Christ at the Round table

Table Of Contents

TRTRODUCTION AG i)c i354 sccspisin ole Mera ces 7 PFEGINNINGR ae bo sie eal lula A OES 19 VAT GRIPS WITH LIFB one ck waa 26 . Wat Can WE GATHER FROM ALL THis? 47

. CONVERSION—HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL. 70

. THE CoLLecTIVE REDEMPTION.......... 90 / LHe GROWING SAVIOUR. 0 ei) Wulie des's 108 Tue TrEND TowarD EXPERIENCE...... 127 PRE MOBD Ses one ey Uucy atta La Lorian Hah ame 141 WHERE IS THE PLACE OF CERTAINTY AND AUTHORITY! fo. fii, aha Wee 155 INTERPRETERS OF CHRIST.............. 171 MISSIONS AT THE RouND TABLE....... 184 NATIONS AT THE RouND TABLE....... 203

Introduction

THis book has written itself. During the twenty years of intimate contact with the soul of the East it has been slowly writing itself in the inmost depths of my being. In hours of innumerable personal conversations, in times of quiet but fierce clash of idea upon idea, in periods when I have opened my soul to the beauty and thought of India, in hours of prayer, in moments of brooding over the mind of Christ in Sacred Writ, and most of all in the Round Table Conferences where we have bared soul to soul, these pages: have been written and these convictions formed. They have come to me almost irresistibly, and now it seems that I do not hold them, rather do these convictions seem to hold me.

Not that they are unalterable and fixed. For if there has been one guiding principle which has held me these years, it has been this: No plans that cannot be changed if they cease to be vital and real, and no convictions that cannot be altered if fuller light comes.

But if these pages have written themselves, the transcribing of them has brought heart-searchings. How can one bring back the atmosphere of these Round Table Conferences? Will not the beauty and delicacy of these hallowed moments fade and wither if plucked from their quiet surroundings? Can we be objective and fair in drawing our conclusions? fs the purpose to win a religious victory or to find reality? Is there a desire to justify a missionary movement or to help someone as we have been helped? Can we be loyal to the land of our adoption and yet loyal to our deepest convictions? How can we be free to speak of life as we saw it at the Round Tables unless we be free to face life as it is —its weaknesses and its strengths, its successes and its failures? Although I have held the principle that my chief concern should be to present my constructive message, leaving untouched in public address the religious systems that my hearers held so that they might be free to draw their own conclusions, can I now freely speak of life as I see it? Whether satisfactory answers to some of the above questions can be given must be judged as we go on our way through the narrative and to its conclu- SiODS.

My impulse has been not to quote directly what men were saying in the Round Tables, but to write of general impressions. But I have felt this would be unfair, particularly to Hinduism. So much stress has been laid in the West on the lower phases of Hinduism that the impression that the ordinary man of the West holds is that it is made up of caste, idolatry, child widows, and so on. He thinks of religion as centered in the temple. So if I spoke of Hinduism in this book, I would be interpreted as meaning temple Hinduism. The fact is that the Hinduism of educated India does not center in the temple but in the Upanishads and the Bhagawad Gita. The possible exception to this is South India, where temple Hinduism has a stronger hold. Even here the Saiva Siddhanta, centering in the poems of the Tamil saints, holds the hearts of the educated rather than does the temple. You might wipe out the Hinduism centering in the temple, along with caste and corrupt social customs, and this Hinduism centering in the Upanishads would live on, perhaps with greater power. But it is not the ordinary man of the West alone who is laboring under this misunderstanding. I showed some of the statements made by the members of our Round Table Conferences to a highly intelligent Westerner who had been in India for forty years, and his comment was, “Well, I’m very glad to find that they are thinking about these things and not merely going blindly to the temple.” Thinking about these things? Why, “there are more words for philosophic and religious thought in Sanskrit than in Greek, Latin, and German put together.” India has thought on these things more deeply than any other people on earth, and if her philosophy has suffered from anything it has not been from underthought, but from overstrain. Moreover, it is not educated India alone which holds these ideas of the Upanishads—they have to a very great extent percolated down into the masses so that the ordinary worshiper who goes to the idol temple goes there with a higher interpretation of life in his mind, and he explains his idolatry in the light of the background of the All of the Upanishads: If Brahma is the All, then why should not this idol be worshiped as a portion of him? This philosophic Hinduism is all-pervasive and not confined to the educated few.

