John Welsh Dulles

“ No one, with the least susceptibility to impressions of beauty and grandeur in the works of God, could fail to look with delight upon the endless succession of billows that rolling onward from the horizon of waters, swell, comb, and burst in green sheets, to form again and roll onward still, again to burst and again to advance, till they dash with a hoarse thunder on the sparkling sand at your feet. But it is not inanimate nature alone that catches your eye. The beach is all life, bustle, and business. ”

“ It seemed to be a new world, and our life a new life. This impressed me, especially at the close of the second Sabbath after the great change in our captain. It was a brilliant evening. The planet Jupiter was shining brightly in the east, and Venus as brightly over against it in the west, while immediately overhead the moon rode among silvery clouds, pouring a flood of mellow light on the gently-rippled waves. The missionary passengers were seated here and there, or walked the deck; the captain was stretched upon the ship's rail, with his Bible in his hand. ”

“ The oracle of the place was a man born blind. By birth, he was a mechanic, but his lack of sight led him to study, of course through his ears alone; and now he was the learned man and philosopher of Calumboor. He sat upon our right hand, and by his side the head Brahmin of the town, a fat, merry-faced fellow, the very image of good nature.
When all were silent, our errand was made known, and the system and practice of Hinduism tested by reason and the writings of their own philosophers, who saw the folly of polytheism and idolatry, though they could show no true way of salvation. ”

“ The righteous," says the Psalmist, “shall flourish as the palm-tree;" his head shall be green, his trunk full of sap, his blossoms setting, and his fruit ripening, when all around is parched, arid, and waste. And why? Because, as the palm-tree sends down its roots twenty or even thirty feet beneath the sandy surface, drawing nourishment from the unseen waters flowing there; so the true spiritual Christian, while worldliness and deadness reign around, is drawing from unseen fountains that water of salvation which is within him, as a well of living water ever gushing forth unto everlasting life. ”

“ The temple of Nungengood is famous even among the temples of India for being covered all over with figures so obscene that they might make the vilest blush. Yet this is the residence of one of the supreme gods of the Hindus; and the place of assembly, at certain seasons, for thousands of benighted idolaters, who come hither to adore and pray to the god who presides in such a dwelling. If no nation, as is said, will be better than its gods, what must be the moral character of Hindustan, as it appears in the eyes of Him in whose sight even the heavens are unclean! ”

“ In the single province of Bengal are districts containing seven million five hundred thousand inhabitants, without a missionary; and in other parts of India you may journey through district after district, and province after province, with millions and millions of inhabitants, and find but two or four men, toiling amid the masses of heathenism around them, as if attempting to empty the ocean by buckets-full, or to tunnel the mountains with bodkins. In other places you will find no man at all to shed one ray of light upon the unbroken darkness of false religion. ”

“ Sail ho!" called all hands on deck, and sent every eye glancing over the waters to catch a glimpse of the stranger. Nothing so breaks the solitude of the vast ocean, with its limitless plains of tossing water, as the sight of fellow-travellers upon its bosom. When the stranger barque bears down upon you, and the little birdlike thing, that in the distance was but a speck upon the horizon, swelling as it approaches to a cloud of canvas overhanging the narrow hull, lies side by side with your own sea home, you feel that you are not alone. ”

“ Thus, ceasing to have a separate existence, they can exclaim, “I am Brahm—the supreme, eternal, omnipotent God!” To attain to this knowledge, however, is not the work of a day; it is only to be gained by the most intense effort, the most self-denying austerities, the most protracted meditations, and the most painful penances. To learn to regard cold and heat, pleasure and pain, hunger and fulness, love and hate, as all equally deceptive and unreal, existing only in the imagination by reason of maya, or illusion, is no light matter. ”

“ The sum of it is, that a certain giant having by religious austerities obtained a boundless store of merit, conquered the three worlds, dethroned all the gods save the supreme triad, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, and their consorts, drove them from heaven, and made them fall down and worship him. The wretched immortals found favour in the eyes of the goddess Durga, and she went forth to slay their oppressor, who met her with an army of thirty thousand giants of enormous size, ten millions of horses, a hundred millions of chariots, and one hundred and twenty thousand millions of elephants! ”

