Archibald Scott

“ Augustine turned them against himself, when he showed that to claim entire originality for Christianity, to deny the existence of any light before Christ came, and the possibility of any silent universal revelation through reason and conscience, was to contradict His Messiahship. To ignore what God had done before, would have cut Him off from God and man. We would expect the Son of Man to confirm the deepest convictions of the human race. We would expect the Son of God to claim and utilise all the truth God’s Spirit had spoken in ages past. ”

“ A religion without morality must degrade. A system of morality apart from religion will never upraise. Religion is for man simply indispensable. Deity is a necessity to him, and deity he must have, though he finds his god in a tree or makes it out of a stone. Man lives by faith, faith in his higher self, faith in a higher than himself, who alone can explain the conflict between his actual condition and the ideals which he conceives. ”

“ Individual existence, at first so full of wonder and delight, lost soon its freshness and glory, and came to be felt to be such a burden that emancipation from it by absorption into the Absolute was hailed as a boon. The human mind, leaving its childhood behind it, and advancing to question itself and the universe, after a season of movement and sense of freedom and power, somehow lost or missed the way. ”

“ We are all agreed that humanity is one, that each life is part of a larger life, and so the injury of the part is the injury of the whole. Sin could not enter humanity without dragging it down, and holiness could not enter and conquer without lifting it up. If one could appear in humanity without sin, not a link in the diseased chain, but perfectly free from all taint of disease, is the supposition incredible that he would have the effect upon humanity of a new creation? ”

“ He wants to isolate and withdraw his portion of life from the sum of humanity, to abstract himself from the mass, to save his own soul; and now that he nears the goal, his whole energies are directed, not to purify and strengthen and ennoble the personal self for better service, by minding what is pure and lovely, and by striving unceasingly after what is right and true, but by crushing out every feeling into apathy, every thought into vacuity, so as to get rid of personality, identity, and the very faintest germ of life. ”

“ While obedience to a superior was not exacted, the law of poverty and chastity was as obligatory upon the Buddhist monk as on the members of the Christian Orders. Francis of Assisi could not more highly have eulogised poverty as “the way to salvation, the nurse of humility, the root of perfection,” than did the Indian monks who compiled the Buddhist scriptures. “In supreme felicity live we, though we call nothing our own. Feeding on happiness, we are like the gods in the regions of light.” ”

“ Unlike the Indian, tortured by endless change, without any evolution from low to higher, from evil or imperfect to what is good and perfect, the Christian can endure suffering not only patiently but also cheerfully, knowing that he is suffering not just for his own sake, but that in ways mysterious he is lightening the load of many, and helping to bring to an end the long anguish of the whole creation. ”

“ Unreckonable energy and thought have been expended upon the production of a man, and just when he has reached the highest point of perfection, and is most serviceable to the universe, he becomes of less value than a vapour that vanishes away. Truly
“the crown of our life as it closes
Is darkness; the fruit thereof dust,” and man walketh in a vain show, he disquieteth himself in vain, if Buddha’s way be the only path of deliverance from evil, and Nirvana his only goal. ”

“ The apostles, instructed of Christ, have taught us that God’s precious gift of life is ours to use: that to keep it, to will to save and to find it, as if it were an end and not a means, is to miss and to lose it; while to use it, be willing to lose it for some higher good, is to keep it unto life eternal. Now Buddha had a glimpse of this truth, that lust of existence was the root of bitterness in humanity. ”

“ It has certainly not destroyed ignorance, and the worship of intelligence has not tended to its development and diffusion among the peoples whom it has swayed. Judged even by an ordinary standard, the monks of either Southern or Northern Buddhism are rarely found to be enlightened men, while the vast portion of the peoples among whom these monks are found are about the most ignorant of all. And just as certainly has it failed to make men free; for religion is the guarantee of freedom. “Where there is no place left in human thought for deity, there will soon be none found for human liberty.” ”

“ Our religion is higher than our grasp, for it is always above us. Alas! in too many cases it is higher than our aim, for we are too inclined to let it slip, and drift on the tides of things as they are; but mankind will never be satisfied with a lower. “Après l’invention du blé ils ne veulent pas encore vivre du gland.” “We needs must love the highest when we see it,” and we needs must strive to become like the highest when we love it. The gospel preaches consolation and hope to a suffering world, and promises grace upon grace to every endeavour to heal and amend its condition. ”

