The Faiths of the World :A Concise Histo

flfotnell Inimeraitg |3ibrarg CHARLES WILLIAM WASON COLLECTION CHINA AND THE CHINESE THE GIFT OF CHARLES WILLrAM WASON CLASS OF J876 1918 Cornell University Library BL 80.F17 The Faiths of the world :a concise histo 3 1924 022 993 830 All books are subject to recall after two weeks Olin/Kroch Library DATE DUE F/7 .St ffiilcs* a^ecturcs—Second .Scries THE FAITHS OF THE WORLD Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022993830 THE FAITHS OF THE WORLD A CONCISE HISTORY OF THE GREAT RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS OF THE WORLD WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCLXXXII a PREFATORY NOTE. The Lectures contained in this volume were delivered in St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh, and in the Cathedral, Glasgow, on Sundays during the winter of 1881-82. They are studies in comparative theology, and are now published in the belief that many who heard them desire to possess them in a permanent form, and in the hope that, from the subject of which they treat, they may prove interesting to a wider circle than those who listened to them. Each lecturer is only responsible for the views expressed by himself St Giles', Edinburgit, May 1882. CONTENTS. LECT.. PACE I. Religions of India: Vedic Period — BUAHMANISM. By the Very Rev. John Caird, D.D., Principal of the University of Glasgow, . i II. Religions of India : Buddhism. By the Same, ... -37 III. Religion of China : Confucianism. By the Rev. George Matheson, D.D., Minister of the Parish of Innellan, . -73 IV. Religion of Persia : Zoroaster and the Zend Avesta. By the Rev. John Milne, M. A., Minister of Green- side Parish, Edinburgh, . ,109 V. Religion of Ancient Egypt. By the Rev. James Dodds, D.D., Minister of the Parish of Corstorphine, .... 145 VI. Religion of Ancient Greece. By the Rev. William Milligan, D.D., Professor of Biblical Criticism in the University of Aber- deen, . ... 181 viii Contents. VII. Religion of Ancient Rome. By the Rev. James MacGregor, D. D., Senior Minister of St Cuthbert's Parish, Edinburgh, . 217 VIII. Teutonic and Scandinavian Religion. By the Rev. George Stewart Burns, D.D., Minister of the Cathedral, Glasgow, . 253 IX. Ancient Religions of Central America. By the Rev. John Marshall Lang, D.D., Minis- ter of the Barony Parish, Glasgow, . 289 X. Judaism. By the Rev. Malcolm Campbell Taylor, D.D., Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the Univer- sity of Edinburgh, .... 325 XI. Mahommedanism. By the Rev. James Cameron Lees, D.D., Minister of St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh ; and one of her Majesty's Chaplains, . .361 XII. Christianitv in Relation to other Reli- gions. By the Rev, Robert Flint, D.D., LL.D., Pro- fessor of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh, 397 ST GILES' LECTURES. SECOND SERIES— THE FAITHS OF THE WORLD. LECTURE I. RELIGIONS OF INDIA: VEDIC PERIOD—BRAHMANISM. By the Very Rev. John Caird, D.D., Principal of the University of Glasgow. THE study of the pre-Christian religions possesses both a practical and a speculative interest for the Christian mind. As he who would teach a child must himself, in a sense, become a child—throw himself back into the childish attitude of mind, and adapt his instructions to its immature conceptions, and even to its vagaries and illusions ; so there is a sense in which it may be said that he who seeks to convert a heathen must himself become a heathen—must, by a kind of intellectual self-abnegation, endeavour to throw himself into the point of view of the minds he A ^ The Faiths of the World. would elevate, and attain to some measure of sym- pathy with them. Catholic missionaries have, justly or unjustly, been sometimes accused of gaining a too easy victory for Christianity by assimilating its doc- trines to heathen superstitions. But whilst that is only a nominal conversion which reclaims from hea- thenism to a Christianity which has itself become heathenish, it may yet be averred that a true conversion can be achieved only by a process of which this is the travesty—not, that is, by tampering with Chris- tian truth, but by discerning and exhibiting its affin- ities to the unconscious longings and aspirations of the human spirit at all stages of its development. But the study of the earlier and imperfect forms of faith has another than practical interest for the Chris- tian mind. The maxim of Christian wisdom to which I have referred rests on the principle that there is an essential relation between Christianity and the pre- Christian religions. Even those who shrink from any such notion as that the religious history of the world is the expression of a natural process of development, are not thereby precluded from recognising in the earlier stages of that history a preparation and pro- paedeutic for the more advanced. It is possible to hold that Christianity is no mere combined result of Jewish and heathen elements, and yet to discern in the characteristic ideas of the pre-Christian religions the germs at least of conceptions of God and of His relations to the world, which find at once their unity and their explanation in our Christian faith. What the great monotheistic and pantheistic faiths of the Religions of India. 