“ The entire tree, when grouped in topes or scattered singly amid other objects, enriches every landscape in which it forms a part, and never ceases to charm the eye. Those who have dwelt amid cocoanut groves, when far away in colder climes long once more to look upon their graceful foliage, glittering in the bright sunlight or reflecting the rays of the moon in the soft night air of India.
As new leaves spring from the head of the ascending trunk, the oldest and consequently lowest are fading and dropping off. ”

“ Brahm, in short, is an infinite nothing. To the Hindu, he is no more an object of worship or of regard than space is to us. He receives no homage, has no temple, hears no prayer. He is to them an unknown god; nay, no god at all.
The human mind, especially when endowed with the activity and subtlety characteristic of the Hindus, cannot rest here; it must have something more tangible than this emotionless, voiceless, thoughtless, actless being. ”

“ We turned into our berths, but not to sleep. The roar of the wind in the rigging, the furious pitching of the ship, the crash of boxes and trunks, thrown from their places and dashed from side to side of our state-rooms, the rush and tramp of men overhead, the quick, fierce orders of the captain, the cries of the sailors, and the swashing of water as it rolled in over the sides and down the deck of our ship, conspired to impress with a feeling of terror all who were not quite insensible to fear. ”

“ As Christ wept over Jerusalem, so might Christendom weep over idolatrous and perishing India.
Hinduism, vast, complicated, and hoary with antiquity, holds in its deadly grasp more than a hundred million souls. God grant that the Sun of Righteousness may soon shine upon these gloomy night-shades, and banish forever this worse than Egyptian darkness from these millions of immortal minds! a darkness doubly fearful and fatal; for they love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil. ”

“ Men may be seen going from ant-hill to ant-hill, and, with great care, sprinkling around each a circle of rice flour. How vain are these attempts to create a righteousness that shall save the soul from the wrath of God! How can the feeding of ants and monkeys, or the more arduous task, of penance, the fasting, cutting of the flesh, swinging on hooks, walking on nails, or laying down of life itself upon the funeral pile, cleanse the soul from the pollution of sin, or prepare it to stand before God? ”

“ Soon may the name of Jesus, as the true sacrifice for sin, as the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world, as he who hath redeemed us by his blood, be known throughout this land! And soon may its millions, finding peace with God and forgiveness of sins, join with us in singing the praises of redeeming love! ”

“ War, however, cannot be waged except at the expense of the blood, treasure, and happiness of the people. On our way, while we passed through thriving towns with their shop-lined streets, and saw old forts, unneeded for defence, crumbling to a happy decay, we also traversed lonely and melancholy wastes, where the Musaljee brandished his torch, and joined his cries to those of the bandy-driver, to fright from our path the tigers who roam in these deserted lands. These fearful beasts are not so much dreaded in the dense jungle as in the waste places near to human dwellings. ”

“ On the Sabbath, not so many as two thousand of the Hindus within the walls of the Black-town of Madras hear the gospel. Where are the one hundred and ninety-eight thousand? They are living in heathenism, idolatry, and vice, scarcely illumined by a single ray of light. The Lord can make a few loaves to feed five thousand men, but it is only by working miraculously; and, though we may not limit his power, we must maintain that the church has no cause to ask why India is not converted, while so little is done even in those spots where most is done. ”

“ At the eastern end of the main street, as you enter the town, stands the preaching-bungalow of the missionary; as you go out at its western end, you see the tall pagoda of the heathen temple. Life and death are thus set before its people; but heathenism, alas! has all the power of a long possession of the land and of those who dwell in it. Nothing but confidence in the unchangeableness of the purposes and promises of God enables the Christian to see by faith the time when India shall submit to Christ. To human view the prospect would be most dark without the light of these precious promises. ”

“ Sin, in every shape; sorrow, in its bitterest forms; violence, rapine, lust, fraud, and folly, are no strangers to the realms in which Brahma, Siva, Vishnu, and Indra (king of the inferior gods) preside. And when we learn the characters ascribed by their own shasters, (sacred books) to the beings whom the Hindus worship as their gods, we are made to blush for our common humanity. Oh! how little do infidels, prating of natural religion, the dignity of human nature, and the powers of human reason, know of the debt they owe to Christianity! ”

