Digital Rare Book:
East and West in Religion
By Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Published by George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London - 1933

Book Excerpt:

CHRISTIAN MISSIONS AND INDIAN FAITHS

This point may be illustrated by a reference to the delicate question of the attitude of the Christian missionaries in India to Indian faiths. This attitude has changed somewhat in the same way as have the political relations between Great Britain and India. The latter may be broadly distinguished into the three stages of (i) The East India Company, (2) The British Empire, (3) The British Commonwealth of Nations. In the first stage, India was simply a field for exploitation. She had no rights of her own and John Company did not believe it necessary to treat her with any respect, much less reverence. The Christian missionaries of that day did not recognize anything vital or valuable in the Indian religions. For them, the native faiths were a mass of unredeemed darkness and error. They had supreme contempt for the heathen religions and wished to root them out, lock, stock and barrel. It is a natural tendency of the human mind to suppose that its own god is God of all the earth, while all other gods are "mumbo jumbo" made with human hands. Bishop Heber s famous hymn brings out admirably this attitude of iconoclasm. That Christianity is the one true religion and all other religions are utterly false has been the belief not only of the rank and file in the Christian Church but also of many Christian men and women of high intellectual standing. This aggressive propaganda lacked the one thing needful charity.

In 1858, after the Great Indian Mutiny a mutiny was necessary the British Government took charge of India and recognized certain rights and interests of the Indian people ; but India became a dependency, a means to an end, and the interests of Great Britain were paramount. All the same, it is an improvement on the conditions of the East India Company. Similarly the Christian missionaries of the second stage realized the futility of aggressive propaganda, and did not dismiss the Indian faiths as a mass of superstition and a sink of iniquity, but regarded them as possessing some virtues of their own. For a religious development existing over forty centuries and attaining spiritual heights which challenge comparison with the best products of other religions cannot be set aside as having no survival value. The other systems came to be regarded as a preparation, and Christianity as the crown and completion of them all. While the first attitude is reminiscent of the spirit of Tertullian, who could see in paganism nothing but the work of the devil, the second has the support of St. Paul and Origen, who recognized on every side signs of the preparation for the Gospel. St. Paul regarded the pagans as "seeking after God if haply they might find Him." His policy of being all things to all men is not the result of an ignorant opportunism. The same attitude is present in the Fourth Gospel, many of the Greek Fathers, the schoolmen of the Middle Ages and the Christian Platonists. It is argued that everything of value in the old religions is conserved in the new, for Jesus came to fulfil and not destroy. The series of volumes in The Religious Quest of India illustrate the second stage. But there is, right through, the imperialistic note that Christianity is the highest manifestation of the religious spirit; that it is the moral standard for the human race while every other religion is to be judged by it.

That Christianity is the one
From Greenlands icy mountains,
From India's coral strand,
Where Afric's sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sand,
From many an ancient river.
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver
Their land from error's chain.

What though the spicy breezes
Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle,
Though every prospect pleases
And only man is vile !
In vain with lavish kindness
The gifts of God are strown,
The heathen in his blindness
Bows down to wood and stone. ...

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