I felt I would be unfair if I did not let these representatives speak and interpret their own faith.

I could do it because these Round Table Conferences were not Round Table Confidences. They were open and frank, each man laying before us what religion was meaning to him. Each was given the chance to say the best he could about his own faith. Surely, no one could object to having such statements repeated. The presupposition is that he would be glad to have it done, provided it was done sympathetically and fairly. This, in fact, has been the attitude taken by those Non-Christians from whom inquiry has been made. But after full inquiry where any hesitation or objeetion to having his views repeated has been shown, in these cases we have refrained. In only two cases have there been objections.

Another consideration which now makes it possible to speak openly about things concerning which it would have been scarcely possible a few years ago is the fact that Gandhiji! in his autobiography, entitled The Story of My Experiments With Truth, is showing the way to a new frankness. Week by week he bares his soul and discusses freely his attitudes toward Christianity and other religions and his reasons for deciding upon the religious life he now leads. The door for frank discussion is now open— opened by an Indian hand.

I found myself not particularly interested in the victory, as such, of one religious system over another. That might take place and we be still far from the goal. We were after truth and reality and spiritual freedom, and we knew that it was possible that one

1] refrain from using the tert ahatma” because of his declared dislike to it, reserving to myself the ene owever, to hold him to be a “great soul’; **ji’’ is a term of respect.

religious system might conquer another and these questions remain untouched, or, worse, be lost in the struggle. The crusaders conquered Jerusalem and found in the end that Christ was not there. They had lost him through the very spirit and methods by which they sought to serve him. Many more modern and more refined crusaders end in that same barrenness of victory. Mere proselytizing partakes of these methods and shares the same barrenness of results. We wanted something deeper and more fundamental. The fact is that the final issue is not between the systems of Christianity and Hinduism or Buddhism or Mohammedanism, but between Christlikeness and un-Christlikeness, whether that un-Christlikeness be within the non-Christian systems or within Christendom. The final issue is bec tween Christ and other ways of life. If in the.

opening chapters we have had occasion to deal with un-Christlikeness outside, before we are through we.

face it within Christendom.

Moreover, our problems are not Eastern or Western problems, but just human. Human need and human sin are not geographical. Materialism and greed and moral failure and spiritual yearning are in the East and in the West; they are found wherever man is found. Can we not, then, sit down.

at the Round Table of Life and face our problems, not as Easterners or Westerners, but as men, and see if there is a way out?

As to being scientifically objective in coming to conclusions, I might as well confess that I probably will not be. Not that I do not want to be, but that, first of all, I have not had that intensive training in scientific methods so necessary if one is to be objective and scientific; and, second, I have brought too much of subjectivity to these Conferences to be absolutely objective. Religion has meant too much to me during these years to be able to stand off and view it apart from that fact. That may be a disqualification—and it may not. At any rate, this book does not pretend to be written in a detached, judicial manner. I am an evangelist recording impressions that have come to me in the midst of my evangelistic work. These impressions compel me to become an advocate. This fact will cause what I say to be discounted in the minds of some. This is inevitable and to be expected. Moreover, dealing with religious values, in the nature of the case, the impressions recorded will seem subjective. This too is inevitable.

Another consideration weighed with me. We as Christians find ourselves in a very serious crisis. A number of things have brought it on. The scientific mind, with its demand for the attitude toward life of open mindedness and for conclusions based on the facts, and its handmaid historical criticism of the Scriptures have challenged many claimed infallibilities in many realms. This is a world-shaking movement. The full force of it has not yet struck the Non-Christian faiths. That will come. But we are in the throes of it.

. Another factor making for disturbance of mind

has been the discovery of Sanskrit literature. It has opened to the West an amazing world of philosophical and literary treasure. Schopenhauer voiced the extreme wing of appreciation when he said:

“The Upanishads have been my consolation in life; they will be my consolation in death.” At first the church was indifferent or hostile toward this storehouse, but Christian scholars have been sifting out the finest from it, and what was the property of the scholar is now becoming available for the ordinary

Christian. Through comparative religions the rank |_~ and file are now seeing that God has not left himself without witness in any land, and that truth and lofty thinking are not the exclusive possession of any race. Human intercourse is getting closer every day and we are discovering that worth and ability and goodness are not confined to particular geographical areas or to special tints of skin. The ordinary Christian is being compelled to relate his Christianity to these facts.

