Chapter Iv — Jesus Comes Through Irregular Channels—Mahatma Gandhi’S Part
CHAPTER IV
JESUS COMES THROUGH IRREGULAR CHANNELS—MAHATMA GANDHI’S PART
WHILE a Christian lecturer was commenting on this remarkable permeation of the atmosphere of India with the thought and spirit of Jesus, a Hindu turned and said to me, “Yes, but he failed to say that Mahatma Gandhi was responsible for a great deal of this new interest in Jesus.” I could only agree with him that the criticism was just.
Mahatma Gandhi does not call himself a Christian. The fact is that he calls himself a Hindu. But by his life and outlook and methods he has been the medium through which a great deal of this interest in Christ has come.
He saw clearly that there were two ways that India might gain her freedom. She might take the way of the sword and the bomb—the way that Mohammed Ali and Shankat Ali, the Mohammedan leaders, untamed by Gandhi, would have taken; and the way that the Bengal anarchists have actually taken. The fires of rebellion were underneath. The flash of a bomb here and there let the world see in that lurid light what was there. Gandhi brought all this hidden discontent to the open. A member of the secret police told me that it was comparatively easy for them now since Gandhi’s advent, that they simply went to the Non-Cooperation Headquarters and asked what would be the next step in their program in the fight with the government and they told him just what they would do next. Gandhi turned the streams of discontent and rebellion into open and frank channels.
He rejected both the sword and the bomb, not because it was expedient, but because he believed with all his soul in something else, in another type of power—soul force or the power of suffering—and another type of victory—a victory over oneself, this inward victory being the precursor of the outward national victory. In the fires of that suffering there would come the inward freedom, the purification of the social and political life from within.
Now for the first time in human history a nation in the attainment of its national ends repudiated physical force and substituted the power of soul or soul force, and has made inward national regeneration a vital part of its program. This is certainly an infinitely more Christian way than we have ordinarily taken in the West. Had the Indian people really caught the ideal on a national scale and put it into practice, as an inner circle caught and practiced it, they would have risen to almost unparalleled moral heights. As one English writer, who is not supposed to be sympathetic, put it, “Had India really practiced Gandhi’s program, no nation on earth could have denied to India the moral leadership of the world.” They would have shown us a way out of the vicious circle into which militarism has got us. They would have demonstrated what we all vaguely feel, that the final power of the world resides in soul.
The daily Anglo-Indian paper, the Statesman, after bitterly fighting Gandhi and his movement, acknowledged in its editorial columns that Gandhi “had put sincerity into politics.” He did more: he put the cross into politics.
The movement as a political movement failed, for violence crept into it. The movement failed, but it was not a failure. The immediate end was not accomplished, but it left a spiritual deposit in the mind of India that will never be lost.
At the close of an address on “Gandhi” in America a man arose and asked why I talked on Gandhi and his movement when both of them were abject failures. I replied that I did so because I belonged to that other and greater Failure of human history—to the Man who began a kingdom with initial success and then it all ended in a cross, a bitter and shameful Failure. But Golgotha’s failure was the world’s most amazing success. A recent dramatist made the centurion say to Mary as she stood by the cross: “I tell you, woman, that this dead Son of yours, disfigured, shamed, spat upon, has built this day a kingdom that can never die. The living glory of him rules it. The earth is his and he made it. He and his brothers have been molding and making it through the long ages; they are the only ones who ever did possess it; not the proud, not the idle, not the vaunting empires of the world. Something has happened on this hill to-day to shake all the kingdoms of blood and fear to dust. The earth is his, the earth is theirs and they made it. The meek, the terrible meek, the fierce agonizing meek are about to enter into their inheritance.” If the meek shall finally inherit earth, then Gandhi must get his portion, for he belongs to the meek, the terrible meek.
Do not misunderstand me, I do not draw the parallels, thereby suggesting that these events are comparable in their effect upon human history, but belonging to the Great Failure that meant world redemption, I am predisposed to understand a failure that may mean something bigger than political success for India—and beyond.
Gandhi did not fail. The Indian people failed Gandhi. It was their failure. But in apparent failure he really succeeded. I would rather think of him as Gandhi the defeated, but holding firm and with unsoured spirit to the belief that somehow, someway the power of his ideal must conquer, than to see Gandhi seated by some other method as the first president of the Indian Republic. We have plenty of presidents throughout the world. We have a new crop every election day. China has one every few months by the clicking of political and military machinery, but few outside China know their names; but the name of Gandhi haunts us, shocks us, appeals to us. If Gandhi should die right now in the moment of his most apparent failure, disagree with him as I do in many things, I would hold him to be the most successful man who has lived in East or West in the last ten years. I think history will bear that out. I would rather be a Wilson or a Gandhi defeated, but holding to ideals not yet accepted, than to be a Clémenceau, the tiger, standing victorious over a fallen foe.
