| Chart Showing a Synthesis of Religions | Title page | II. Sources of the Revelations of Comparative Religion |
[ p. 1 ]
Three hundred and fifty years ago there was held at Agra, in India, the first parliament of religions. It was conceived, planned, and inaugurated by Akbar, the great Mogul emperor of India.
In 1575 he dedicated a magnificent structure called the Thadat Khana, or house of discussion, to the study of comparative religion. Here every Thursday evening he presided over an audience composed of representatives of the five great religions of India and their sec ts—Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Mohammedanism, Judaism, Christianity. At each meeting a statement of the claims of one or [ p. 2 ] another of these systems of faith was presented by an accredited delegate and his address was followed by general discussion. Thus the tenets peculiar to each variety of religion were competently set forth and thereupon subjected to comment and criticism in an atmosphere of mutual respect and tolerance, generated by the genial and broad-minded Akbar.
Out of this ferment of religious hospitality there was produced that remarkable book known as the Dabistan, an impartial report of the proceedings at these Thursday evening conferences. As an index of the catholicity and fraternalism that characterized the sessions let me quote a most noble sentence, spoken by one of the participants, a Mohammedan, of the Sufi sect: “If thou art a Mussulman, go stay with the Franks; if thou art a Shuite, go, mix with the Schismatics; if thou art a Christian, fellowship with the Jews. Whatever be thy religion, associate with those who think differently from thee. If thou canst mix with them freely and art not angered at hearing their discourse, thou hast attained [ p. 3 ] peace and art a master of creation.” With this inspiring utterance let me couple the fervent exclamation of the Psalmist: “Behold how good and pleasant a tiling it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.” [1] Together the two texts furnish a kind of spiritual setting in which to consider the subject before us. For, besides the intellectual purpose of acquainting us with the results of research in the field of comparative religion, these chapters have an ethical purpose for their main justification, namely, to make us more catholic in our sympathies, more just and generous in our attitude to foreign faiths, more magnanimous toward orthodox people less fortunate in their religion than we, more responsive to sources of inspiration that we were prone to neglect, more quick and keen to recognize Oriental graces of character in which our Occidental civilization is deficient. Above all is it the ethical purpose of our inquiry to make us more proficient in the practice of appreciation, that modern virtue to which the [ p. 4 ] race, in its moral evolution, has been slowly climbing. How far we of the West are from this goal is evidenced by our reluctance to admit any indebtedness to the Far East, by our glib talk about the life of humanity, the service of humanity, and so forth, while persisting in identifying all that is alive and forwardlooking in humanity with our Western civilization, contrasting the “progressive West” with the “stagnant and immobile East” and complacently echoing the familiar line of Tennyson:
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
In the recently published Legacy of Rome four of the writers identified the Roman Empire with “the whole civilized world.” Even Dean Inge, writing in the London Evening Standard, committed the same breach of broadmindedness and justice, implying that civilization ended abruptly in the fifth century on the western frontier of Parthia and that the arts, poetry, philosophy, and religion of [ p. 5 ] China and India were the output of peoples emerging from barbarism! What contribution, it is asked, in all seriousness, has the Far East made to human culture? We admit a measure of merit in Chinese porcelains, Japanese color-prints and Indian textile fabrics; we admit that in such matters the Ear East has something to teach the West. But toward the philosophy, religion, and ethics of Oriental peoples the prevailing Occidental attitude is one of contemptuous indifference or of hostile criticism. Such are some of the indices of our stage in the moral evolution of the race toward the ideal of appreciation.
Time was, when, in Christian countries, persecution was thought to be ethically warranted, when those in ecclesiastical authority, assuming that they alone had the only true religion, believed themselves divinely ordained to suppress dissenters and so vindicate and spread “God’s truth.” If persuasion failed, they resorted to imprisonment; when, that proved ineffectual, they tried the lash. As a final measure they condemned dissenters to [ p. 6 ] the stake, hoping by fire to exterminate.both heresy and heretics. How often, oh, how often, have ecclesiastical despots sought to crush free thought and free speech by burning the books and the bodies of authors whose convictions were brighter than flames and like asbestos withstood the fire intended to consume them! True, the traces of such forms of persecution are entirely extinct, but the spirit of it still survives, though the forms have taken on a milder mien. To-day the Christian persecutes the Jew and the Jew the Christian; Romanism persecutes Protestantism, orthodox Protestantism persecutes liberal Christianity; and even liberal Christianity has been found persecuting the religion that cannot call itself Christian.
A step upward in the direction of the modern ideal was taken when forbearance replaced persecution, when latitude was admitted in theology no less than in geography and the distinction drawn between essentials and nonessentials in religion; when dissenters were reluctantly allowed to hold their heresies without [ p. 7 ] fear of molestation or threat. And when at length, tolerance was substituted for forbearance, it meant that a new attitude was taken toward dissenters, because tolerance is the willing consent to let others hold opinions different from our own, while forbearance is the unwilling consent. Yet even this attitude, noble as it is, cannot be regarded as the acme of spiritual attainment. For, tolerance always implies a measure of concession. We tolerate what we cannot help but would suppress if we could. Tolerance has an air of patronizing condescension about it. He who tolerates affects a certain offensive superiority, exhibits spiritual conceit. Clearly, then, it cannot be true that tolerance marks the acme of spiritual attainment, or that it is “the loveliest flower on the rose-bush of liberalism,” to quote a distinguished Unitarian divine of the last century. Lovelier far is appreciation, which, while wholly free from the blemish that mars the beauty of tolerance, adds to that beauty fresh graces all its own. Appreciation is dissatisfied with tolerance, despises [ p. 8 ] mere forbearance, blushes at persecution… It restrains us from ridiculing beliefs that to ps are superstitions and from looking upon our own cherished beliefs as final; rather does appreciation bid us realize our own finitude and the immense firmament of thought under which we move, watchful for each new star the guiding heavens may reveal. Toward every established system of belief appreciation takes the evolutionary point of view, judging it not only statically, by what it was at the start, but also dynamically, by what it has become in the course of the centuries. Toward the Bibles of the great religions, appreciation takes an eclectic attitude, seeking from each what can be borrowed for the enriching and deepening of the moral life. Toward the founders of these religions, appreciation takes a reverential, docile attitude. Before each of them it bows, be he the Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, Mohammed, Moses, or Jesus; not indeed that all are to be equally estimated, but each is to be evaluated according to the truth he had to teach and the inspiration that may [ p. 9 ] be derived from the story of his life and work. Toward the great religions themselves- appreciation takes the organic viewpoint. It conceives of each religion as a memher of a family of religions, a part of a whole, an organ of an organism, each having some excellence not possessed by the rest and therefore to be contributed by it to them, and receiving in return the manifold contributions of all the others toward its own enhancement. In the eyes of appreciation all the great religions and their sects are likened to the stops and pedals of a great organ, some emphasizing the essential, others the ornamental notes, none of itself yielding the full-orbed music, but the harmonious blending of their individual melodies producing the great symphony of human aspiration and faith.
| Chart Showing a Synthesis of Religions | Title page | II. Sources of the Revelations of Comparative Religion |
IPs. 83:1. ↩︎