§ 5. Concluding Remarks
An eminent theologian tells us: “Reason is the only faculty we have wherewith to judge concerning anything, even Revelation itself.”389 How is it, then, that Religionist and Rationalist arrive at such contrary conclusions? The explanation is simple enough: the Religionist trusts, the Rationalist distrusts, his emotions. Which is in the right? The survival of religious belief will largely depend upon the view men may ultimately take upon this question. Whether religion be no more than “morality touched by emotion,” as Matthew Arnold defines it,390 or whether all religions are only different ways of expressing a reality which transcends experience and correct expression, we cannot, on that account, accept dogmas that are untrue; we cannot pretend that a supernatural revelation has been vouchsafed to us. We may surmise, as Sir Henry Thompson supposed, that the “eternal and infinite energy behind phenomena” is what we call “God”; but we have to admit that this God is an unknown God, and that all attempts to unravel the mystery that surrounds our own fate are the merest guesses in the dark. Does a surmise—a belief if you will have it so—of this kind afford any religious satisfaction? If this Eternal Energy possesses what we should call a mind, can we worship a Supreme Intelligence
“Which stoops not either to bless or ban,
Weaving the woof of an endless plan”?
Can we worship the Unknown? Can we, like the Athenians of old, erect altars to the Unknown God? I trow not. The age of ignorance and superstition is slowly, but none the less surely, passing away, never again to return.
Sir Oliver Lodge believes391 in “the ultimate intelligibility of the universe,” and with this opinion many of us will agree. Perhaps our present brains may require considerable improvement before we can grasp the deepest things by their aid, or perhaps they will suffice as they are, and only a further acquisition of knowledge may be required. In any case, one sees no reason why, because we have no acceptable theory of life or of death now, we must therefore be equally ignorant many centuries, or even a single century, hence. On the other hand, it is, of course, quite possible that these mysteries may remain for ever unexplained. It may transpire that Haeckel’s assumption of a monism in the physical world, and his identification of vital force with ordinary physical and chemical forces, are incorrect. It may transpire that Professor le Conte was wrong in regarding vital force as just so much withdrawn from the general fund of chemical and physical forces. Radio-activity and the cyanic theory392 may not furnish a satisfactory solution of the problem of the first appearance of life upon this globe. But one thing, at all events, our present knowledge seems clearly to indicate: the solution of the problem cannot be in accord with the Christian dogmas. Should the secrets of our existence still lie concealed in the womb of time, their birth will be the death, not the renascence, of the dying creeds of to-day.
Meanwhile our present course is clearly defined: we should search out and expose all false premises of belief. Only in this way can we hope to arrive a little nearer to the ultimate truth. Also, what is of much greater consequence, when all that is demonstrably untrue in the world’s beliefs has been pointed out and acknowledged, believers and unbelievers will be in far better accord concerning all that is vital to the well-being of the human race. “We cannot,” as Mr. Trevelyan pertinently remarks,393 “alter the nature of the Unknown by conceiving it to be other than that which it is; but we can get a wrong basis for ethics, and a false sentimental outlook on everything, by reason of false beliefs.”
By all means let those who can, continue to cherish the “larger hope”—why should they not, while all is unknown?—and let the metaphysicians continue to translate their wishes and aspirations into philosophical language; but the guiding spirit in human affairs should be, and one day will be, a scientific humanitarianism working on rational principles for the peace and happiness of all mankind.
“Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.”
APPENDIX
Chapter I
P. 5, lines 12–14.—The Copernican system was gradually accepted, and so were the discoveries which followed up to fifty years ago.
Copernicus’s book, The Revolution of the Celestial Bodies, was printed a few days before his death, in 1543. The system was condemned by a decree of Pope Paul V., in 1616, which was not revoked till 1818 by Pius VII. The great Kepler (d. 1630) was an astrologer as well as astronomer, and thought the stars were guided by angels. While his mind had a strong grasp of positive scientific truth, it also had an irresistible tendency towards mystical speculation. In those days Science and Religion were easily reconciled. It was fortunate for Newton that he made his discovery of the law of gravitation in a rather more enlightened age and country, otherwise he would inevitably have shared the terrible fate of Giordano Bruno at the hands of the Church’s emissaries.
