There is no Natural Religion As all men are alike (though infinitely various), so all Religions, as all similars, have one source. William Blake.
There is but one salvation for all mankind, and that is the life of God in the soul. William Law.
THE constant increase of contacts between ourselves, who for the purposes of the present essay may be assumed to be Christians, and other peoples who belong to the great non-Christian majority has made it more than ever before an urgent necessity for us to understand the faiths by which they live. Such an understanding is at the same time intrinsically to be desired, and indispensable for the solution by agreement of the economic and political problems by which the peoples of the world are at present more divided than united. We cannot establish human relationships with other peoples if we are convinced of our own superiority or superior wisdom, and only want to convert them to our way of thinking. The modern Christian, who thinks of the world as his parish, is faced with the painful necessity of becoming himself a citizen of the world ; he is invited to participate in a symposium and a convivium ; not to preside for there is Another who presides unseen but as one of many guests.
It is no longer only for the professed missionary that a study of other religions than his own is required. This very essay, for example, is based upon an address given to a large group of schoolteachers in a series entitled "How to Teach about Other Peoples," sponsored by the New York School Board and the East and West Association. It has, too, been proposed that in all the schools and universities of the postwar world stress should be laid on the teaching of the basic principles of the great world religions as a means of promoting international understanding and developing a concept of world citizenship.
The question next arises, By whom can such teaching be properly given ? It will be self-evident that no one can have understood, and so be qualified to teach, a religion, who is opposed to all religion ; this will rule out the rationalist and scientific humanist, and ultimately all those whose conception of religion is not theological, but merely ethical. The obvious ideal would be for the great religions to be taught only by those who confess them ; but this is an ideal that could only be realized, for the present, in our larger universities. It has been proposed to establish a school of this kind at Oxford.
As things are, a teaching about other than Christian faiths is mainly given in theological seminaries and, missionary colleges by men who do believe that Christianity is the only true faith, who approve of foreign missions, and who wish to prepare the missionary for his work. Under these conditions, the study of comparative religion necessarily assumes a character quite different from that of other disciplines ; it cannot but be biased. It is obvious that if we are to teach at all it should be our intention to communicate only truth : but where a teaching takes for granted that the subject matter to be dealt with is intrinsically of inferior significance, and the subject is taught, not con amove, but only to instruct the future schoolmaster in the problems that he will have to cope with, one cannot but suspect that at least a part of the truth will be suppressed, if not intentionally, at least unknowingly.
If comparative religion is to be taught as other sciences are taught, the teacher must surely have recognized that his own religion is only one of those that are to be " compared " ; he may not expound any " pet theories " of his own, but is to present the truth without bias, to the extent that it lies in his power. In other words, it will be " necessary to recognize that those institutions which are based on the same premises, let us say the supernatural, must be considered together, our own amongst the rest whereas "to-day, whether it is a question of imperialism, or of race prejudice, or of a comparison between Christianity and paganism, we are still preoccupied with the uniqueness … of our own institutions and achievements, our own civilization." 1 One cannot but ask whether the Christian whose conviction is ineradicable that his is the only true faith can conscientiously permit himself to expound another religion, knowing that he cannot do so honestly.
How completely pragmatic the missionary point of view can be is illustrated by the comment of one who after spending over thirty years in India could speak of " the presence in the country of six million professional beggars, most of them ' holy men ' who are entirely unproductive." (L. W. Bryce, India at the Threshold, New York, 1946, p. 113). Shades of St. Francis d'Assisi !
We are, then, in proposing to teach about other peoples, faced with the problem of tolerance. The word is not a pretty one ; to tolerate is to put up with, endure, or suffer the existence of what are or appear to be other ways of thinking than our own ; and it is neither very pleasant merely " to put up with " our neighbours and fellow guests, not very pleasant to feel that one's own deepest institutions and beliefs are being patiently " endured." Moreover, if the Western world is actually more tolerant to-day than it was some centuries ago, or has been since the fall of Rome, it is largely because men are no longer sure that there is any truth of which we can be certain, and are inclined to the " democratic " belief that one man's opinion is as good as another's, especially in the fields of politics, art, and religion. Tolerance, then, is a merely negative virtue, demanding no sacrifice of spiritual pride and involving no abrogation of our sense of superiority ; it can be commended only in so far as it means that we shall refrain from hating or persecuting others who differ or seem to differ from ourselves in habit or belief. Tolerance still allows us to pity those who differ from ourselves, and are consequently to be pitied !