Gandhi’s movement in its failure left a new spiritual deposit in the mind of India. The cross has become intelligible and vital. Up to a few years ago one was preaching against a stone wall in preaching the cross in India. The whole underlying philosophy of things was against it. The doctrine of karma, as ordinarily held, has little or no room for the cross in it. According to it, you are being meted out, to the last jot and tittle, the results of your actions in a previous birth. Everything is held in the iron grip of that law of rewards and punishments. If you help a man it is because his Karma calls for that help; if you hurt him, it is for the same reason. All suffering is punitive and the result of previous sin. This thought prompted a man to ask me in one of my meetings “if Jesus must not have been a very wicked man in a previous birth, since he was such a terrible sufferer in this one.” This was a view consistent with the doctrine. There is little or no room for vicarious suffering for others.
But with this teaching of Gandhi that they can joyously take on themselves suffering for the sake of national ends, there has come into the atmosphere a new sensitiveness to the cross. A brilliant Hindu thinker, writing on this subject, said, “What the missionaries have not been able to do in fifty years Gandhi by his life and trial and incarceration has done, namely, he has turned the eyes of India toward the cross.” I am a missionary, and you would expect that to make us missionaries wince a bit, but it does not. We do not mind who gets the credit. We are not there for credit, but for reality. We desire so desperately that India and the world may see the cross that we rejoice if anyone, even one outside our fold, helps India see that cross. To-day in India you can step up from this nationalist thinking straight to the heart of the cross. It is the message that goes through with power.
Even a Mohammedan editor caught the inner meaning of things—and it is difficult for Mohammedans who have other ideas of power—and expressed it in an editorial thus: “From the mere standpoint of strategy it is infinitely better for the missionaries to depend upon the cross and its meaning of self-sacrifice than upon all the empires and their backing.”
This little window lets us see a good deal: In a Nationalist paper at the time of great national excitement there appeared this flaming headline, “A Dreadful Night of Crucifixion.” I read through the account with eagerness to see what had happened. It was a vivid account of how Akali Sikhs, resisters, were severely beaten by the police. It ended with this sentence: “Gentle reader, on that dreadful night Christ was again crucified.” This was written by a Hindu for Hindus and Mohammedans, but they had caught the idea that Christ was identified in some mysterious way with the pain and suffering and oppression of men. Whether the text taken will bear the burden of the meaning given to it is not the question; the idea lives on even after the event to which it is applied passes away. That idea is that Christ suffers in the suffering of men.
A nationalist put the matter to me this way: “It is you Christians who can understand the inner meaning of our movement better than others, for it has a kinship to the underlying thought of Christianity.” The man who said this was a man of beautiful character and was acting upon that inner meaning. One nationalist asked me, “Do you not think that the Non-Cooperation movement is an application of the principles of Jesus to the present political situation?”
Some of the Hindus have been concerned about this too definitely Christian aspect of things. One of them asked in my meeting, “Just as the British government conquered India through the sons of the soil, that is, through Indian troops, aren’t you trying to conquer India for Christianity in the same way, namely, by using a son of the soil, Gandhi?” Of course this was preposterous, for Gandhi is the last man on earth who can be “handled”; but the point is that the questioner saw the Christian drift of things.
In one of the important conferences when the nationalist leaders were discussing this question of procedure a Hindu nationalist said, “I oppose this non-violent non-cooperation. I ask you is it Hindu teaching? It is not. Is it Mohammedan teaching? It is not. I will tell you what it is, it is Christian teaching. I therefore oppose it.”
Even among the ordinary villagers this drift is noted. At ——— the missionaries had been bitterly opposed by the Hindus in their preaching at a mela, a religious fair. But this year of which I speak the Hindus came and helped them, saying, “We are allies now, since Mahatma Gandhi is following Christ.” The question of whether he would say he is or not is not the paramount thing—the point is that the villagers saw the inner relationship of things.
This viewpoint of the villagers is not to be wondered at when an instance like this occurs: On the arrival of the train the great crowd gathered for a speech. Gandhi came out, took out a New Testament and read the Beatitudes and then finished by saying: “That is my address to you. Act upon that.” That was all the speech he gave. But it spoke volumes.
In one place the nationalists were forbidden by the government to carry the national flag beyond a certain point on a bridge which led into the European or Civil section of the town. The nationalists made it an issue. The magistrate, who arrested and tried most of them, remarked to me that those whom he arrested were much more Christian in their spirit than he was. They would let him know what time they were coming across the bridge with the flag and how many! Would he please be prepared for twenty-five to-day. Of the twelve hundred who were arrested in that flag agitation, although none of them were professed Christians, and although they could take into jail with them only a limited number of things which they had to produce before the magistrate, the vast majority took New Testaments with them to read while there. The reason they did so becomes apparent when one of them remarked, “We now know what it means for you Christians to suffer for Christ.” The cross had become not a doctrine, but a living thing to them.