3 ancient world were feeling after they failed to reach, for this, apart from "other reasons, that their solu- tion of the problem of religion was, in each case, a one-sided and fragmentary one, — that the element of truth which each contained was rendered false because held in isolation from that which is its necessary complement. On the one hand, in a religion which conceives of God simply as the creator and ruler of the world, absolutely exalted above it, un- affected by its limits, incapable of being implicated in its imperfections, the moral sublimity of the conception easily passes into a false elevation if it lacks, as. the necessary complement of a power and will transcending the world, the idea of an infinite thought and love which reveals itself in it. On the other hand, a religion which sees God in all things—the reality beneath all appearances, th6 substance of all change- ful forms, the all-pervading yet incomprehensible life in which all finite existences live and move and have their being,—such a religion, if its conception of the immanence of God in the world leaves no place for the equally essential idea of His transcendence over the world, speedily discloses its weakness in the ob- literation of moral distinctions, and the swamping of finite individuality and freedom. In briefer terms, monotheistic religions are imperfect because they exclude the pantheistic element, pantheistic religions because they lack the monotheistic element. It lends a new force to our appreciation of the nature and spiritual value of the Christian faith if we can discern in it that which at once comprehends and transcends ; 4 The Faiths of the World. these earlier religions, embracing what is true, and supplying the complement of what is imperfect, and the corrective of what is false, in both. Whilst, there- fore, we may hold that Christianity is neither a repro- duction nor a natural development of the imperfect notions of God in which the religious aspirations of the old world embodied themselves, it is possible at the same time to maintain that the study of the old religions sheds new light on the Christian religion, and gives to us a new and deeper sense of its spiritual significance and power. The religions of which in this and the following lecture we are to treat, belong to one of the two kinds or groups of religions under which, as above indicated in a very rough and general classification, the religions of the pre-Christian world may be embraced. Brahmanism and Buddhism, in other words, are pantheistic religions. What that designation means we shall understand better by tracing the origin and historical development of these religions than by any formal or philosophical definition of the term. I. A Christian apostle, addressing a heathen audi- ence, tells them that God " hath made of one blood all nations of men, to dwell on the face of the earth . that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us : for in Him we live, and move, and have our being." If we ask what we mean by the word "religion," or why amongst the manifold elements of human experience, we characterise one ; Religions of India. 5 particular kind of experience as " religious," per- haps no better answer could be given than in these words of St Paul. Religion is that attitude of the human spirit, and its outward manifestations and expressions, in which, in all races and climes, we see it "feeling after God, if haply it may find Him." We are " the offspring of God." In the very essence of man's nature as a spiritual being there is that which renders it impossible for him to rest in the things that are seen and temporal, which forces him to rise above the world of finite and transitory experience, of ever-changing forms and appearances, and to seek after an infinite reality which underlies and transcends them. Within the rudest and most undeveloped nature made in the image of God, there is a latent capacity of transcending the finite, an inalienable affinity to what is universal and infinite and it is this which constitutes the secret impulse to the search after God, and the key to the outward phenomena of the history of religion.

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