such definite forms of deity as provisional there lay the danger of dissolving objective truth in the self-assertion of the critical faculty; and of claiming not only that man makes and unmakes his special conception of God, but that God, as God, is nothing else than a human conception. But these perils of negation were held in check by a profound veneration in the Oriental mind for the independence of the eternal, absolute, and infinite. It was but as forms of personal will that the gods were held to be thus provisional, and subject to the demand for more perfect fulfilment of the religious ideal. The Buddhist has not therefore committed the weak Imperfect sense of deity. ness of holding Brahmâ or Vishnu to be true and perfect Deity, while at the same time subjecting him to human criticism and even mastership. Yet, when Buddha himself came to be the centre of religious faith and mythologic creation, he was regarded as subject to human influence and even control, with little respect for the self-adequacy of the divine. So Vishnu is described by Kàlidâsa as greater than the self-existent," when choosing a mortal shape, to save mankind.1 To this imperfect sense of the meaning of deity all religions are subject, in concentrating worship on a definite personal will. In the same way, the Christ practically supplants the Father in the faith and service of Christians; and God becomes only an "impalpable effluence," from the person of his own Son! It hardly becomes Christendom to rebuke Buddhism for putting a man in place of God. Luther said that God had "tied himself to man by bonds of prayer;" Montalembert, that "prayer equals, sometimes surpasses, the power of God, triumphing 1 Sakuntala, Act. VII. over His will, His wrath, and even over His justice." "God," says Ruskin, "is a Being who can be reasoned with, moved by entreaties, angered by our rebellion, alienated by our coldness, pleased by our love, and glorified by our labor." All this is certainly to worship the conditional and finite. It would subject the moral order of the universe to the infirmities of human desire. It is also, on the other hand, however unconscious and perverted, a kind of claim justly entered by the human to determine the paths of freedom and progress. Both these forces manifestly involve criticism and even supersedure of what has been held the adequate object of worship. But they are perverted, if not suppressed, in so far as the claim amounts to a pretension of moving and changing deity itself; in so far as it is assumed that one who can be thus criticised, changed, convinced, improved, and even supplanted, has in very fact exhausted the idea of infinite, absolute Being. Such, however, is the per- / verted form under which the claim of the human to shape its religious ideal appears, not in the distinguished instances only that have just been given, but in the general tenor of Christian praying and preaching. And the sincerity and devoutness, which is found to be compatible therewith in the Christian world, should prepare us to believe that a similar failing in later Buddhism is not without its aspirations to freedom and its sentiment of reverence and faith. |