Tolerance, carried further, implies indifference, and becomes intolerable. Our proposal is not that we should tolerate heresies, but rather come to some agreement about the truth. Our proposition is that the proper objective of an education in comparative religion should be to enable the pupil to discuss with other believers the validity of particular doctrines, 2 , leaving the problem of the truth or falsity, superiority or inferiority, of whole bodies of doctrine in abeyance until we have had at least an opportunity to know in what respects they really differ from one another, and whether in essentials or in accidentals. We take it for granted, of course that they will inevitably differ accidentally, since "nothing can be known except in the mode of the knower." One must at least have been taught to recognize equivalent symbols, e.g., rose and lotus (Rosa Mundi and Padmavati); that Soma is the "bread and water of life"; or that the Maker of all things is by no means accidentally, but necessarily a "carpenter" wherever the material of which the world is made is hylic. The proposed objective has this further and inmediate advantage, that it is not in conflict with even the most rigid 'Christian orthodoxy; it has never been denied that some truths are embodied in the pagan beliefs, and even St. Thomas Aquinas was ready and willing to find in the works of the pagan philosophers "extrinsic and probable proofs" of the truths of Christianity. He was, indeed, acquainted only with the ancients and with the Jews and some Arabians ; but there is no reason why the modern Christian, if his mental equipment is adequate, should not learn to recognize or be delighted to find in, let us say, Vedantic, Sufi, Taoist, or American Indian formulations extrinsic and probable proofs of the truth as he knows it. It is more than probable, indeed, that his contacts with other believers will be of very great advantage to the Christian student in his exegesis and understanding of Christian doctrine ; for though himself a believer, this is in spite of the nominalist intellectual environment in which he was born and bred, and by which he cannot but be to some degree affected ; while the Oriental (to whom the miracles attributed to Christ present no problem) is still a realist, born and bred in a realistic environment, and is therefore in a position to approach Plato or St. John, Dante or Meister Eckhart more simply and directly than the Western scholar who cannot but have been affected to some extent by the doubts and difficulties that force themselves upon those whose education and environment have been for the greater part profane.
Such a procedure as we have suggested provides us immediately with a basis for a common understanding and for co-operation. What we have in view is an ultimate " reunion of the churches " in a far wider sense than that in which this expression is commonly employed : the substitution of active alliances let us say of Christianity and Hinduism or Islam, on the basis of commonly recognized first principles, and with a view to an effective co-operation in the application of these principles to the contingent fields of art (manufacture) and prudence for what is at present nothing better than a civil war between the members of one human family, children of one and the same God, " whom," as Philo said, " with one accord all Greeks and Barbarians acknowledge together." 8 It is with reference to this statement that Professor Goodenough remarks that, " So far as I can see Philo was telling the simple truth about paganism as he saw it, not as Christian propaganda has ever since misrepresented it."
It need not be concealed that such alliances will necessarily involve an abandonment of all missionary enterprises such as they are now ; interdenominational conferences will take the place of those proselytizing expeditions of which the only permanent result is the secularization and destruction of existing cultures and the pulling up of individuals by their roots. You have already reached the point in which culture and religion, utility and meaning, have been divorced and can be considered apart, but this is not true of those peoples whom you propose to convert, whose religion and culture are one and the same thing and none of the functions of whose life are necessarily profane or unprincipled. If ever you should succeed in persuading the Hindus that their revealed scriptures are valid only " as literature," you will have reduced them to the level of your own college men who read the Bible, if at all, only as literature. Christianity in India, as Sister Nivedita (Patrick Geddes' distinguished pupil, and author of The Web of Indian Life) once remarked, " carries drunkenness in its wake " 4 for if you teach a man that what he has thought right is wrong, he will be apt to think that what he has thought wrong is right.
