But there in the East it is not so. For weeks and months, for half the year may be, one perfect day is joined to another by more perfect nights.
Only there can man be alone. Only there, in the limitless silence of the desert, in the unending forests, can you live and forget all other men, and yourself almost, and be alone with Him who is G.o.d.
You want but little, no house to shelter you, no fire, but very little food and drink and clothes. You do not feel that restless desire to do something born of cold winds and skies. Your roof by day is the palm or tamarind, by night you watch the stars wheeling over your head. There is no one to commune with but Nature, and if you love her as she should be loved; if you woo her as she would be wooed; if you can send out your soul to lose itself with her in the wonders of the infinite, then shall you hear the music of the stars.
Thus has all religion come from the land of the sun: light is the fount of faith.
Never till you have been to the East can you know what faith is. Have we not religion, nay religions, in the North? Yes, but not as they have there. Do we not believe in the West? Yes, but not as they believe.
Faith lies there in the great distances, in the dawn, the noon, the sunset, in the holiness of the dark. It has sunk into the heart of man.
Consider, what do you see when you land anywhere in the East, what strikes you most, what is most prominent, not in the landscape, but in the people?
It is their religion.
You watch the people in the streets and you ask, Why has the merchant in that shop trident marks on his forehead? Because he is a Hindu and follows Vishnu. And that clerk who gave me money in the bank, why has he those other marks? Because he is a Brahmin. And that money-lender seems to have rubbed his forehead with ashes? He is a Chetty.
They carry their religion about with them, they are proud of it, they desire all men to know it. See that man"s beard, he is a Mahommedan; and yonder man with a green turban, he is a Seyid. They would not desire you to doubt it.
Did you ever see Englishmen praying in the streets? Perhaps never.
Certainly if ever you have seen it you condemned it as unnatural. "Let him pray at home," you have thought. "He is parading his piety." But here in the East it is different.
Go by the morning train, leave Rangoon Station when the sun is shining on the great paG.o.da, and you will see men and women and children lean out of the carriage windows to salute it, to murmur a prayer. The Mahommedan spreads his cloth and turns to Mecca, and prays no matter where he may be. He is not ashamed. It does not seem to him strange. He does it absolutely naturally, as all these people do all the things that pertain to their faiths. Neither his fellow-believers nor the adherents of other faiths wonder.
The Hindu may hate the Mahommedan for social reasons, and the Buddhist may hate both, but they do not despise each other for being religious.
It would never occur to a Hindu to despise or jeer at a Mahommedan for spreading his cloth at the street corner and praying. He thinks the faith a mistaken faith, _he_ would not have it. But if a man is a Mahommedan it is right of him to pray, of course.
I have never heard, no one has ever heard, one Oriental jeer at another for being religious, for obeying the commands of his faith. But I have heard Christians and teachers of Christianity do so very often. We will jeer at a Mahommedan for praying, at a Hindu for observing his caste, at a Buddhist for raising his hands in honour to his paG.o.da, at a Chinaman for protecting the graves of his fathers. For in the West we have never known what real religion is. We have it not ourselves, and so we cannot recognise and honour it in others. No brave man will mock at another brave man, though an enemy; no one who has loved mocks at another lover, though he love strange things. Only those jeer who do not know, and the Christians of the West jeer at the faiths of the East, at the simple natural religion of the people, because they know not what religion of the heart can be.
In Europe, what difference does a man"s faith make? None. He may live a lifetime with other men and no one know or care what his faith may be.
Unless he is a poor man and in need of mission, it is considered impertinence to ask. But here in the East a man"s faith is everything.
You cannot get away from it even for a moment. It is an essential part of him.
There is another thing that strikes one very soon. These Oriental religions have little or no organisation. Here in Europe there is nothing so organised as religion. Consider the Catholic faith and the organisation of Rome. It is a marvel of government, of very strict government indeed. And the other forms of Western Christianity are not much behind. The Greek Church is organised as a branch of Government.
So, too, to a lesser extent is the Anglican Church, and if the Dissenting bodies, as we call them, are not connected with the State, they have nevertheless a strong system of government.
These organisations are not now, of course, so strong as they were. They used to drag the men into religion by force, by State aid, they used to insist on conformity and punish laxity of observance. That is now gone, but a strong and continuous pressure still exists, exerted by the Churches in many ways. All Churches in Europe are always having "missions." Our great cities are full of them, and the country is not free of them. There has to be a continual shepherding of the flock or the Church might dwindle sadly. Men have to be preached at and caught one way or another. All through Europe immense sums are spent yearly in Christianising the poor.