Even in the early eighteenth century the light of science had hardly got beyond the first glimmering of dawn. Mathematics and astronomy were the only sciences which had passed into the positive and final stage. Chemistry, geology, biology, historical criticism, were not yet in a position to speak with authority even on subjects in their own province. Read a popular apologetic work of the eighteenth century; read Truth and Certainty of Christian Revelation, edition 1724, and you will find that a defender of the faith had in those days a comparatively easy task. Science being still in its infancy, Dr. Samuel Clarke gave reasons for the truth of Christian dogmas, which, though they could not be controverted then, would now be considered the most abject nonsense. Bead also Mr. S. Laing’s remarks on p. 13 of A Modern Zoroastrian, where he tells us that when he was “a student at Cambridge, little more than fifty years ago, astronomy was the only branch of natural science which could be said to be definitely brought within the domain of natural law, and that only as regards the law of gravity and the motions of the heavenly bodies, for little or nothing was known as to their constitution.”
P. 5, lines 18–19.—The vast antiquity of the earth.
“It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that 500 to 1,000 million years may have elapsed since the birth of the moon” (see Professor Darwin’s Presidential address at the meeting of the British Association in Johannesburg on August 30th, 1905).
P. 8, lines 27–9.—He is well aware of the odium he would incur should he proclaim his heterodox views concerning the popular religion.
Nor is it easy for even a well-known man to get his heterodox views published where they will be widely read. Sir Hiram Maxim wrote lately to the Literary Guide concerning his letter in the “Do We Believe?” correspondence, saying “it was necessary for my letter to have a slight coating of ecclesiastical sugar, otherwise it would not have been published.” Does the Church realise the extent to which men of science coat their popular writings with “ecclesiastical sugar”? The retail bookselling trade in England is still largely in the hands of persons belonging to the various sects, and, even where this is not so, few dare to push the works of glaringly heterodox writers. As an example of the difficulties which beset the way of a too truth-loving author, we may notice that it took three years before 2,000 copies of Mr. Samuel Laing’s Modern Science and Modern Thought could be sold, and its sale brought him no pecuniary profit.
P. 19, lines 2–3.—He [Sir Oliver Lodge] has never yet professed belief in a personal God.
He has now done so. In an article entitled “First Principles of Faith,” appearing in the Hibbert Journal for July, 1906, he has drawn up a new formula of faith, which commences: “I believe in one Infinite and Eternal Being, a guiding and loving Father, in whom all things consist.” He continues: “I believe that the Divine Nature is specially revealed to man through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lived and taught and suffered in Palestine 1,900 years ago, and has since been worshipped by the Christian Church as the immortal Son of God, the Saviour of the world.” This reconstructed Christian (?) creed has been deftly worded; but this, at least, is clear—the Virgin-birth, Resurrection, and Ascension form no part of the religious belief of Sir Oliver Lodge. The full text of the “Catechism” which he has designed for the use of teachers and others interested in the education of the young appears in the Standard of December 14th, 1906.
P. 20, line 31.—The religious naturally wish to discredit science.
It is a common assertion of the pious that modern science has continually to retrace its steps, and admit that it was mistaken in its facts and theories. The following pronouncement by Professor Ray Lankester, in his Presidential Address at the annual meeting of the British Association (held at York in 1906), should disillusion them: “During the last few years an idea has spread abroad that some of the more recent discoveries of science have revolutionised scientific ideas—have upset former theories, or have reversed them. Nothing is further from the truth.”
P. 25, lines 19–20.—They [Agnostics] “exhibit the very temper which Christ blesses.”
Canon Scott Holland’s precise words were: “It is no petulant boy making his petulant repudiation, but a man with steady and deliberate judgment, weighing, examining, testing, and still, at last to his own sorrow, to his own confessed cost, bravely facing what he deems to be the fact, and pronouncing, ‘I am not of the Body; I cannot share the life of the Christian community.’ And yet, if we look at him, we recognise in every detail of his character the lines that lead to Christ. He illustrates and exhibits the very temper which Christ blesses; he is pure, unselfish, humble, and good.... He may say what he pleases, but Christ has not forsworn him.” Subsequently he acknowledges in moving terms that, as the populations are emerging from out of their darkness, so they are repudiating the name of Christ. But he gives no explanation for a circumstance so perplexing to a Christian.