We are all alike in need of repentance and conversion, a " change of mind " and a " turning round " : not, however, from one form of belief to another, but from unbelief to belief. There can be no more vicious kind of tolerance than to approach another man, to tell him that " We are both serving the same God, you in your way and I in His ! " The " compassing of sea and land to make one proselyte " can be carried on as an institution only for so long as our ignorance of other peoples' faiths persists. The subsidizing of educational or medical services accessory to the primary purpose of conversion is a form of simony and an infringement of the instruction, " Heal the sick . . . provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey . . . [but go] forth as sheep in the midst of wolves."Wherever you go, it must be not as masters or superiors but as guests, or as we might say nowadays, "exchange professors" ; you must not return to betray the confidences of your hosts by any libel. Your vocation must be purged of any notion of a "civilizing mission" ; for what you think of as "the white man's burden" here is a matter of "white shadows in the South Seas" there. Your "Christian" civilization is ending in disaster and you are bold enough to offer it to others ! Realize that, as Professor Plumer has said, " the surest way to betray our Chinese allies is to sell, give or lend-lease them our [American] standard of living, 1 ' 5 and that the hardest task you could undertake for the present and im- mediate future is to convince the Orient that the civilization of Europe is in any sense a Christian civilization, or that there redly are reasonable, just, and tolerable Europeans amongst the " barbarians " of whom the Orient lives in terror.
The word " heresy " means choice, the having opinions of one's own, and thinking what we like to think : we can only grasp its real meaning to-day, when " thinking for oneself " is so highly recom- mended (with the proviso that the thinking must be " 100 per cent."), if we realize that the modern equiva- lent of heresy is " treason." The one outstanding, and perhaps the only, real heresy of modern Christianity in the eyes of other believers is its claim to exclusive truth ; for this is treason against Him who " never left himself without a witness," and can only be paralleled by Peter's denial of Christ ; and whoever says to his pagan friends that " the light that is in you is darkness," in offending these is offending the Father of lights. In view of St. Ambrose's well-known gloss on i Corinthians xii. 3, "all that is true, by whomsoever it has been said, is from the Holy Ghost " (a dictum endorsed by St. Thomas Aquinas), you may be asked, " On what grounds do you propose to distinguish between your own ' revealed ' religion and our ' natural ' religion, for which, in fact, we also claim a supernatural origin ? " You may find this question hard to answer.
The claim to an exclusive validity is by no means calculated to make for the survival of Christianity in a world prepared to prove all things. On the contrary, it may weaken enormously its prestige in relation to other traditions in which a very different attitude prevails, and which are under no necessity of engaging in any polemic. As a great German theologian has said, " human culture [Menschheitsbildung] is a unitary whole, and its separate cultures are the dialects of one and the same language of the spirit." 6 The quarrel of Christianity with other religions seems to an Oriental as much a tactical error in the conflict of ideal with sensate motivations as it would have been for the Allies to turn against the Chinese on the battlefield. Nor will he participate in such a quarrel ; much rather he will say, what I have often said to Christian friends, " Even if you are not on our side, we are on yours." 7 The converse attitude is rarely expressed; but twice in my life I have met a Roman Catholic who could freely admit that for a Hindu to become a professing Christian was not essential to salvation. Yet, could we believe it, the Truth or Justice with which we are all alike and unconditionally concerned is like the Round Table to which " al the worlde crysten and hethen repayren " to eat of one and the same bread and drink the same wine, and at which " all are equal, the high and the low." I do know also of one European Trappist monk, whose brother is a Moslem ; both are men of prayer ; neither has any wish to convert the other. A very learned Roman Catholic friend of mine in correspondence, speaks of Sri Ramakrishna as " another Christ . . . Christ's own self."
