Chapter Xiii — The Christ Of The Indian Road
CHAPTER XIII
THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD
SOME time ago I was criticized kindly but earnestly by a missionary in India who complained that “I preached a living Christ instead of a dead Christ.” I think I knew what he meant. He felt I did not enough emphasize what Jesus did, expressed in fixed formulas and set systems, not enough of that once-and-for-all-accomplished idea. I pleaded guilty, though I could say with my brother that I thought I could go as far as he went—maybe further—in believing in what Jesus accomplished for us upon the cross. He died for me. Fill those words with all the wealth of meaning that grateful human hearts can put into them and I still feel there is room for something else to be said. He was the Unspeakable Gift . I weave my formulas about him and he steps out beyond them! The Word is too big for my words. But I believe in that past. Jesus is the same yesterday. Cut the historical from the experimental and there will soon be no experimental. We must have the past.
Yet Christ is living to-day. He not only accomplishes for us in the past, he accompanies with us in the present. He is no spent force. He is the Great Contemporary. Studdart Kennedy is right when he says that we do not know what it is that is troubling us in our modern world, but that it is this: Christ has got hold of us. We are not nearly as smugly complacent as we were. We cannot bring ourselves to obey him absolutely or to turn away from him. He is getting hold of us in East and West.
I find him in places and movements I had never dreamed of and by the quiet sense of his presence he is forcing modification everywhere. Call the roll of the reforms that are sweeping across India, and whether they be economic, social, moral, or religious, they are all tending straight toward Christ and his thought. Not one of them is going away from him, that is, if it be a reform and not a reaction.
A friend in describing Sir George Gabriel Stokes, the discoverer of the science of spectroscopy and the theory of the undulation of light, told me of how very gentle and retiring he was. Along with this modesty he was a saint. He did not care a scrap if people did not recognize him as the author of these discoveries. He was constantly behind Kelvin and Thomson and others pushing them forward while he remained unnoticed. “I cannot tell you,” he concluded, “how many things he was behind.” As we sat there we talked of how many things Jesus was behind in India and the East, though often unnoticed.
A Cabinet minister in Japan, in reply to the question, “How do you account for the immense increase of labor unrest since the war?” instead of attributing it to Bolshevism, said, “It is Christianity working among the people; the working man is testing Christ’s preaching of larger life and freedom.” As a non-Christian laborer put it to one of our missionaries: “We laborers understand Christ, for he was a laboring man and bore a cross. Every laborer understands that cross, for he has to bear one.” Back of many of the movements throughout the East the living Spirit of Jesus can be felt.
The last Mohammedan king of Oudh had three hundred and sixty-five wives. One of his palaces has now been turned into a Legislative Council Hall. I sat there in that former harem and listened to a debate on woman’s suffrage, and saw Hindus and Mohammedans pass the bill unanimously. Up in the galleries was a fine group of our splendidly trained and educated young women of the Isabella Thoburn College. Again and again the speakers referred to their presence and one of them said, “We’ve got to give them suffrage—see who are looking down on us.” Without a word there was the silent pressure of the Christian spirit upon the situation. Jesus was back of it.
Travancore is the most caste-ridden section of India. Yet in the very center of it we sat down to an intercaste dinner—a hundred high-caste Hindus, a hundred outcastes, a hundred Indian Christians, a few Mohammedans, and several of us of the West. They mixed us up so that here was a high caste, next to him an out-caste, a Mohammedan, one of us, an outcaste again, and so on down the line. I sat between a Mohammedan and an outcaste. As I sat down the Mohammedan said, “Well, thank God we are all down together at last.” As I sat there and watched the amazed faces of those outcastes, faces that bore the marks of the centuries of suppression, I thought I saw One standing back of them saying, “I was in prison and you visited me.” The chains of the centuries were being broken by the pressure of the Spirit of the Son of man upon the conscience.
By the silent pressure of his presence he is forcing modification everywhere. Movements are springing up, many of them but dimly recognizing that the impelling Spirit of Jesus is behind them. “Hindu Christians!” said a discerning Hindu with a smile to me as we watched a crowd of earnest Hindu social workers. Christ is abroad upon the Indian Road, and as he sits by the wayside the sensitive soul of India knows that he understands toil and pain and sorrow and enters in and feels with them. One of the leading Hindu thinkers of North India at the close of my address expressed the truth in these beautiful words: “The thing that strikes me about Jesus is his imaginative sympathy. He entered into the experiences of men and felt with them. He could feel the darkness of the blind, the leprosy of the leper, the loneliness of the rich, the degradation of the poor, and the guilt of the sinner. And who shall we say he is? He called himself the Son of man. He also called himself the Son of God—we must leave it at that.” This professor beautifully expressed what men are vaguely feeling.