“ Now, if we find in all sections of humanity, even far apart from each other, the same groping after an Author and Governor of our being, and the same forecasting of our destiny, though in most contradictory, and, alas! often fearfully perverted ways, we may safely infer as a fundamental truth that humanity, though broken up into many fragments, is really an organic unity, and that the Christian dogma simply expresses a scientific fact, “that God hath made of one all nations on the face of the earth.” ”

“ Of propagandism in this sense the Buddhist Sangha knew nothing. It was moved by no enthusiasm of humanity; it felt nothing of that earnestness which from the days of the apostles has characterised the true propagators of the gospel. In no discourse that has come down to us is there any impassioned entreaty of men to repent and believe. There is no sorrow over the unbelieving who refuse their salvation, no burning indignation against those who despise or who scoff at the truth. ”

“ Buddhism, in a quiet land and tranquil age, was launched upon the world as a new theory of life—a system so rounded off and completed that its disciples had no other duty than that of believing, obeying, and propagating it. Christianity, on the other hand, began its career amid the convulsions of political revolution, and for three centuries of conflict it had to fight every inch of its way. ”

“ Sharing a confessedly sinful humanity, he may be partaker of a sinless one, and thus, if evil reigns over him unto death, the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus can free him from it.
Buddhism had no such hope and goal for man; indeed, we may well wonder that a pessimism more thorough than that of Brahmanism did not deprive it of all hope and sink it into fatalism. Left alone to fight his way through the universe, struggling in a maelstrom of forces with no help for him in man, no hope of sympathy in God, a Buddhist would surely despair. ”

“ It is not necessary to trace the sickening degradation of Christianity through all its encounters and compromises with heathenism, till in the gathering gloom its degenerate art reached a point where it dared to portray to the eye of sense the death-pangs of the Son of God, and its worship touched a depth of idolatry in which it symbolised the mystery of the Holy Trinity by a three-headed figure quite after the model of the Hindu Trimurti. ”

“ The vows of poverty and obedience and chastity may be the very medicine we require, in a condition of public sentiment so unhealthy that a man’s standing, and worth, and even life, seems to consist in the abundance of his goods, and his freedom in licence to despise all authority and indulge all his likings. No doubt, in the West as in the East, Monachism eventually became an impediment to Christian civilisation, but not until it had considerably regenerated and uplifted it. ”

“ Religion would indeed secure rewards, but they would only be transient; religion might regulate and modify the course of migration, but only Gnosis could break its adamantine chain. “The vision of Atman is the only deliverance, for by it all ties are loosened”; “the vision of the self is the light of the world, to which only the purest minds attain.” To reach it not only the bonds of desire must be broken, but of ignorance too. “For Atman is highly exalted above all reverence and effort, above holiness and unholiness.” ”

“ Buddha confessed to an ideal, and wrought hard to realise it, but alas for humanity when it finds no higher than self to reverence! Buddha’s theories of self-culture and self-deliverance reduced to practice have proved most miserable failures. It could not be otherwise; no man is likely to move the ship in which he sits by puffing away at the sails, or to lift himself out of the mire by simply pulling away at his boots; and no philosophy of self-culture, self-control, or self-rescue, can succeed, which ignores or refuses to acknowledge man’s instinct of worship. ”

“ As
“Man hath all which nature hath, but more,
And in that more lie all his hopes of good,” so Christianity, while having in it in fuller measure and clearer form every truth that has vivified any other religion, has in it, as the new creation to which viithe long travail of the soul under every form of faith has from the first been pointing, something peculiar and contrasted—which is the Divine answer to all their aspirations. This we do not need to demonstrate: indeed it may be a verity, as incapable of demonstration as is that of the existence of Deity or the immortality of the soul. ”

“ As a general rule, we may assert that the strength of a man’s faith will be found to be in direct proportion to his knowledge of the everlasting and unchangeable laws by which the universe is governed. It is our theology alone that is assailed, and we are learning that theology, as a system of reasoning upon materials furnished not only by religion itself, but also by some other “ologies,” must be based on other and higher authority than that of an infallible Council, or that of a chapter whose significance was supposed to be unalterably fixed two or three thousand years ago. ”