Let us now, for a moment, consider the points of view that have been expressed by the ancients and other non-Christians when they speak of religions other than their own. We have already quoted Philo. Plutarch, first with bitter irony disposing of the Greek euhemerists " who spread atheism all over the world by obliterating the Gods of our belief and turning them all alike into the names of generals, admirals and kings," and of the Greeks who could no longer dis- tinguish Apollo (the intelligible Sun) from Helios (the sensible sun), goes on to say : " Nor do we speak of the 'different Gods' of different peoples, or of the Gods as ' Barbarian ' and ' Greek,' but as common to all, though differently named by different peoples, so that for the One Reason (Logos) that orders all these things, and the One Providence that oversees them, and for the minor powers [i.e., gods, angels] that are appointed to care for all things, there have arisen among different peoples different epithets and services, according to their different manners and customs." 8 Apuleius recognizes that the Egyptian Isis (our Mother Nature and Madonna, Natura Naturans, Creatric, Deus) " is adored throughout the world in divers manners, in variable customs and by many names." 9
The Musalman Emperor of India, Jahangur, writing of his friend and teacher, the Hindu hermit Jadrup, says that "his Vedanta is the same as our Taawwuf " : in the same way Prince Muhiammad Dara Shikuh (through whose Persian version the Upanishads first reached Europe) in his Mingling of the Two Oceans (of Islam and Hinduism) finds, as regards their enunciation of Truth, " only verbal differences " between the Sufis and the " Indian monotheists " ; and, in fact, Northern India abounds in a type of religious literature in which it is often difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish Musalman from Hindu factors. 10 The indifference of religious forms is indeed, as Professor Nicholson remarks, " a cardinal Sufi doctrine." So we find ibn-ul-'Arabi saying :
My heart is capable of every form : it is a pasture for
gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
And idol-temple and the pilgrim's Ka'ba [Mecca], and
the tables of the Torah and the book of the Koran ;
I follow the religion of Love, whichever way his
camels take ; my religion and my faith is the true religion. 11
That is to say that you and I, whose religions are distinguishable, can each of us say that " mine is the true religion," and to one another that " yours is the true religion " whether or not either or both of us be truly religious depending not upon the form of our religion but upon ourselves and on grace. So, too, Shams-i-Tabriz :
If the notion of my Beloved is to be found in an idol-temple,
Twere mortal sin to circumscribe the Ka'ba !
The Ka'ba is but a church if there His trace be lost :
My Ka'ba is whatever " church " in which His trace is found ! 12
Similarly in Hinduism ; the Tamil poet-saint Tayumanavar, for example, says in a hymn to Siva :
Thou didst fittingly . . . inspire as Teacher millions of religions.
Thou didst in each religion, while it like the rest showed in splendid fulness of treatises, disputations, sciences, [make] each its tenet to be the truth, the final goal. 13
The Bhaktakalpadruma of Pratapa Siriiha maintains that " every man should, as far as in him lieth, help the reading of the Scriptures, whether those of his own church or those of another." 14
In the Bhagavad Gita (VII, 21) Sri Krishna proclaims : " If any lover whatsoever seeks with faith to worship any form [of God] whatever, it is I who am the founder of his faith/' and (IV, n), "However men approach Me, even do I reward them, for the path men take from every side is Mine." 15
We have the word of Christ himself that he came to call not the just, but sinners (Matthew ix.i3). What can we make out of that, but that, as St. Justin said, " God is the Word of whom the whole human race are partakers, and those who lived according to Reason are Christians even though accounted atheists. . . . Socrates and Heracleitus, and of the barbarians Abraham and many others." So, too, Meister Eckhart, greatest of the Christian mystics, speaks of Plato (whom the Moslem Jill saw in a vision, "filling the world with light ") as " that great priest," and as having " found the way ere ever Christ was born." Was St. Augustine wrong when he affirmed that " the very thing that is now called the Christian religion was not wanting amongst the ancients from the beginning of the human race, until Christ came in the flesh, after which the true religion, which already existed, began to be called ' Christian ' " ? Had he not re- tracted these brave words, the bloodstained history of Christianity might have been otherwise written !
We have come to think of religion more as a set of rules of conduct than as a doctrine about God ; less as a doctrine about what we should be, than one of what we ought to do ; and because there is necessarily an element of contingency in every application of principles to particular cases, we have come to believe that theory differs as practice must. This confusion of necessary means with transcendent ends (as if the vision of God could be earned by works) has had unfortunate results for Christianity, both at home and abroad. The more the Church has devoted herself to " social service," the more her influence has declined ; an age that regards monasticism as an almost immoral retreat is itself unarmed. It is mainly because religion has been offered to modern men in nauseatingly sentimental terms ("Be good, sweet child," etc.), and no longer as an intellectual challenge, that so many have been revolted, thinking that that " is all there is to " religion. Such an emphasis on ethics (and, incidentally, forgetfulness that Christian doctrine has as much to do with art, i.e. manufacture, making, what and how, as it has to do with behaviour) plays into the sceptic's hands ; for the desirability and convenience of the social virtues is such and so evident that it is felt that if that is all that religion means, why bring in a God to sanction forms of conduct of which no one denies the propriety ? Why indeed ? 16 At the same time this excessive emphasis upon the moral, and neglect of the intellectual virtues (which last alone, in orthodox Christian teaching, are held to survive our dissolution) invite the retorts of the rationalists who maintain that religion has never been anything but a means of drugging the lower classes and keeping them quiet.