Jesus does not stand before the blind and the leper and the poor and the sinner and discourse philosophically on why they are in such condition, but lays his hands of sympathy upon them and heals them through his servants; and more—he puts his gentle but condemning finger upon the conscience of the hale and hearty Pharisee in the crowd and asks why he has allowed all this. “Why?” he persists in asking. And for the first time men begin to feel that they are in very truth their brother’s keeper, and that the wretchedness of the poor and the sick is not a sign of their sin of a previous birth, but the sign of the sin of the privileged in this birth for allowing it. Movements come out of such thoughts as these, and such thoughts are coming from Christ, very often standing unnoticed in the shadows.
Some do recognize what is happening. The Hindu professor of modern history in a South India college said to me, “My study of modern history has shown me that there is a Moral Pivot in the world to-day, and that the best life of both East and West is more and more revolving about that center—that Moral Pivot is the person of Jesus Christ.” It is as interesting as a novel to watch men’s thoughts and spirits as they get within the sphere of his influence, being caught by the attraction of his person and their life beginning to revolve about him. This is the sphere of influence that we watch with bated breath. All other spheres of influence in the East created for purposes of exploitation and political intrigue are the breeding places for jealousy and strife, but this sphere of influence of Jesus is healing and cementing and saving.
Listen to the testimony of this outstanding philosopher of India, a man deeply read in the philosophy of East and West. When I asked him my question I inwardly steeled myself for the shock of his criticism, for I knew it would be keen. “Professor, what do you think of Jesus Christ?” I asked. He replied: “We had high ideas of God before Jesus came. But Jesus is the highest expression of God that we have seen. He is conquering us by the sheer force of his own person even against our wills.” Jesus wins, not because of any religious trick or cleverness, but because he is winsome; he compels, not because he calls in Cæsar’s help, but because he is compelling; he is Saviour just because men find in him what a Saviour ought to be—he saves; he draws the world just by being lifted up.
Christ is confronting men everywhere. He has got hold of us. A Hindu lawyer of fine ability gave an address to which I listened on the topic, “The Inescapable Christ.” He said: “We have not been able to escape him. There was a time when our hearts were bitter and sore against him, but he is melting them by his own winsomeness. Jesus is slowly but surely entering all men in India—yea, all men.” The only thing that I could think of all through the address was this: “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold. Them also I must bring.” How is it possible to limit or demarcate the lines of the Kingdom any more? He steps beyond them, and shocked and frightened like the Pharisees of other days we stand and wonder how far he will go in his warm sympathy and understanding. He eats with publicans and sinners and with the Hindu too. No wonder H. G. Wells in summing up the influence of Jesus upon human history in his Outline of History exclaims, “The Galilæan has been too great for our small hearts.”
When this Galilæan was upon earth with us he said of the outside Gentile’s faith, “I have not found so great faith even in Israel.” He must be saying the same thing again, for the “outside” world surprises us again. I talked in Hindi with a Sadhu one day. In the midst of the conversation he broke out into the purest English, and pulling a New Testament from under his cloak, he said, “This is my meat and drink.”
“But,” I said, rather taken aback, “you are connected with this temple, what are you doing with that?”
“Yes,” he said, and then repeated, “It is my meat and drink.”
When I asked him what he thought of it he eagerly replied: “All other religions are passing away or will pass away; Jesus alone will remain.”
Is the faith of the Sadhu being realized? Are other things passing away and is Jesus beginning to fill the horizon? I know it is easy in a matter of this kind to overdraw the picture, to read into the situation what one would like to see, but in the narrative of this little book I have let the testimony of Hindus tell the story. If it is overdrawn, they have overdrawn it. But the facts themselves tell me that the Sadhu is right.
