Christian Music News

From a pantheistic First Cause
Gnosticism traced the emanation of a series of eons beings of Light.
The source of evil was supposed to be matter, which in this material
world holds light in captivity. To liberate the light and thus redeem
the world, Christ came, and thus Christianity was added as the crowning
and victorious element in this many-sided system of speculation. But
Christ was regarded not so much as a Saviour of individual souls as an
emancipator of a disordered kosmos, and the system which seemed to
accord great honor to Christianity threatened to destroy its life and
power. So, according to some of our Modern Systems, men are to find
their future salvation in the grander future of the race.

The bland and easy-going catholicity which professes so much in our day,
which embraces all faiths and unfaiths in one sweet emulsion of
meaningless negations, which patronizes the Christ and His doctrines,
and applies the nomenclature of Christianity to doctrines the very
opposite of its teachings, finds a counterpart in the smooth and vapid
compromises of the old Gnostics. “Gnosticism,” says Uhlhorn, “combined
Greek philosophies, Jewish theology, and ancient Oriental theosophy,
thus forming great systems of speculative thought, all with the object
of displaying the world’s development.

There are other alliances, not a few, between the East and the West.
In India and Japan the old Buddhism is compounded with American
Spiritualism and with modern Evolution, under a new application of the
ancient name of Theosophy. In Japan representatives of advanced
Unitarianism are exhorting the Japanese Buddhists to build the religion
of the future on their old foundations, and to avoid the propagandists
of western Christianity.

Not even the old Gnostics could present so striking an admixture
as that of the Arya Somaj. It has appropriated many of those Christian
ethics which have been learned from a century of contact with
missionaries and other Christian residents. It has approved the more
humane customs and reforms of Christendom, denouncing caste, and the
degradation of woman. It has repudiated the corrupt rites and the
degrading superstitions of Hinduism. At the same time its hatred of the
Christian faith is most bitter and intense.

As Manichæans and
Gnostics corrupted the truths of the Old and New Testaments with ideas
borrowed from Persian mysticism; as various eclectic systems gathered up
all types of thought which the wide conquests of the Roman Empire
brought together, and mingled them with Christian teachings; so now the
increased intercommunication, and the quickened intellectual activity
of our age have led to the fusion of different systems, ancient and
modern, in a negative and nerveless religion of humanity. We now have in
the East not only Indian, but Anglo-Indian, speculations. The
unbelieving Calcutta graduate has Hegel and Spinoza interwoven with his
Vedantism, and the eclectic leader of the Brahmo Somaj, while placing
Christ at the head of the prophets and recognizing the authority of all
sacred bibles of the races, called on Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and
Mohammedans to unite in one theistic church of the New Dispensation in
India.

German philosophy has borrowed its pantheism from India rather than from
Greece, and in its most shadowy developments it has never transcended
the ancient Vedantism of Vyasa.
As in the early centuries, so in our time, different systems of religion
have been commingled and interwoven into protean forms of error more
difficult to understand and dislodge than any one of the faiths and
philosophies of which they were combined. As the Alexandrian Jews
intertwined the teachings of Judaism and Platonism.

The atomic theory of creation advanced by Lucretius is found also in the
Nyaya philosophy of the Hindus. The pessimism of Pliny and Marcus
Aurelius was much more elaborately worked out by Gautama. The Hindus had
their categories and their syllogisms as well as Aristotle. The
conception of a dual principle in deity which the early Church traced in
all the religious systems of Egypt, Phoenicia, and Assyria, and whose
influence poisoned the life of the Phoenician colonies, and was so
corrupting to the morals of Greece and Rome, was also elaborated by the
Sankhya philosophy of Kapila, and it has plunged Hindu society into as
deep a degradation as could be found in Pompeii or Herculaneum.[23] The
Indian philosophy partook far more of the pantheistic element than that
of Greece. Plato and Aristotle had clearer conceptions of the
personality of the deity and of the distinct and responsible character
of the human soul than any school of Hindu philosophers–certainly
clearer than the Vedantists, and their ethics involved a stronger sense
of sin.

In the proud intellectual character of the systems encountered
respectively by the ancient and by the modern Church, there are
remarkable parallels. The supercilious pride of Brahminism, or the lofty
scorn of Mohammedanism, is quite equal to that self-sufficient Greek
philosophy in whose eyes the Gospel was the merest foolishness. And the
immovable self-righteousness of the Stoics has its counterpart in the
Confucianism of the Chinese literati. A careful comparison of the six
schools of Hindu philosophy with the various systems of Greece and
Rome, will fill the mind with surprise at the numerous
correspondences–one might almost say identities. And that surprise is
the greater from the fact that no proof exists that either has been
borrowed from the other.

When the Church went forth in comparative poverty, and with an intense
moral earnestness, to preach righteousness, temperance, and the judgment
to come; when those who were wealthy gave all to the poor–like Anthony
of Egypt, Jerome, Ambrose, and Francis of Assisi–and in simple garments
bore the Gospel to those who were surfeited with luxuries and pleasures,
and were sick of a life of mere indulgence, then the truth of the Gospel
conquered heathenism with all that the world could give. But whether a
Church in the advanced civilization of our land and time, possessed of
enormous wealth, enjoying every luxury, and ever anxious to gain more
and more of this present world, can convert heathen races who deem
themselves more frugal, more temperate, and less worldly than we, is a
problem which remains to be solved. We have rare facilities, but we have
great drawbacks. God’s grace can overcome even our defects, and He has
promised success.

On the other hand, we who are the ambassadors to the heathen of to-day,
are ourselves exposed to the dangers which result from wealth and
excessive luxury. Our grade of life, our scale of expenditure, even the
style in which our missionaries live, excites the amazement of the
frugal heathen to whom they preach. And as for the Church at home, it is
hardly safe for a Persian or a Chinaman to see it. Everyone who visits
this wonderful eldorado carries back such romantic impressions as excite
in others, not so much the love of the Gospel as the love of mammon.