danger, visit them in sickness, come even into accidental contact with them, is to him a pollution to be atoned for by the severest penalties. Nay, there are those whom it is no sin but a duty to treat with contempt and inhumanity, who are doomed by birth to a lot of infamy and isolation from their fellow-men, and worse than all, on whom religion inflicts a wrong more cruel than slavery by making them slaves who regard their fate as no wrong. Instead of teaching them to look on their dark and hopeless lot as a thing for which they can seek higher consolation, an injustice against which it is right to struggle, religion only gathers over it a more terrible darkness by making that lot itself an unchangeable ordinance of God. In these and other ways, we can perceive how the system of caste involves the worst of all wrongs to humanity -that of hallowing evil by the authority and sanction of religion. We cannot wonder, therefore, to find a reaction gradually arising in the consciousness of the people against a religion which so outraged the deepest instincts of man's spiritual nature. How that reaction found expression under the guidance of a great religious reformer, what were the particular forms it took and the results to which it led, it will be our endeavour in the next lecture to show. RELIGIONS OF INDIA : II. BUDDHISM. BUDDHISM is, in one point of view, a reaction against Brahmanism; but in another and deeper point of view, it is a new step in that progressive movement of religious thought which we have endeavoured to trace in the religions of India. In the former aspect, it is simply the recoil of the aggrieved moral instincts from the immoral and anti-social results of the earlier religion, and a protest against its idolatrous rites and observances. Neither in its religious nor in its moral teachings was Brahmanism true to its fundamental principle. Pantheism, as we have seen, may, viewed from opposite sides, be regarded either as a religion in which everything vanishes in God, or as a religion in which everything is consecrated by the presence of God, But though both forms of religion start from a common pantheistic origin, only one of them may be said to be strictly and logically true to it. Brahmanism may be described as the false or illegitimate consecration of the finite; Buddhism as the recall of the religious consciousness to that elevation above the finite from which, in its indiscriminate deification of material and sensuous things, the former religion had fallen away. When you have begun by saying that the world and the things of the world are unreal and illusory and that, in the whole compass of being, God is the only reality, you cannot legitimately return to rehabilitate that world which you have already denied and renounced. So far from pantheism lending its sanction to the deification of human and animal forms, or of every material object on which the superstitious imagination may fasten, its teaching would seem to be, that only by abstraction from the finite, by the mental annulling of the forms and phenomena of a world which is nothing but illusion, can we get near to God. So far, again, from finding in pantheism the basis of a morality which consecrates existing facts, and practically asserts that whatever is, is right—it would be nearer the truth to say that its ethical result is, logically, that whatever is, is wrong; and that only by emancipating ourselves from the thraldom of custom, by the obliteration of illusory social distinctions and inequalities, can we rise into union with the Divine. It would seem, therefore, from this point of view, that Buddhism must be regarded as a reaction against Brahmanism,—a return to a religion of abstraction and a morality of renunciation which are the legitimate outcome of a pantheistic conception of God. Yet though, no doubt, there is some truth in this view of the matter, Buddhism cannot be regarded simply as the return of Brahmanism to its fundamental principles. Like other religious reforms, it is at once a return and an advance. It reproduces in their simplicity and purity the ideas of the past, but it reproduces them with a deeper meaning which history and experience have infused into them. It reasserts the negative element involved in pantheism, and, as we shall see, exaggerates it till not only every finite and anthropomorphic ingredient, but every vestige of positive thought, vanishes from the idea |