Let me not be misunderstood to say that this extremely lenient view towards the Agnostic is the usual one at present. On the contrary, the Bishop of Moray voices the opinion of the majority of the orthodox when (at the Diocesan Synod held at Inverness Cathedral in the autumn of 1904) he challenges the wisdom of this sympathetic attitude, and asks: “Is this a time to banish into silence, or relegate to an inferior position, the great bulwark of the Faith—the Athanasian Creed?” We are to understand that the curses of the Creed are reserved, not for the man who is born of heathen parents, but for the man who, often with much uprooting of his dearest hopes, and at the cost of losing many friends and even his original means of livelihood, decides that he must forsake the Faith. It seems to me that, before converting the heathen, it would be only fair that the terrible fate they will incur by any subsequent recantation should be distinctly explained to them.
Again, the Rev. J. Morgan Gibbon, in his pamphlet, Atheism and Faith, represents the Atheist in the guise of the Tempter “holding out the bribe of free indulgence of all the passions to our youth, our working classes, our governing classes, and our capitalists.” Clergymen who speak with such bitterness and make such sweeping assertions really betray the weakness of their own case. For it is a psychological fact that men are always angriest when they know they are not quite in the right. It is also a statistical fact (so far as statistics can be relied upon for facts) that crime among disbelievers is proportionately small, while among the staunchest believers, the Roman Catholics, it is proportionately large.
P. 29, line 23.—Excite prejudice by the use of a condemnatory adjective.
The Riddle of the Universe was described as a “book of rubbish” by Father Gerard, a member of the “Society of Jesus.” He has not the least authority for such an indictment. On the contrary, every single biologist would tell him that he was himself talking rubbish. The Turin Academy crowned it as the best book written in the last four years of the nineteenth century. Clergymen seem to prefer to get their science from apologetic works only. How many, I wonder, have ever read the masterly exposition of the case for Haeckel—Haeckel’s Critics Answered, by Joseph McCabe?
P. 30, lines 13–14.—“In relief of doubt.”
A work entitled In Relief of Doubt, by the Rev. R. E. Welsh, a Presbyterian minister, is an attempt by an exceedingly earnest man to remove doubts concerning the Bible. There is an introductory note by the Bishop of London. The book is written in what the Bishop terms a “racy” style, and has the merit of much straightforwardness; but few well-informed, and at the same time open-minded, readers would agree with the conclusions of the author. The argument that St. Paul was a contemporary of Christ is one of the principal features; but see Chap. II., § 3, and Chap. III., § 2.
P. 31, lines 27–8.—The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.
In Priests and People in Ireland, by Michael McCarthy, there is a complete exposé of the methods and results of Christian teaching in this portion of the British Isles, and a portrait of a typical Roman Catholic priest which demonstrates his elevating (?) influence. Also see Twelve Years in a Monastery and Life in a Modern Monastery, by Joseph McCabe.
P. 33, lines 32–3.—The Roman Catholic Church is more consistent.
“The Papal Church, founded, to a large extent, on superstition and ignorance, has ever been afraid of knowledge, of study, and education; hence she only consulted her own life’s interests when, in the Middle Ages, she decreed knowledge to be identical with heresy, and heresy to be punishable by death.” These words are quoted from The Roman Catholic Church in Italy, by the Rev. Alexander Robertson, D.D., a book accorded a flattering reception by the King of Italy in 1903. Again, Lord Macaulay, speaking of the Roman Catholic Church in the first chapter of his History of England, says that, “during the last three centuries, to stunt the growth of the human mind has been her chief object. Throughout Christendom, whatever advance has been made in knowledge, in freedom, in wealth, and in the arts of life, has been made in spite of her, and has everywhere been made in inverse proportion to her power. The loveliest and most fertile provinces of Europe have, under her rule, been sunk in poverty, in political servitude, and in intellectual torpor.”
P. 38, line 7.—Gifts for the needy.
The exhortation to “give to the poor” is a precept of all the great religions. Indiscriminate giving was inculcated by the disciples of Christ, who were the poor, and Asiatic poor at that. The pity of it is that often more harm than good is done because the “Divine” command does not specify the deserving poor. Hence that wholesale pauperisation of which the evil effects are especially apparent among the Jews and in Oriental countries.
Chapter II
P. 44, lines 22–3.—Mansel, Mozley, Farrar, Westcott, on Miracles.
Dean Mansel said: “If there be one fact recorded in Scripture which is entitled, in the fullest sense of the word, to the name of a miracle, the Resurrection of Christ is that fact. Here, at least, is an instance in which the entire Christian faith must stand or fall with our belief in the supernatural.... A superhuman authority needs to be substantiated by superhuman evidence, and what is superhuman is miraculous” (pp. 3 and 35 of Aids to Faith, 4th ed.).