Against all that, the severe intellectual discipline that any serious study of Eastern, or even " primitive," religion and philosophy demands can serve as a useful corrective. The task of co-operation in the field of comparative religion is one that demands the highest possible qualifications ; if we cannot give our best to the task, it would be safer not to undertake it. The time is fast coming when it will be as necessary for the man who is to be called " educated " to know either Arabic, Sanskrit, or Chinese as it is now for him to read Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. And this, above all, in the case of those who are to teach about other peoples' faiths ; for existing translations are often in many different ways inadequate, and if we are to know whether or not it is true that all believing men have hitherto worshipped and still worship one and the same God, whether by his English, Latin, Arabic, Chinese, or Navajo names, one must have searched the scriptures of the world never forgetting that sine desiderio mens non intelligit.
Nor may we undertake these activities of instruction with ulterior motives : as in all other educational activities, so here the teacher's effort must be directed to the interest and advantage of the pupil himself, not that he may do good, but that he may be good. The dictum that "charity begins at home" is by no means necessarily a cynicism : it rather takes for granted that to do good is only possible when we are good, and that if we are good we shall do good, whether by action or inaction, speech or silence. It is sound Christian doctrine that a man must first have known and loved himself, his inner man, before he loves his neighbour.
It is, then, the pupil who comes first in our conception of the teaching of comparative religion. He will be astounded by the effect upon his understanding of Christian doctrine that can be induced by the recognition of similar doctrines stated in another language and by means of what are to him strange or even grotesque figures of thought. In the following of the vestigia pedis, the soul " in hot pursuit of her quarry, Christ," he will recognize an idiom of the language of the spirit that has come down to us from the hunting cultures of the Stone Age ; a cannibal philosophy in that of the Eucharist and the Soma sacrifice ; and the doctrine of the " seven rays " of the intelligible Sun in that of the Seven Gifts of the Spirit and in the " seven eyes " of the Apocalyptic Lamb and of Cuchulainn. He may find himself far less inclined than he is now to recoil from Christ's harder sayings, or those of St. Paul on the " sundering of soul from spirit." If he balks at the command to hate, not merely his earthly relatives, but, " yea, and his own soul also," and prefers the milder wording of the Authorized Version, where " life " replaces " soul," or if he would like to interpret in a merely ethical sense the command to " deny himself," although the word that is rendered by " deny " means " utterly reject " ; if he now begins to realize that the " soul " is of the dust that returns to the dust when the spirit returns to God who gave it, and that equally for Hebrew and Arabic theologians this " soul " (nefesh, nafs) imports that carnal " individuality " of which the Christian mystics are thinking when they say that " the soul must put itself to death " ; or that our existence (distinguishing esse from essentia, from oucrta, bhu from as) is a crime ; and if he cor- relates all these ideas with the Islamic and Indian exhortation to " die before you die " and with St. Paul's " I live, yet not I," then he may be less inclined to read into Christian doctrine any promise of eternal life for any " soul " that has been concreated with the body and better equipped to show that the spiritual- ists' " proofs " of the survival of human personality, however valid, have no religious bearings whatever.
The mind of the democratic student to whom the very name of the concept of a " divine right " may be unintelligible is likely to be roughly awakened if he ever realizes that, as Professor Buckler often reminds us, the very notion of a kingdom of God on earth " depends for its revelation on the inner meaning of eastern kingship," for he may have forgotten in his righteous destestation of all dictatorships, that the classical definition of " tyranny " is that of " a king ruling in his own interests."
Nor is this a one-sided transaction ; it would not be easy to exaggerate the alteration that can be brought about in the Hindu's or Buddhist's estimate of Christianity when the opportunity is given him to come into closer contact with the quality of thought that led Vincent of Beauvais to speak of Christ's " ferocity " and Dante to marvel at " the multitude of teeth with which this Love bites."