Jesus is forcing modification everywhere. He stands unmodified. In all this battle and struggle of things—and Jesus hasn’t won this place in the soul of India without his Calvarys of misunderstanding and abuse, and there are more to come—nevertheless, in this clash of ideas and ideals we have not been called upon to modify a single thing about him. We are called upon, with deep insistence, to modify our civilization, our church, ourselves—everything, except him. A Hindu principal of a college said to me, “Your trouble is with the Christian Church.” Even so, but that is remediable. We can remedy our church, our civilization, ourselves. But suppose he had been able to say, “Your trouble is with your Christ”—that would be irremediable; it would be fatal. “Smite the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered abroad.” Smite Jesus with a legitimate moral or spiritual criticism, and we are worse than scattered abroad. We are done for. But I say the literal truth when I say that men are not asking for modification there; the demand is for interpretation and imitation.
Jesus walks along the roads of India’s thought and life and everywhere there is a new sense of values, a new feeling that there is healing in the air, a new sense that there is a springtime of the soul upon us as the old frozen forms of life break up and melt and there are stirrings of new life all around, a new hope—a regenerating Presence has come. I had baptized a group of outcastes in their section of the village. At the close of the ceremony the father of the house took me by the hand and said, “Sir, I want you to walk through my compound and through my little house, and when you have passed through all the impurities and sin of our past will be taken away and all will be purified.” I marveled at his simple faith in me and shrank from its implications. But I was grateful that I did know One who was walking along the highways of India, through her compounds, into her lowly cottages and through the bazaars, and everywhere he goes there is a new sense of purity, a new feeling of the worth-whileness of life, a new eagerness to serve—there is renewal, regeneration.
“We have met Christ to-day, haven’t we?” said a Sadhu with shining face, as he was leaving my room. Yes, we had.
It is India’s day of meeting Christ—and ours. In their meeting him, we too have met him.
As I have sat writing the experiences of these seventeen years two simple incidents have kept recurring again and again. They were so simple that they should have faded with the moment, but while the introductory statements of chairmen of our meetings have been forgotten, these two things persist, and in their persisting bless. A little Indian girl of about seven years was playing around the bungalow with our little girl. I was seated on the veranda at my writing. As they darted past me the little Indian girl paused, and in her shy way came up to me, passed her little brown hand across my cheek and said, “Apke munh mujhe bahut piyara lagta”—“Tour face is very dear to me.” As she ran on I brushed away a tear and went on with my writing. But my heart was very warm. As I have sat writing this book here in America I have felt again the soft touch of India’s hand upon my cheek, and my heart has been warm, for India has become very dear to me. But I find that my love for India has a quality in it now that it did not have in the early days. I went to India through pity, I stay through respect. I love India because she is lovable, I respect her because she is respectable; she has become dear to me because she is endearing.
The other occurred when I was in Shantineketan at the Ashram of Tagore. I sat on the edge of the steps and watched the temple service one day. At the close a student went forward, took a lotus flower—the national flower of India—from a bowl upon the table in front, came back and presented it to me. As I arose to receive it he bent and touched my feet, as is the custom with their gurus, or teachers. It was done very simply and very beautifully. I had come there a stranger and a foreigner, I had come openly with another faith, and I wondered how I would be received, but when this student gave me this lotus flower before all, then I knew I was accepted as friend and brother—and teacher. To be accepted as teacher was the goal of my hopes. But I felt myself as much a learner as a teacher, I had come to India with everything to teach and nothing to learn. I stay to learn as well, and I believe I am a better man for having come into contact with the gentle heart of the East.
But is “teacher” the right word? I wonder if “introducer” isn’t better? I spoke to a Hindu student one night in the aftermeeting of a series and asked him if he didn’t want to know Christ. “Yes,” he said, eagerly, “but I do not know how to go to him. I need someone to introduce me to him.” I suggested that I should love to introduce him to my Master. I saw quite vaguely then what is clear to me now: my chief business and chief joy is to introduce men to this Christ of the Indian Road.
If I do that, I must know him myself, and that means much. “Have you seen Jesus?” a Hindu lawyer asked me one day. I could not glibly reply, but slowly said, “Yes, I believe I have.” “Then,” said he, “you have found something that I have not yet found. I must get it.”
To know him, to introduce him—this is my task.
There is a beautiful Indian marriage custom that dimly illustrates our task in India, and where it ends. At the wedding ceremony the women friends of the bride accompany her with music to the home of the bridegroom. They usher her into the presence of the bridegroom—that is as far as they can go, then they retire and leave her with her husband. That is our joyous task in India: to know Him, to introduce Him, to retire—not necessarily geographically, but to trust India with the Christ and trust Christ with India. We can only go so far—he and India must go the rest of the way.
India is beginning to walk with the Christ of the Indian Road. What a walk it will be!