Canon Mozley said: “Miracles and the supernatural contents of Christianity must stand or fall together” (Bampton Lectures, 1865).
Dean Farrar said: “However skilfully the modern ingenuity of semi-belief may have tampered with supernatural interpositions, it is clear to every honest and unsophisticated mind that, if miracles be incredible, Christianity is false” (The Witness of History to Christ, Hulsean Lectures for 1870, 2nd ed., p. 25).
Bishop Westcott said: “The essence of Christianity lies in a miracle, and, if it can be shown that a miracle is either impossible or incredible, all further inquiry into the details of its history is superfluous from a religious point of view” (The Gospel of the Resurrection, 3rd ed., 1874, p. 34). See also Archbishop Trench’s Notes on Miracles.
P. 44, lines 28–9.—The opinion of the majority of our living dignitaries.
This has been made abundantly clear by the unanimous reply of a large number of Bishops to a correspondent of the Record, who had written letters to them stating that he had heard that “not a single Bishop on the bench to-day believed in the miraculous in religion” (reported in the daily papers towards the close of January, 1905).
P. 48, lines 25–6.—Some even hold that it [devil-possession] still exists.
Thus, in the introduction to Pastor Hsi (a book of which 24,000 copies were printed between 1903 and 1905), the Rev. D. E. Hoste, General Director of the China Inland Mission, not only expresses this belief, but seeks to explain why devil-possession should now be chiefly confined to heathen lands. “Careful observation and study of the subject have,” he says, “led many to conclude that, although in lands where Christianity has long held sway the special manifestations we are now considering are comparatively unknown, the conditions among the heathen being more akin to those prevailing when and where the Gospel was first propagated, it is not surprising that a corresponding energy of the powers of evil should be met with in missionary work to-day.” He would have us believe, apparently, that the atmosphere of holiness in Christendom is so overpowering that the Devil and his crew are rendered less active! Taking him seriously, can he also explain how it is that God permits devils to perform such pranks? Not only is the house “swept and garnished” that they may “enter in, and dwell there”; but in the case of Saul we are told that they were purposely sent by God! (See Luke xi. 25, 26, and 1 Sam. xviii. 10 and xix. 9.)
The importance of this question is brought home to us by Mr. Benn in his History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, where he says (p. 454): “The witness of Jesus to the Fatherhood of God as a personal spirit amounts to no more than his witness to personal devils as authors of disease; and the witness of the Evangelists to their Master’s authorship of the Sermon on the Mount is less unanimous than their witness to the destruction by diabolical agency of the Gadarene swine.”
P. 49, lines 13–14.—The feeding of the five thousand.
Bishop Ingram attaches the utmost importance to the truth of this miracle. In a sermon published in the Church Times of October 7th, 1904, he is reported to have said: “It is the worst policy of defence to throw over the miracle of feeding the five thousand, or our Lord’s power over disease and death, and then expect to keep the faith of the world in His incarnation, His Virgin-birth, and His resurrection.”
P. 61, line 14.—The simple theory of the spiritists.
Dr. Moncure Conway relates, in his Autobiography, how it was a spiritualist séance which made him realise the kind of frenzy that took possession of those early Christians who really believed that a dead man had returned to life. See also Professor Lombroso on “spiritualistic” phenomena, p. 396.
P. 64, lines 20–1.—Few of us have ever had our belief tested.
Persons who have never spent their lives, or a portion of their lives, among the heathen, have never had their faith put to the fullest test, for in such an environment they would find faith’s difficulties considerably enhanced. I remember, a few days after my arrival in India, a certain Bishop looking me in the face and, with a kindly hand upon my shoulder, saying: “You will find life much more difficult in India.” He referred, of course, to the religious life, and was quite right, although, probably, he was thinking chiefly of the example that I should find set me by my fellow Christians; while, as mine was largely a camp life, it was more the insight into the belief of my native companions which affected me. There, all around you, are simple folk believing in what you know to be absurd; you are brought face to face with ignorance and superstition; you see how faith can be misplaced, and how trusting natures can be deceived. It sets you thinking whether, after all, you too may not be deceived; whether the possession of an unlimited capacity for faith has the virtue in it which the priest tells you it has, whether, in fact, faith is a reliable guide. Should you attempt to convert an educated native, you not only find that the task is hopeless, but that you are asking him to accept a belief which is as unfounded and unproven as the one he already holds. Anyone wishing to form some idea of an experience of this sort should read The Bible: Is it the Word of God? by Thomas Lumsden Strange, formerly a judge of the High Court of Madras. The way the observations are cast in the shape of a conversation between a student of the Bible and a cultured native of India brings home many Bible difficulties which largely escape the notice and consideration of the devout. I have taken my illustration from this book.