" Some contemplate one Name, and some another ? Which of these is the best ? All are eminent clues to the transcendent, immortal, unembodied Brahma : these Names are to be contemplated, lauded, and at last denied. For by them one rises higher and higher in these worlds ; but where all comes to its end, there he attains to the Unity of the Person " (Maitri Upanishatf). Whoever knows this text, but nothing of Western technique, will assuredly be moved by a sympathetic understanding when he learns that the Christian also follows a via affirmativa and a via remotionis I Whoever has been taught a doctrine of " liberation from the pairs of opposites " (past and future, pleasure and pain, etc., the Symplegades of "folklore'') will be stirred by Nicholas of Cusa's description of the wall of Paradise wherein God dwells as " built of contradictories," and by Dante's of what lies beyond this wall as " not in space, nor hath it poles," but "where every where and every when is focused." We all need to realize, with Xenophon, that " when God is our teacher, we come to think alike." For there are as many of these Hindus and Buddhists whose knowledge of Christianity and of the greatest Christian writers is virtually nil, as there are Christians, equally learned, whose real knowledge of any other religion but their own is virtually nil, because they have never imagined what it might be to live these other faiths. Just as there can be no real knowledge of a language if we have never even imaginatively participated in the activities to which the language refers, so there can be no real knowledge of any " life " that one has not in some measure lived. The greatest of modern Indian saints actually practised Christian and Islamic disciplines, that is, worshipped Christ and Allah, and found that all led to the same goal : he could speak from experience of the equal validity of all these "ways," and feel the same respect for each, while still preferring for himself the one to which his whole being was naturally attuned by nativity, temperament, and training. What a loss it would have been to his countrymen and to the world, and even to Christianity, if he had " become a Christian " ! There are many paths that lead to the summit of one and the same mountain ; their differences will be the more apparent the lower down we are, but they vanish at the peak ; each will naturally take the one that starts from the point at which he finds himself ; he who goes round about the mountain looking for another is not climbing. Never let us approach another believer to ask him to become " one of us" but approach him with respect as one who is already " one of His" who is, and from whose invariable beauty all contingent being depends ! 17
REFERENCES
1 Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 1934, p. 5.
An illustration of Ruth Benedict's comment can be cited from C. S. Lewis, Miracles, 1947, p. 140 : " Democrats by birth and education, we should prefer to think that all nations and individuals start level in the search for God, or even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point of view." What a trial for the poor Christian to have to admit that he is right and that everybody else is wrong 1 Still, somehow or other, he manages to bear up under this supposedly God-imposed burclen.
2 To illustrate what I mean by " discussion " here, I refer the reader to my article entitled, " On Being in One's Right Mind," in the Review of Religion, Vol. VII, New York, 1942, pp. 32-40. Although in fact by one author, this article is in effect a collaboration of Christian, Platonist, and Hindu, expounding a doctrine held in common.
3 Philo Judaeus, De specialibus legibus II, 65 ; E. R. Goodenough, Introduction to Philo Judaeus, 1940, pp. 105, 108.
4 Lambs among Wolves, 1993. See also my "Christian Missions in India " in Essays in National Idealism (ist ed., 1909 ; or 2nd ed.).
5 J. M. Plumer, " China's High Standard of Living", Asia and the Americas, February, 1944.
6 Alfred Jeremias, Altorientalische Geisteskultur, Vorwort. "A long metaphysical chain runs throughout the world and connects all races" (Johannes Sauter, in Archive fur Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie, Berlin, October, 1934).
7 Cf. D. S. Sarma : Hinduism "has out-lived the Christian propaganda of modern times … It is now able to meet any of these world religions on equal terms as their friend and ally in a common cause" (Renaissance of Hindu- ism, 1944, p. 70). What might not be accomplished if Christians would but open their eyes !
8 Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 67 (Moralia, 377). So William Law, in continuation of the citation above, " There is not one [salvation] for the Jew, another for the Christian, and a third for the heathen. No, God is one, human nature is one, and the way to it is one ; and that is, the desire of the soul turned to God." Actually, this refers to " the baptism of desire," or " of the Spirit " (as distinguished from baptism by water, which involves an actual membership in the Christian community) and only modifies the Christian dogma extra Ecclesiam nulla solus. The real problem is that of the proper meaning of the words " Catholic Church " ; we say that this should mean not any one religion as such, but the community, or universe of experience, of all those who love God. As William Law says also : " The chief hurt of a sect is this, that it takes itself to be necessary to the truth, whereas the truth is only then found when it is known to be of no sect but as free and universal as the goodness of God and as common to all names and nations as the air and light of this world."