Other elements making for disturbance have been the disillusionment following the war and the deep ~ questionings of the soundness of Western civilization and the bitter criticisms of it from both East and West. They have contributed to the vast uncertainty.

Unsympathetic attitudes and contempt toward foreign cultures and religions and national aspirations have in large measure given way to appreciation and sympathy. This is to be welcomed and cultivated, but the fact must not be overlooked that this has a tendency to cut under exclusive claims and to undermine evangelistic passion. It was easier to be evangelistic when the issues were more fiercely defined. Finally Theosophy steps in amid the resulting bewilderment, waves its hand and says: “All religions have the same underlying

YG ‘ truths. The differences are in the details—at the center they are one.” ‘The tendency of all this is to wipe out distinctions, tone down superiorities, and have everything end in a diffused kindly feeling, or, - as someone has put it, “in a mush of amiability.” All these things put together are disconcerting and disturbing.

The more I think of it the more I realize that the most dangerous thing the Christian Church ever did was to send us to India. Not dangerous to us. It matters little whether we live or die. But to start a moral and spiritual offensive in the heart of the most religious and philosophical race of the world, and that at a time when the weapons of modern criticism and modern knowledge are available for counter-attack, is too dangerous for words. For suppose it should be revealed amid that struggle that Christianity is only one among the many ways, that its claim to finality is untenable, that its sharp alternatives are not valid, that it is only a stage in the evolution of religion and it will be passed by, the final stage being a sifted amalgam from the whole. What would be the result of this? Certainly the missionary movement would, at least as now carried on, wane and die. And it is questionable whether, with the conviction of finality gone, Christianity could hold continued sway over the mind of the West.

Amid this vast uncertainty has the gospel of Christ any certainty to offer? Will it show itself capable of bringing to confused minds and distressed souls everywhere a new sense of reality and certainty under this awful scrutiny, yea, even because of it? Is it founded upon Life and will it therefore stand the shocks of life? Or is it a great and heroic guess at the solution of the riddle of life? Would the Round Table Conferences shed any light on these problems?

We had not gone very far with the Conferences with the Non-Christians before we saw that here was a method of discovering reality that would be valuable for us as Christians. The deepest things of religion need sympathetic atmosphere. In an atmosphere of debate and controversy the deepest things, and hence the real things of religion, wither and die. In order to discover what is most delicate and fine in religion there must be an attitude of spiritual openness, of inward sensitiveness to the Divine, a willingness to be led by the beckoning spiritual facts. We felt the Conferences tended to bring this. The sense of battle seemed to fade out and common spiritual quest and sharing took its place.

The fact cannot be disguised that we as Christians have our internal controversy. It has largely partaken of the method of long-distance dueling. We have shelled each other’s positions, or what we thought were the positions, but there has been much smoke and confusion and not a little un-Christian feeling. Why not sit down at Round Tables as Christian men and women and see what religion is meaning to us in experience? We would listen reverently to what the other man would say it was bringing to him, and we would share what it was meaning tous. At the close we might not be agreed, but we would be mutually enriched, and certainly we would be closer to the real issues. And we would be on the right lines of approach in facing these ° issues and in finding their solutions.

But this controversy and the Round Tables as a possible method of approaching it was not in our minds when we began to have them for Christians only. The purpose was to face the question of how religion was working, what it was doing for us, and how we could find deeper reality. Under this quiet but searching scrutiny some missionaries and Christian workers with a great deal of restrained emotion have told the group quite frankly that it was not working except in outward phases, that the deepest things were not there. But often before the Conferences were over lives have been renewed and new depths found.

The valuable thing for us as Christians in the Round Table Conferences with Non-Christians lay in the fact that we were compelled to rethink our problems in the light of the Non-Christian faiths and in the light of the religious experiences of non- Christians. So while these Conferences have been valuable in our approach to the Non-Christian faiths, they have proved of even greater value to us in facing our own problems, spiritual and intellectual. They have given some answers to the problems now facing us in the crisis we have mentioned above.

But the most difficult question of all had to be faced before I could go on: Dared I try to see life and see it whole and tell what I saw? The answer came back: “Yes, provided you are willing to face what you hold in the same frank way.” And I found myself willing, even eager, for I felt that if any adverse appraisal must be given, I would do it with as much tenderness as I would point out the fading health on my mother’s cheek.

Moreover, I knew that, if criticism was considered necessary in the Indian situation, none of it would be directed toward the Indian people, whom I consider one of the finest and most lovable peoples on earth, but only against yokes that need to be lifted to let this great people go free.