Chapter III
P. 77, lines 11–12.—Encyclopædia Biblica.
(My best thanks are due to Mr. C. T. Gorham for permitting me to make a free use of his notes on the Enc. Bib.)
In case the reader may jump to the conclusion that this is a work compiled by collecting the most heretical views from all parts of the globe (as I was informed by the librarian when I inquired for the book in a Cathedral library), let me call attention to the list of contributors, among whom will be found many English ministers of the Gospel. For instance:—
The Rev. Archibald R. S. Kennedy, D.D., Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages, Edinburgh.
The Rev. C. F. Burney, M.A., Lecturer in Hebrew, and Fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford.
The Rev. Claude Hermann Walter Johns, M.A., Hon. Sec. Camb. Pupil Teachers’ Centre.
The Rev. George Adam Smith, M.A., D.D., LL.D., Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis, Free Church College, Glasgow.
The Very Rev. J. A. Robinson, D.D., Dean of Westminster.
The Rev. Owen Charles Whitehouse, M.A., Principal and Professor of Biblical Exegesis and Theology in the Countess of Huntingdon’s College, Cheshunt, Herts.
The Rev. R. H. Charles, M.A., D.D., Professor of Biblical Greek, Trinity College, Dublin.
The Rev. Samuel Rolles Driver, D.D., Regius Professor of Hebrew, Canon of Christ Church, Oxford.
The Rev. T. K. Cheyne, M.A., D.D., Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford, Canon of Rochester.
The Rev. T. Witton Davies, B.A., Ph.D., Professor of Old Testament Literature, North Wales Baptist College, Bangor; Lecturer in Semitic Languages, University College.
The Rev. William E. Addis, M.A., Lecturer in Old Testament Criticism, Manchester College, Oxford.
The Rev. William Henry Bennett, Litt.D., D.D., Professor of Biblical Languages and Literature, Hackney College, London, and Professor of Old Testament Exegesis, New College, London.
The Rev. William Sanday, D.D., LL.D., Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Canon of Christ Church, Oxford.
The Rev. A. B. Davidson, D.D., Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis, United Free Church New College, Edinburgh.
The Rev. George Buchanan Gray, M.A., Professor of Hebrew, Mansfield College, Oxford.
The rapid advance of Bible criticism in late years is well seen by comparing articles in Dr. W. Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible (1860), in the Encyclopædia Britannica, signed W. R. S. (between 1875 and 1888), and in the Encyclopædia Biblica (1899 to 1903). Even the comparatively conservative Hastings’s Dictionary (1898–1902, with extra volume 1904) contains articles which would have been condemned as heretical half a century ago. Speaking of the Enc. Bib. and Hasting’s Dictionary, Mr. Benn remarks (in his History of Rationalism) that, “as regards the Old Testament, their respective attitudes do not essentially differ, Wellhausen’s theory being accepted by both.”
P. 80, line 18.—We have note got the stone and read the inscriptions.
For a popular account of this interesting discovery (upon the site of Susa, the ancient city of the Persian kings, in December, 1901) see The Hammurabi Code, by Chilperic Edwards.
P. 103, line 16–17.—A disputed passage in Tacitus.
The sceptical theory is that, had it been genuine, the passage would not have been overlooked by all the early Christian writers in the various disputations with objectors, and especially by Tertullian, who quoted largely from his works, and the ecclesiastical historian Eusebius, who was zealous in his defence of the Faith and greedy of materials with which to support it. (An important French student of Tacitus holds that the whole Annals is medieval!) On the other hand, the style is thoroughly Tacitean, containing a number of words and expressions elsewhere used by the author, and more or less characteristic of him, yet without any such elaborate over-imitation as we should expect to find even in a skilful forgery. Nor is the subject-matter perhaps less characteristic, while the MS. evidence is in favour of the passage being genuine. Taking it to be so, what, after all, does it amount to? Merely this. Christ was put to death by Pontius Pilate, and a very large number of Christians were put to death in a horrible manner by Nero. The passage occurs in Tacitus, Annals, XV., 44, and runs as follows: “Consequently, to get rid of the accusation, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called by the populace ‘Christians.’ Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred of mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt to serve as a nightly illumination when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle.”