“ Yet, here the gods are worshipped—this is a holy place, and to visit it an act of piety! Such is Hinduism, and such the moral sense of the Hindus! Such, rather, is human nature left to reveal its own depravity.
The great temple of Siva has not a monopoly of the sacred city. The worshippers of the rival god Vishnu have also a famous temple here. It is not Christianity alone, as many suppose, that is divided into sects. Hinduism has its sects, who have engaged in bloody wars to decide whether Siva or Vishnu was the supreme ruler ”

“ Some, among the Hindus, rising in their aspirations above the low strivings of the mass, aim at one leap to pass from present existence to some heaven of the gods, or even to that final blessedness which is attained by absorption into the divine Spirit. Such are known as Sanyasees or Yogees. Forsaking the natural courses of life, they devote themselves to the attainment of a consciousness that God is all things, and, that aside from God, the universe exists not; that in all space there is but one existence, and that one the supreme Brahm. ”

“ Every seaman knows that for twelve hundred or fifteen hundred miles north of the line he may look for a fresh breeze from the north-east during the whole year; again, south of the equator he will have some two thousand miles of ocean in which a south-east wind always blows. Often for two or three weeks scarce a sail will be shifted. The balminess of the air, and the beauty of the fleecy clouds, make the trades a most delightful part of an East India voyage. ”

“ If you ask the Christian missionary, "What is a Brahmin?” he might answer, “He is what you would expect a man to be who held such opinions as to his nature, rights, and offices.” The proud belief of his own purity, wisdom, and exaltation, the supreme contempt of all other men that dwells in the breast and appears in the speech and mien of the Brahmin, cannot, I think, be paralleled in the world. From his birth he is followed by a succession of ceremonies, each one tending to enhance his self-sufficiency. ”

“ In our morning walk through the streets, we met a procession going with offerings to appease the angry goddess; while from time to time the loud, monotonous wailing of a peculiar horn, used only in funerals, told us that one and another had gone from this dark seat of heathenism to the eternal world. At night, all around us arose the mournful outcries of assemblages, who, with rude music, bells, and loud invocations, were for hours calling upon the goddess to stay her anger. ”

“ Well might we turn to God for aid, when, after eighty-three days at sea, the forecastle was still closed against us, and so little had been done for the precious souls sailing with us in that little barque over the sea of life to the eternal world. ”

“ It was the strong man armed keeping his goods. Satan was loath to leave his seat. But a stronger than he had come to demand entrance. The poor sinner felt that he must yield or perish; that this was the turning-point in his history; that he must go down upon his knees and cry for forgiveness, or be lost. The Spirit of God triumphed! The proud knees were bowed, the hard heart melted into penitency. Angels rejoiced, for a sinner had repented. His burden was gone, and his heart went up in praise and thanksgiving to God. ”

“ The danger, however, is small, as the pathway has been made with much skill and labour. At last, passing a now-deserted tiger's lair, and stooping beneath a cleft rock, under which we must go, emerging, and then ascending a few narrow granite steps, we were at the summit, and in the portico of a small temple. This, with six other shrines, crowns the mountain. All are very small, and have been built with much ingenuity, resting, at different elevations, partly on pillars, and partly on levelled portions of the peak; and all are dedicated to the same god—the elephant-headed Ganesha. ”

“ The poor wretches added to the horrors of their appearance by horrible outcries and writhings. The blind, the maimed, the footless and handless leper, the hunchback, and the cripple lay stretched upon the ground begging for alms. The crowd now grew still more dense, for we were drawing near the temple. A broad street runs beside a noble square tank, with stone steps on every side descending to the water's edge, and below the water to the bottom of the tank. ”

“ Truly, we have reason to bless God that it is in our power, while surveying the degradation and heathenism of India, to present a picture so cheering of the life and death of a Hindu pastor; and to have an illustration of the power of God by the most unthought-of means to raise up those who, on their own soil, in their own language, under their own sun, and among their own countrymen, shall spread the good news of salvation with a facility to which the foreigner must necessarily be a stranger. ”

“ If, my friends, you fall into this religion of the Christians, who have already proved the ruin of their own families, you will surely have to roam about with a beggar's hand and cup. If you fix and detain the Triune and Eternal one, who is called Vishnu, Brahma, and Siva, in a post, a water-jar, or an image, and believe with all the affection of your heart that the idol itself is very God, you will obtain a clear perception of the heavenly Being. They who, with tumultuous noise, deride the idol, are a stupid race. ”