Religion.

A

LECTURE

TO

EDUCATED HINDOOS,

DELIVERED ON

SUNDAY, MARCH 20,

BY THE

REV. E. F. BROWN, M. A.,

OF

THE OXFORD MISSION.

Price 1 Anna.

CALCUTTA:

OXFORD MISSION PRESS.

The following is the second of a series of four lectures. The subjects of the remaining ones are Theism, and Christianity, which will be published as they are delivered.

Religion.

To night I meet you again, my dear friends, with the feeling that we have gained a great step towards understanding each other. Last Sunday, if you remember, we spoke of duty and I tried to establish that some sense of duty is the first necessary condition for the pursuit of truth. And whether I succeeded in establishing it to your satisfaction I do not know; but so firmly am I convinced of it myself, that I would not willingly have amongst my hearers anyone who comes without this sense of Duty-I would rather speak to two people in whom it exists, than to two hundred or two thousand in whom it does not—and I invited to depart, and do now again most solemnly invite to depart, anyone who is seeking the truth from mere curiosity or without any sense (I do not say he must have a full sense) of the responsibility which the truth must bring. I did so because I believe that truth, if it were made known to such a one, would not only do him no good, but would do him fearful harm. Knowledge is power, but power either for good or evil. The ignorant man whose moral sense is perverted is comparatively harmless: but the man of large mind, set free from the sense of responsibility, becomes a very devil.

Well then, by your very presence here you confess that you have a desire not merely to know the truth, but to live it: and this, I say, at once places us in cordial sympathy. For between men and men the great gulf is fixed according to the tendency of their wills-not according as they have weak wills or strong wills, wills darkened by ignorance or wills illumined by knowledge, but according as they have good wills or evil wills, wills selfish or wills directed-shall I say?-to that "something not ourselves which makes for righteousness." All who are genuinely loyal to Duty, all who have pledged themselves for life or death to follow wherever it leads. form one great brotherhood bound together by a stronger tie than anything else can create the real hope of the human race-and so it has been

said truly "an honest man 's the noblest work of God," not because moral honesty is the highest virtue of all, bnt because it is the root of all none other can exist without it.

Duty is indeed the fairest name which man in his natural state has heard, or can hear. If man were so pure, so perfect, that he could recognise it instinctively, and obey it unhesitatingly, then it might stand alone, as the Law of Gravitation for the moral Universe; that which would keep every moral being in his place. But now I ask, Can it stand alone?

George Eliot's Romola' is to my mind the greatest work of fiction in the English language. Its heroine is a woman possessed by a pure and passionate longing for the right. In the time of prosperity and little temptation, it never occurs to her to ask what is the standard of right and wrong: she is content with her hereditary ideas upon the subject. Nor does she need a motive for obeying it; it is the instinctive law of her soul from which she has never swerved. She lives in seclusion, with an old and studious father; fidelity to him bounds her vision of duty. But across this quiet life-as sooner or later across all our quiet lives-there cut at last disturbing influences. She finds herself bound to a selfish and treacherous husband. To the question of what is her duty to him she does not find in the hitherto narrow round of her experience any answer; and she is nearly taking a false step, when her great soul-need impels her to accept the guidance of that great monk-reformer, whose figure will for ever stand out prominent in history, Savonarola. For a time she finds peace and joy amidst all external troubles in the new life of charity and obedience—it is more a belief in him than a belief in his religion-into which he leads her. But at last there comes a day when her trust in him breaks down. She endures "one of those sickening moments, when the enthusiasm which had come to her as the only energy strong enough to make life worthy, seemed to her to be inevitably bound up with vain dreams and wilful eye-shutting." And now, cries the author at last, when the doubt had become a certainty-when she found she could never more believe in her hero-" What force was there to create for her that supremely hallowed motive which men call duty, but which can have no constraining influence save through some form of believing love?"

My friends, it is a parable of our own lives. We step forward out

of our childhood with all the sacred traditionary associations of home and religion clinging around us, nothing doubting but that as we have never found them fail us yet, so they will always be sufficient to guide us through the mazy paths of life. From that dream we are rudely awakened-it may be by some sorrow, it may be by some scoffing words, it may be by some terrible temptation—and all the sanctions, which duty has had for us hitherto, melt away in that blast of fiery trial. Yet, even though we have given way, the instinct of duty is strong within us still; and we take up with some hero worship, some loyal friendship, which reinforces by a personal devotion the motives to duty which have been found too weak in the day of trial. Yet that too can only be for a time. Sooner or later the day must come when the flaw shall be detected in every human ideal, a mere personal influence is not enough to guide us, and we too find out that duty can have no constraining influence, save through some form of believing love.

Something to believe, and something to love; in one word, a Religion. I use the word in its largest sense. It is sometimes confined to a belief in divine truths: but I do not wish now so to limit it. Let it be defined as any power, human or divine, which makes duty possible by giving it a standard and a motive-something to believe and something to love. I shall try to show you that there is such a power, one and the same for all mankind: and that power must be the Truth.

Some would say that it is not so. They would say that the standard of duty is a shifting one, different for different people and for different ages. You act up to your light and I act up to mine, and we are both right" is a very common nostrum-or as Pope puts it:

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"For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight,
"His can't be wrong whose life is in the right.

It is evident that if it were so, there is no such thing as an Absolute Truth; and therefore the quest for it would be idle.

But again I shall appeal to the facts of human nature: and because human nature is portrayed most vividly and freshly by the poets and tale-writers of every age, I shall make no apology for referring frequently to them, as well as to the men who have propounded philosophic systems.

1. Our own reason tells us that there must be a supreme standard, as well as a supreme motive, of duty.