If there is a conclusion running throughout this book, it will probably be found to be this: Christ represents Religion. Organized Christianity, mixed as it is with the mind of Cesar and the Mind of Christ, is a religion. Religions must be judged and evaluated in the light of Religion. I feel free, therefore, to evaluate or criticize or commend non-Christian religions as well as the present organized Christian religion in the light of Christ who is Religion.

Until a few years ago the usual attitude toward other faiths and cultures was criticism and lack of appreciation. Now the pendulum has swung back the other way to an attitude on the part of many of unqualified approval or to the attitude that all faiths are more or less the same. The time has now come for an attitude between these extremes, namely, an attitude of appreciation with appraisal. But this evaluation must not be merely intellectual, it must be deeply experimental. What does religion bring in experience? What is its value for life?

I think I have noted a change in emphasis during these twenty years. At first it was a battle of Civilizations. The attitude was that we must find defects in Indian civilization in order to establish our own. Along with this was the battle of the Books— which book contained the truths that we could call revelation? Then it shifted to Personalities, the ones who embodied these truths—was Christ or Krishna the Way? Now I find the emphasis going straight toward experience. The question of the Books and the Personalities is still there and will be there, but the evaluation is more and more resting on experience. Where can we find God? Where can we get a dynamic for spiritually victorious living, release from what we are, a saving from sin and evil, a renewed character? Where can we catch a passion to help our fellow men? How can we realize the Brotherhood of our common humanity, and bring the kingdom of God on earth? Does religion work? What does it produce in experience? This is the direction in which things are now going. It is the direction of the demand of the scientific outlook on life in relation to the facts. This made our Round Table Conferences inevitable.

While the Round Table Conferences form the basis of the book, nevertheless we do not confine ourselves to them, but go beyond them. The convictions recorded have grown out of the wider contacts of _ the years.

a

Chapter I Beginnings

Inp1a has opened many great things to me and to that indebtedness I must add another, for it was a Hindu who unknowingly opened the door to these Round Table Conferences. He had voluntarily associated himself with the Christian Committee to arrange for our public meetings. He asked if he might have a teaparty at his home and invite the leading men of the city so that I could talk to them in a more intimate and personal way than was possible in the public meetings. We sat in a group and soon the untrammeled Christ was before us. I had asked what their reception of Christ would be if he came disassociated from Westernism, if he came in - his own person and made his appeal direct to the soul of India—would it make any difference? I was speaking thus when the mayor of the city, a Non- Christian, interrupted me and said, “I hear you speak about finding Christ. What do you mean by it?”

The question was penetrating and sincere. Here I saw a deeper demand than the one for an objective Christ—however untrammeled he might be. They wanted to know about this Christ of experience. I paused a moment, for here was-a’ penetrating demand. I replied that I could only tell him what it meant to me. So I told him how I had found him.

I shared the joy of the found treasure. He then made it more personal and said, “Now tell me how I could find him.”

I did. Here we sat with the leading men of the city, talking in this intimate personal way about how to find Christ.

Our eyes were opened to the possibilities in the small selected group. But we could not hope to find all groups as responsive as this, for some would | be sullen and uncommunicative and some argumentative and hostile. How could we approach them when the atmosphere was not friendly and the situation was filled with misconceptions and misunderstandings? As in many another perplexity it was “given in that hour.” It came this way.

A few weeks later we were holding a series of meetings in another city and I told Canon —— about our selected group meeting in the other place. He suggested that he invite a group of the best men for a garden party and I proceed with them at the close in any way I thought best. But that was not as easy as it sounded. As I slowly walked through the garden on my way to the group thinking of what I should say to them, the thought occurred: Why not turn the whole thing into a religious Round Table Conference, asking each man to tell what religion is meaning to him in experience?

I am quite sure that if I had had time to think about it, I should never have ventured upon it. Could one get highly educated, cultured men to open their souls in this intimate way? It is easy to talk of religion and to debate religious concepts, but would they say what religion was meaning to them

BEGINNINGS 21 in experience? Or would they close up like sensitive plants and the whole thing end in failure? But I was too close to the group to have time to think it through, so I ventured and it worked—amazingly. The Voice does not fail.

We have had scores of Round Table Conferences since then, and while our first procedure “given in that hour’ has been elaborated, it has not been substantially changed.