Sometimes things took a rather amusing, if not ludicrous turn, as when a Hindu nationalist who was being tried by a British judge, began his defense with these words, “And they shall deliver you up before kings and governors and magistrates for my name’s sake,” and ended up his statement with the words, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do!”
But the real force of it strikes one when Ghandi himself exemplifies it. He is ready to apply this principle of conquering by soul force not merely against the British government, but against his own people as well, when he feels they are in the wrong. This, of course, would have little or no effect were not Gandhi the soul of sincerity and utterly fearless.
When in South Africa carrying on his passive resistance movement against the South African government (which struggle, by the way, he won) the indentured coolies in whose behalf he was fighting with non-violent weapons, got out of hand again and again. He remonstrated, but all to no avail. Finally without word he went off and began to fast. He had fasted for two days when word went around among the coolies that Gandhi was fasting because of what they were doing. That changed matters immediately. They came to him with folded hands and begged him to desist from the fast, promising him that they would do anything if only he would stop it. Suffering love had conquered.
In his ashram one of the boys told him something that he believed but later found out that the boy had lied to him. Gandhi called the school together and solemnly said, “Boys, I am sorry to find out that one of you is a liar. As punishment I am going off and fast to-day.” That may be passed with a smile, but not if you knew the dead earnestness of Gandhi and the sheer moral weight of the man. There could not have been a more terrific punishment, for long after any physical pain from physical punishment would have died away there would persist the spiritual pain from the lashings of conscience awakened by the sufferings of the man who loved him. In the light of Gandhi’s acting thus it becomes easy for them to step up from the thought that if one man would take on himself suffering to bring a boy back from a lie to the truth, then if there were One divine enough and holy enough, he might take on his soul the very sin of a whole race to bring us back to good and to God. The cross thus bursts into meaning when lighted up by this lesser act.
This is all the more vividly seen in Gandhi’s recent fast of twenty-one days. A fast of that length of time is serious when we recall that Gandhi had not really recovered from his operation and that he ordinarily weighs less than a hundred pounds. But when he came out of jail he found the Hindus and Mohammedans suspicious, jealous, and divided. Before his arrest they had become united in his person, but when he was taken away and put in jail they fell apart. He knew that the moment India was united that moment India was free. He pleaded and remonstrated, but the divisions persisted and became acute. Out of sheer sorrow of heart he announced that he would undergo, as a penance, a fast of twenty-one days.
It touched India to the quick, for they are an emotionally responsive people. They called a Unity Conference on the tenth day of his fast. It was composed of representatives of the various religions of India, including the Metropolitan, the head of the Church of England in India. They debated back and forth the questions at issue. Though Gandhi was lying in weakness upon his couch in another part of the city, his spirit pressed upon them in the conference for a solution. They passed resolutions covering their points of difference and appointed a commission of twenty-five as a Permanent Board of Adjudication on intercommunal matters. But the most remarkable resolution was the one in which they stated that “We recognize the right of an individual to change his faith at will, provided no inducement is offered to effect that change, such as the offering of material gain,” and, further, “We also recognize the right of that individual not to suffer persecution from the community which he may leave.” When one remembers that in Islam apostasy meant death, and in Hinduism social death, then this resolution marks a national epoch and is really a National Declaration of Religious Freedom. The silent pressure of the spirit of Gandhi was doing its work. And Gandhi’s spirit was being pressed upon by the Spirit of Jesus.
On the eighteenth day of the fast, Mr. C. F. Andrews, who was editing Gandhi’s paper, Young India, while he was fasting, wrote an editorial in which he described Gandhi lying upon his couch on the upper veranda in Delhi, weak and emaciated. He pictured the fort which could be seen in the distance, reminding them of the struggle for the possession of the kingdom; below the fort Englishmen could be seen going out to their golf; nearer at hand the crowds of his own people surged through the bazaar intent on buying and selling. While Andrews watched him there that verse of Scripture rushed to his mind: “Is it nothing to you, ye that pass by? Is there any sorrow like unto my sorrow?” He ended it with this sentence: “As I looked upon him there and caught the meaning of it all, I felt as never before in my own experience the meaning of the cross.”
Andrews spoke out in these last sentences the very thought of the heart of India. India has seen the meaning of the cross in one of her sons. As a former fiery opponent of Christianity, a nationalist leader, said, “I never understood the meaning of Christianity until I saw it in Gandhi.” While this inspires us and we are deeply grateful for it, nevertheless, it is a sword that cuts two ways, for some of us have been there these years and deeply regret that Christianity did not burst into meaning through us. However, we are glad that India is seeing. And let it be quietly said that we too are seeing.