“ Christianity demands that an ἄσκησις shall be practised by all who desire the illumination of the Spirit, for all that is vile must be purged out of life, and all that is animal in it must be subdued. The discipline, however, is always moral as well as religious, and it aims only at controlling, never, like Stoicism or Cynicism, at stifling or violating natural affection. Unlike Plato, who regarded matter as evil, Christ and His apostles recognised it as the creature of God, and taught us to seek the seat of evil, not in the body, but in the perverted will. ”

“ It is like a land of dreams to our modern conception, but it is not a chaos. We can trace to a certain extent movements in it, and as we follow them there emerges in outline sufficiently clear a real civilisation, which, though lacking the stir and endeavour, the commerce and the art of the West, and really inferior to it, is yet most interesting in its pathetic resemblances, and all the more instructive that its beliefs and institutions were formed out of antecedents and predispositions very different from any of which the Western world had experience. ”

“ It was the philosopher, and not the priest, who in old times argued of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come. The Hebrew, as we have seen, was the first and only ancient religion that demanded holiness of life as indispensable to the worship of God, and Christianity, as was natural, recognised this old law which men had from the beginning. But Buddhism was the first system in which morality was substituted for religion. It had neither priests, nor temples, nor prayers, but taught men to depend for safety solely upon a life of virtue and wisdom and goodness. ”

“ The great question with Buddha and his immediate disciples was not how Nirvana, the goal of human aspiration, was to be defined, but how it was to be attained. It was for him sufficiently expressed as the final extinction of all the roots of sorrow, and he taught that this consummation could only be reached by knowledge. Ignorance was the ultimate ground of all suffering existence, but, as in Christianity, men could know the truth, and the truth would set them free. ”

“ Their earliest popular conception of deliverance was simply that of re-birth in a happier world, perchance secured by sacrificial rites and religious acts, but such a conception could not long satisfy, and eventually it gave way in the higher class of minds to nobler views. In India, as elsewhere, men soon became conscious of the more solid security of merit procured by a life of justice and mercy. Man’s future was in his own and not in the hands of a priest: its happiness or misery would be no accident, but the sure result of good or evil done here and now. ”

“ It is significant that in the beginning of the Bible Nature-worship seems stamped as accursed in its symbol, the serpent, and that the whole Bible from beginning to end is a Divine protest against that worship in all its forms. Mankind in all ages is tempted to become as the gods, and in a low condition he has almost everywhere succumbed to the temptation. He feasts his gods, compels them to serve him, is really higher than they, and thus he degrades himself or falls from the ideal of one made in the image and after the likeness of God. ”

“ All through his career he was beset by Mara, the sensual king of all who submit to him; but Buddha was superior not only to Mara, but to all the gods in the popular pantheon, for they, alike with the lowest and the weakest of things, were subject to the law of transmigration. Man might rise to a higher heaven than what they occupied; they might fall to the lowest hell. “Their worlds must perish like that of man, and if ever they attained to final salvation, it could only be by the same way in which a worm might hope to reach it.” ”

“ The miraculous personality of Christ is thus the outstanding and distinctive feature of the Christian writings. As the mists clear away in the East, Buddha emerges more and more in the stature of a good and great man, but Christ rises upon us as one who cannot be accounted for according to the measure of any man, nor even that of an angel. It is not as a teacher, a guide out of the difficulties of life, that He meets us, but as a Revealer and Saviour. It is thus He has been accepted by His disciples, and upon their faith He has reared His Church. ”

“ It is not our interest, therefore, to sever Christianity from all connection with the manifold forms in which the religious instinct and faculty of man has found expression. If it could be proved that our religion stands in no relation to anything which men in other religions thought or believed, it would be discovered defective, and we would have to abandon the claim that it is the universal religion of humanity. ”

“ Absolute truth and goodness is the perfection of divine blessedness; the never-ceasing pursuit of it is human blessedness. The goal we can never reach, but the watchword, “Nearer, my God, to Thee!” seems to solve for us the problem of human destiny, for by directing us to the life of perpetual achievement, it assures us of a never-ending blessedness.
The Buddhist goal of perfection and the law or way that led to it, was by Buddha himself or his earliest disciples considered to be beyond the power of many to attain to. ”