As we sit around in a circle we suggest to them that we take a new approach to religion—new when we think of the ordinary approaches in common use. We suggest that we have had the controversial, the comparative, and the dogmatic approaches to religion. There is another approach possible. Let us come at it by the method more closely akin to the scientific method—a method so gripping to the mind of the world to-day. This method has three outstanding things in it: Experimentation, Verification, and Sharing of Results. I suggest to them _ that we try this method. We are all religious men, some more and some less, and we have all been experimenting with this matter of religion over a number of years. We have tried it as a working hypothesis of life. As we face the problems of life —its joys and its sorrows, its perplexities and its pains, the demands of duty, the moral struggle with sin and evil, the upward call to higher life, the desire to help our fellow men and to be of use, the craving for God, for redemption—what has religion brought to us? What has it brought to us of light, of moral dynamic for personal and social life, of inward peace and harmony, of redemption from sin and from the power of this world, of God? What have we and what are we verifying as true in experience? Will you share with us the results of your verification ?

‘We suggest, therefore, that no one argue, no one try to make a case, no one talk abstractly, and no one merely discuss religion, but that we simply share what religion is meaning to us as experience.

We.can almost hear the inward gasp that goes on in the souls of the group when we suggest this. We assure them that we recognize that this is not easy to do, that it is not easy to put into words what one realizes in these deepest moments of life, so that we do not want anyone to feel that he has to speak, that if he so desires he may simply ask to be excused when his turn comes.

We also suggest that we do not want them to feel that the friendliness of this atmosphere must cause them to iron out differences, or to put it in other words, to reduce everything to a least common denominator; that if religion centers for them in Rama, or Krishna, or Buddha, or the Vedanta, or the Koran, or Christ, to say so. Let everyone be perfectly free, for we are a family circle; we want each one to feel at home and we will listen with reverence and respect to what each man has to share.

We know how facile our talk about religion may be, so in order to bring an atmosphere of deeper reality we suggest that perhaps some will find that religion is meaning nothing to them, that they will be like a leading nationalist in our Round Table Conference, who, when his turn came, said, “I have

BEGINNINGS 23 dismissed God and religion from my life. So many things are done in the name of God and religion that are revolting to me that I have simply dismissed them. I am asking what is my duty to my country. If that is being religious, I am religious; if it is not, then I am not.”

This is the air of sincerity that we crave. We suggest that, as in the case of this nationalist, there is often more faith in an honest doubt than in a great deal of easy, meaningless believing.

I have noted the change that comes over the group in the first ten minutes. Many have come fortified and ready to enter a battle of wits and to uphold their religious system against all comers. But immediately the atmosphere changes, a deep seriousness comes over them, for here the battle drops to levels deeper than a mere battle of words or of ideas —drops down to where we meet life—we are at grips with life. Others who have come languid at the thought of further verbal controversy or long lectures are immediately galvanized into attention and interest, for here is something different—religion is to speak out of life. Has it any adequate answer to give to life? Or is it a series of mental and social left-overs, out of touch with life and its meaning, and contributing little to its solution? We were to report results of the Great Experiment, we were to tell of Verification, if any: deep was to speak to deep. .

I must confess that I never approach these Round Tables without feeling my heart beat a little faster, for here before us sit members of the most religiously inclined race of the world, men who belong to a people who have persistently searched for God and Reality as no other people on earth have searched ; sons of a philosophical and cultural past that stretched back millenniums before Europe awoke ‘from barbarity. What answer would they bring from that hoary past and this heaving present? Would it be an adequate one?

And we Christians who came with what we call a gospel—would it sound like a gospel here? When we had stripped our religious life of overgrown verbiage, how much fact would we have left? Would our gospel ring true to reality? Would it move amid these problems of life with assured poise and conscious power? Would it face life and answer it? Was our gospel a broken light from God, illuminating patches and portions of life but leaving life as a whole unilluminated? Or was it God’s adequate answer to man’s need—intellectual, moral, spiritual, social?

Count Keyserling, disappointed with his European researches and experiences, starts on his long quest in other lands. One of the compensations in being a missionary lies in the fact that you are forced to rethink your religious life in the light of other faiths and cultures and ways of life. All the old shibboleths and modes of expression and accepted outlooks on life are challenged and one begins to see where the relevant lies. Some years ago when in southern California, where there seems to be plenty of leisure to discuss religious doctrines, I was approached by all sorts of people asking what I thought of their particular and pet doctrine. I told them, or at least I showed them in some way, that