P. 107, lines 19–20.—The true likeness of our Lord had been miraculously transmitted.
Presumably my informant was referring to the legend of St. Veronica, since the equally absurd History of the Likeness of Christ (translated by E. A. Wallis Budge) closes with these words: “And the angel took the likeness from where it was standing, and he removed it; and no man hath ever seen it since.”
Chapter IV
P. 121, line 22.—Born in a cave.
“Justin Martyr the Apologist, who, from his birth at Shechem, was familiar with Palestine, and who lived less than a century after the time of our Lord, places the scene of the nativity in a cave. This is, indeed, the ancient and constant tradition both of the Eastern and the Western Churches, and it is one of the few to which, though unrecorded in Gospel history, we may attach a reasonable probability” (see p. 20 of the cheap edition [1906] of Farrar’s Life of Christ). The grotto of the manger in the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem is certainly a cave. Embedded in the rock is a much-kissed silver star bearing the inscription: “Hic de Virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus est.”
P. 122, line 6.—Krishna was slain.
The Vishnu Purâna speaks of his being shot in the foot with an arrow. Other accounts state that he was suspended on a tree. “On raconte fort diversement la mort de Crishna. Une tradition remarquable et avérée le fait périr sur un bois fatal (un arbre), ou il fut cloué d’un coup de flèche” (quoted from Mons. Guigniaut’s Religion de l’Antiquité, by Higgins; Anacalypsis, vol. i., p. 144). In the accounts given in the Mahâbhârata, Vishnu Purâna, and Bhagavat Purâna, the slaying is unintentional, but predestined. There appears to have been a crucifixion myth in ancient India; but Godfrey Higgins’ assumption that Krishna was crucified rests mainly on an oversight of the archæologist Moor (see J. M. Robertson’s Christianity and Mythology, pp. 294–9).
P. 123, lines 24–5.—Almost every important episode of the life of Christ.
“With the remarkable exception of the death of Jesus on the cross and of the doctrine of atonement by vicarious suffering, which is absolutely excluded by Buddhism, the most ancient of the Buddhistic records known to us contain statements about the life and the doctrines of Gautama Buddha which correspond in a remarkable manner, and impossibly by mere chance, with the traditions recorded in the Gospels about the life and doctrine of Jesus Christ” (quoted from p. 50 of Bunsen’s Angel Messiah).
P. 124, line 1.—Buddha was miraculously born.
Maya dreams that she is carried by archangels to heaven, and that there the future Buddha enters her right side in the form of a superb white elephant. Rhys Davids relates this legend on p. 183 of his Buddhism, and in a footnote he says: “Csoma Korösi refers in a distant way to a belief of the later Mongol Buddhists that Maya was a virgin (As. Res. xx. 299); but this has not been confirmed. St. Jerome says (Adversus Jovin., bk. 1): ‘It is handed down as a tradition among the Gymnosophists of India that Buddha, the founder of their system, was brought forth by a virgin from her side.’” In Samuel Beal’s Romantic History of Buddha (from the Chinese version) we read of Buddha’s miraculous birth, and that there is ground to assume the prevalence of this belief for centuries before Christ. Bunsen, again (p. x. of his Angel-Messiah), speaks of the “Virgin Maya, on whom, according to Chinese tradition, the Holy Ghost had descended”; and elsewhere (e.g., pp. 10 and 25) he adopts this version of the legend. Dr. Knowling, in his apologetic work, Our Lord’s Virgin Birth and the Criticism of Today, pp. 53–4, lays stress upon the grotesqueness of the idea that a man should enter his mother’s womb in the form of a white elephant. But, as Dr. Rhys Davids explains (p. 184 of Buddhism), there is nothing bizarre when the origin of the poetical figure has been ascertained. The belief was borrowed from the older sun-worship, “the white elephant, like the white horse [cf. Rev. vi. 2 and xix. 11, 14], being an emblem of the sun, the universal monarch of the sky.”