Cf. F. W. Buckler : " The layman, Dissenter, schismatic or the heathen, who wittingly or unwittingly has taken up his Cross, is a child of the kingdom of God on earth and a Khallfah of our Lord, as the priest or bishop, who has not taken up his Cross, however unquestionable his Apostolic continuity, is not " (The Epiphany of the Cross, 1938). It should also be borne in mind that (as the last mentioned author has often shown) the Christian concept of the " kingdom of God " cannot be properly understood except in the light of the Oriental theory of Kingship and Divine Right.
9 Apuleius, Golden Ass, XI, 5.
Cf. Alfred Jeremias, Der Kosmos von Sumer (Dev Alte Orient, 32, Leipzig, 1932), Ch. Ill, "Die eine Madonna''
10 Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri (Memoirs of Jahangir), in the version by Rogers and Beveridge, 1905, p. 356, M. Mahfuz-ul-Haq, Majma'ul-Bahrein (translation, Bib. Ind. 246, Calcutta, 1929) ; V. Raghavan, " Dara Shikoh's Majma-ul-Bahrein," Journal of Oriental Research 15, 1947, 150-158.
11 R. A. Nicholson, Mystics of Islam, 1914, p. 105. Similarly, " If he [the follower of any particular religion] understood the saying of Junayd, ' The colour of the water is the colour of the vessel containing it/ he would not interfere with the beliefs of others, but would perceive God in every form and in every belief " (ibn-ul-'Arabi, Nichol- son, Studies in Islamic Mysticism, 1921, p. 159). And, " Henceforth I knew that there were not many gods of human worship, but one God only, who was polyonomous and polymorphous, being figured and named according to the variety of the outward condition of things " (Sir George Birdwood, Sva, 1915, p. 28).
12 R. A. Nicholson, Diwanl Shams-i-Tabriz, 1898, p. 238, cf. 221.
Cf. Faridu'd Din 'Attar, in the Mantiqu't Tayr : " Since, then, there are different ways of making the journey, no two [soul-] birds will fly alike. Each finds a way of his own, on this road of mystic knowledge, one by means of the Mihrab, and another through the Idol."
13 Sir P. Arunachalam, Studies and Translations, Colombo, 1937, p. 201.
14 Translation by Sir George Grierson, JRAS, 1908, P. 347.
15 Schleiermacher rightly maintains (Reden, V) that the multiplicity of religions is grounded in the nature of religion itself, and necessary for its complete manifestation "Nur in der Totalitdt oiler solcher moglichen Formen kann die ganze Religion wirklich gegeben werden" But Schleiermacher claims the highest position for Christianity on the grounds of its freedom from exclusiveness !
Una veritas in variis signis varie resplendeat: and in the words of Marsilio Ficino, " Perhaps, indeed, this kind of variety, ordained by God himself, displays a certain admirable adornment of the universe " (De Christiana religione, c. 4). Cf. also Ernest Cassirer's exposition of Pico della Mirandola's "defence of the libertas credendi" in the Journal of the History of Ideas, III, 335.
16 The answer can be given in the words of Christopher Dawson : " For when once morality has been deprived of its religious and metaphysical foundations, it inevitably becomes subordinated to lower ends/ 1 As he also says, the need for a restoration of the ethics of vocation has become the central problem of society " vocation " being that station of life to which it has pleased God to call us, and not the " job " to which our own ambitions drive.
17 The following books are commended to the reader's attention :
Sister Nivedita, Lambs among Wolves (1903) and The Web of Indian Life (1904 or later editions).
Demetra Vaka, Haremlik (1911).
Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher (1927).
Father W. Schmidt, The High Gods of North America (1933) and Origin and Growth of Religion (2nd ed., 1935).
Lord Raglan, The Hero (1936).
Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (1937) ; The Perennial Philosophy (1945) ; Science, Liberty t and Peace (1946).
Rene Guenon, East and West (1941) ; Crisis of the Modern World (1942) ; General Introduction to the Hindu Doctrines (1946).
Marco Pallis, Peaks and Lamas (1941).
R. St. Barbe Baker, Africa Drums (1942).
Swami Nikhilananda, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942).
N. K. Chadwick, Poetry and Prophecy (1942).
A. K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism (1943)
The Religious Basis of the Forms of Indian Society (1946).
Sir P. Arunachalam, Studies and Translations (1937).
Sir George Birdwood, Sva (1915).
J. C. Archer, The Sikhs (1946).