In the East nothing of this exists. There is no head of Hinduism; that of the Sultan in Mahommedanism is merely nominal; how slight the organisation is of Buddhism those who have read my former book will know.
Hindus are guided by the race of Brahmins, who in turn are guided by no one. They are a great community themselves, without any organisation or binding authority. They need no Pope, no Acts of Uniformity. They are Brahmins because they are so. And so it may be said in general. Faiths in the East require no strong organisations to hold them together.
Religion is innate in the believers. It seems wonderful. And they have no missions. If a man feels the need of faith he will seek it and obtain it. It is there for him if he will come. And all do come. How many millions in Europe, even in England, have no religious usages? Can you in the East find one man?
When you think of Europe and its faiths you seem to be in a garden where the hedges are carefully clipped and the flowers are trained and pruned, and where you may not walk on the gra.s.s. It is all order, and method, and restriction, for the flowers are exotics and would die without the tending, they would vary if they were not kept true to type. But the East is Nature"s garden, where the flowers grow wild everywhere; no one tends them or cares for them, but each grows his own way, developes his own power and strength, from the lowest gra.s.ses to the gorgeous orchid or the poison lily.
Therefore it may be that in this East, this country whence all religions have come, where the whole air breathes of faiths and all life is full of them, the man who has lost his early beliefs may learn new ones.
There is so much to choose from, so many varieties of thought and emotion.
In this Empire of ours are all the great religions. It is the home of Brahminism, of the mystical forms of Hinduism, beyond which it has never spread. There are more Mahommedans here than under the Sultan of Roum.
There are the Pa.r.s.ees here, fugitives long ago from Persia on account of their faith, the only sun worshippers who are left. There are Jews who came here no one can tell how long ago, there are Christians who date back may be eighteen centuries, there are Armenians and Arabs. Within this Empire live the only race professing a Buddhism that is pure and without superst.i.tion; and beside these there are a hundred other cults, superst.i.tions, or religions, call them what you will.
From the spirit worship of the Shan plateau to the dignified philosophic theories of the Brahmo Somaj is a s.p.a.ce as wide as the world can show, yet may it be bridged with religions that differ but by small degrees till the whole be pa.s.sed.
If anyone want a faith here are enough and to spare. "Therefore,"
thought the boy, who had now become a man, "I will seek here for what I want. I know what I want. I have it clearly before me. I have even written it down. It is not as if I was undertaking a blind search for something of which I was not sure. These are my three essentials: a reasonable theory of the universe, a workable and working code of conduct, a promise in the after life that gives me something to really desire, to really hope for, to be a haven towards which I may steer. I will take each subject, each section of a subject, separately and read it up. I will read up these faiths from books, I will study them as I can from the people, and I will see what they are. Surely somewhere can be found what I desire, what I desire so greatly to find."
CHAPTER VII.
THE WISDOM OF BOOKS.
Therefore the man got books and read them. He read books on Hinduism, many of them; he read the Vedas and the sacred hymns. He learnt of Vishnu and Siva, of Krishna and the milkmaids. He found books on caste and read them, of how these were originally four castes which subdivided. He read of suttee and the car of Juggernauth. He then turned to Mahommedanism and the life of Mahommed. He read the Koran. He learned the early history of the faith, of its rise, of the glory of its result, of the fall of its great Empire. He saw it had much to do with Judaism, there were great similarities, there were also differences. He read of Pa.r.s.eeism, that taught by Zoroaster which they call fire worship; he read of Jainism, of the cult of the Sikhs, of many another strange faith; he learned of the spirit worship of the aboriginal tribes among the mountains, of Phallic worship and its monstrosities.
He read of Confucius and his teachings, of Laotze and his doctrines, of ancestor worship among the Chinese, of Shintoism in j.a.pan.
Most of all he read about Buddhism. There was something here that attracted him more than in all the rest. In the life of Gaudama the Buddha he found a beauty that came to him as a charm, in the teachings of the Great Teacher there seemed to him a light such as he had not seen. Mystery and miracle and the supernatural had always jarred on him, they had an unpleasant savour, as of appeals to the lowest elements in the minds of the credulous and ignorant. Truth he thought should not need such meretricious attractions. Here was a faith that needed none of these things. It could exist without them. It contained explanations, not dogmas. It was reasonableness instead of hysteria, it denounced mysticism and the cult of the supernatural.
It took the man several years to read these books, and he lived those years much alone. His house lay half up a mountain side. Below him lay tangled ma.s.ses of hills clothed with dense forest, with here and there a clearing. Before him was a jagged mountain wall, behind a great bare dome of rock. It was always wonderful to sit and watch, to see the sun rise in gold and crimson behind the peaks, while all below lay in a white mist; to watch the sun rays fall and the mist grow thinner, showing faint outlines of tree clump and hill contour, till all the mist was gone and the world was full of golden light. Daily he saw the marvel of the dawn. He learnt to love it as the most beautiful of things, most beautiful because full of the promise of untold glory. For the most part his life was very lonely. There were the labourers who worked for him, the black, half-nude people who came in gangs in May and left in February of each year. They were not of his world. He directed their work, he paid them, but he did not know them. He wondered at them, that was all, and there were scattered here and there throughout the hills other Europeans, who lived much the same life as he did, and whom he met occasionally at their houses or his, or at the club ten miles away. He liked them, some of them were his best friends, a great part of his life was theirs also.
But there was, aside from his friends, aside from the merry meetings, the games, the chaff, the laughter, another life apart. There was a life he lived to himself, in another world it seemed. His world was of the mountain and the fell, of the brooks that laughed down the precipice, of the giant trees, the tangled creepers, the delicate orchid far above.
His thoughts were with them and with his books, for they should be brothers. He read and he watched, and he tried to understand; he asked of nature the meaning of these religions, to tell him the secret that he would know. What is the truth of things--what do you mean? And I----What do _I_ mean? What is the secret of it all?
The mountains and the trees answered him and told him secrets, the secrets of their hearts, but not the secret he would know. They murmured to him of many things, of beauty, of love, of peace, of forgetfulness.
They sang the world"s slumber song.
But of whence, of how, of whither they told him nothing, only they ceased talking when he asked, they ceased their song and there was silence. They could not tell.
So he lay upon the rocks and read, and the hills and trees wondered because they knew not of what he read. "Take care," they whispered; "why trouble? Life is so short, surely it were wise to make the best of it; for no one can answer what you ask. We die and fall and new trees grow again, the hills are newly clad each year. The old return in new forms.
We can tell of ourselves, we are not afraid. Our lives are full of delight. Death has no terror for us. But you? Of you we know nothing. We have no echo to your words."
Yet the man read on. He dreamed and read and dreamed again.
"I have three wants," he said. "I would know whence I came, I would have some rule to live by, I would know whither I am going. Religions, many religions profess to tell men these things, surely somewhere there will be truth. Nearly all men are satisfied with their religion, cannot I find one that satisfies me? It is so little that I ask, I have here so many answers. Amongst them I will be able to find what I want."
Therefore he read on. But in the thoughts of many teachers there is not clearness, but confusion. In a mult.i.tude of counsellors there is not wisdom, only mist, only the strange shadows made by many lights. He found that he did not gain. "Sometimes," he said, "I agree with one, sometimes with another. No one seems to be altogether true. There is Truth, perhaps, but not the whole Truth. This will not do."
At last he said to himself that he would make a system. He would take certain ideas from various faiths, he would put them together, he would compare them one by one and see what he learnt.
There is, he said, the First Cause. What do religions say about this First Cause? There is Brahma, and Jehovah, and Ahriman, with Ormuz; there is the Buddhist doctrine of Law, there is the Christian Trinity.
These are some of the chief ideas. What can be made of them? Have they a common truth? Are the great religions utterly at variance about this First Cause, or can they agree? I will take this point and consider it first. What is the First Cause? Then I will pa.s.s to another. What does life mean? Why are we here? Is there any explanation of this? For what object does man exist? To what end? He did not mean what is the end of man, but what is the object of man, of life? To whom is it a benefit that man exists? To G.o.d--if there be a G.o.d? If not, to whom? It cannot be that existence is an aimless freak, that it has no object. But what can this object be? What was to be gained by creating man at all? That was question number two. There is no answer to this question.
There were many other questions that he asked. And when he had framed a question he sat down to his books to find the answer. He worked at them as problems to be solved. He sought in the various faiths described in his books the answers to these problems. What he found will be shown in the next few chapters; but let it be understood again how and why he sought.
He had been born in a faith and brought up in it, and had abandoned it.
He left it because he sought in it certain helps to thought and to life that it seemed to him religion ought to give. More, it seemed to him that these answers were of the very essence of religion. His fathers"
faith gave him answers he could not accept, it gave him a rule of life he could not follow, that seemed to him untrue. Yet would he not be satisfied with ignorance, he would search further. He wanted a religion, a belief, and he would find it.
For I want it to be understood very clearly that he was no scoffer, no denier of religion. It was the very reverse. He so much wanted a faith, it seemed to him such an eminently necessary thing, that he would not be content till he had one that he could really accept and believe. He hated doubt and half acceptance. He wanted a truth that appealed to him as a whole truth, that held no room for doubt.