World Parliament of Religions Scrapbook 003

              #003 World Parliament of Religions Scrapbook, p. 028

If you closely observe the conduct of your fel-
low beings you will notice that each individual
acts different from others. From this we can in-
fer that in future life each one will also enjoy or
suffer the result of his own actions done in this
existence. As the pleasure and pain of one's
present actions, so the happiness or misery of our
future world will be the result of our present ac-
tion. We enjoy happiness and suffer misery, our
own action being causes. In other words, there
is no other cause than our own actions, which
make us happy or unhappy. Now let us observe
the different attitudes of human life. One is hap-
py and others feel unhappy. Indeed, even among
the members of the same family we often notice
a great diversity in wealth and fortune. Thus
various attitudes of human life can be explained 
by the self-formation of cause and effect. There 
is no one in the universe but one's self who rewards 
or punishes him. The diversity in future stages 
will be explained by the same doctrine. Heaven
and hell are self-made. God did not provide you
with a hell, but you yourself. The glorious hap-
piness of future life will be the effect of present
virtuous action.
According to the different sects of Buddhism
more or less different views are entertained in re-
gard to the law of causality, but so far they
agree in regarding it as the law of nature inde-
pendent of the will of Buddha and much less of
the will of human being. The law exists for an
eternity without beginning, without end. Bodily
health, material weath, wonderful genius, un-
natural suffering, are the infallible expressions
of the law of causality which governs every
particle of the universe, every portion of human
conduct.
As I have already explained our sacred Buddha
is not the creator of the law of nature, but he is
the first discoverer of the law who led thus his
followers to the height of moral protection. Who
shall utter a word against him, who discovered
the first truth of the universe, who has saved and
will save by his noble teaching the millions and
millions of falling human beings? Indeed, too
much approbation could not be uttered to honor
his sacred name.
  IT BECOMES RELIGION OF FACTS.
Prof. George P. Fisher Furnishes a Paper
        on Christianity.
There were many vacant seats in the hall
when Dr. Barrows called the afternoon session
to order. Prof. Goodspeed was presented to
read the paper on "Christianity a Religion
of Facts," prepared by Prof. George P. Fish- 
er of New Haven. A synopsis follows:
In saying that Christianity is an historical re-
ligion more is meant, of course, than that it ap-
peared at a certain date in the world's history.
This is true of all the religions of mankind, ex-
cept those which grew up at times prior to
authentic records and sprung up through a spon-
taneous, gradual process. The preparation of
Christianity is indissolubly involved in the his-
tory of ancient Israel, which comprises a long
succession of events. The gospel itself is in its
foundation made up of historical occurrences,
without which, if it does not dissolve into thin
air, it is transformed into something quite unlike
itself.
Christianity is distinctly set forth as a religion
of facts. Be it observed that in asserting that
Christianity is composed of facts we do not mean
to deny it to be a doctrine and a system of doc-
trines. These facts have all an import, a signifi-
cance which can be more or less perfectly de-
fined. That Christ was sent into the world is
not a bare fact; but he was sent into the world
for a purpose; the ends of his mission can be
stated.
If all human knowledge is defective, and if in
every department of research barriers are set at
some point to the progress of discovery, how un-
reasonable to cry out against Christian theology 
because the Bible does not reveal everything and
because everything the Bible does not reveal is
not yet ascertained. We do not account for
events here as in the material world by going
back to forces which evolved them and the laws
which necessitated them. Enough that here has
been a choice to sin, there has been a holy will,
and there a love that flinches from no sacri-
fices. Our solutions are, to use tech-
nical language, moral, not metaphysical.
We have to do not with puppets moving about
under the pressure of a blind compulsion, but
with personal beings endowed with a free spirit-
ual nature. He who seeks to go behind the free
will of God in quest of same anterior force out of
which he fancies the world to have been derived
lands in a dreary Pantheism satisfying neither
his reason nor his heart.
Christianity does not profess to be a demonstra-
tion, but, taking all things into consideration, the
Evangelical history in its leading essential
points is established by proof as near to a demon-
stration as we can reasonably expect, or as actu-
ally exists in respect to the most important oc- 
currences of that time. There is no defect of 
proof and no room for disbelief unless there is a
settled prepossession against the supernatural,
and against any near contact of God with the af-
fairs of this world. May we not expect then,
leaving out of view the special Providence of
God in connection with the progress
of the gospel, that the facts of the
Christian religion will become not only a part of
the universally acknowledged truth, but also
that they will enter, so to speak, into the historic
consciousness of mankind? As to the second
part of the gospel, this interpretation is not an
arbitrary or forced one. Though given by inspi-
ration to guard against human blindness and er-
ror it is nevertheless perfectly rational. It is
and will one day be seen to be the only possible
meaning of God's work of redemption. Christi-
anity in both fact and doctrine will become a
thing perfectly established.
   Meeting Possible Only in America.
"Among the most devoted friends of this
parliament," said Dr. Barrows, "has been
from the first Prof. J. Esther Carpenter of
Oxford, who stands at the head of the great
Unitarian thinkers of this country and En-
gland. He is unable to be here, but he has
sent his papers on "The Need of a Wider View
of Revelation."
The paper was read by the Rev. Dr. Ruben-
kamp of Chicago. A synopsis follows:
The congress which I have the honor to address
in this paper is a unique assembly. It could not
have met before the nineteenth century and no
country in the world possesses the needful bold-
ness of conception and organizing energy save
the United States of America. I will not stop to
define a sacred book or to distinguish it from
those which have deeply influenced Christian
thought or feeling. It is enough to observe that
the significance of great collections of religious
literature cannot be overestimated.
As soon as a faith produces a scripture, a book
invested with legal or other authorities, no mat-
ter on how lowly a scale, it at once acquires an
element of permanence. Such permanence has
both advantages and dangers. First of all it pro-
vides the great sustenance for religious reflec-
tion ; it protects a young and growing religion
from too rapid change to contact with foreign
influences. It settles a base for future internal
development. It secures a certain stability. It
fixes a standard of belief. It consolidates the
moral type. It has been sometimes argued that
if the gospels had never been written the
Christian church, which existed for a gen-
eration ere they were composed, would
still have transmitted its orders and adminis-
tered its sacrament and lived on by its tradition.
But where would have been the image of Jesus
enshrined in these brief records? How could it
have sunk into the hearts of nations and served
as the impulse and the goal of endeavor, unex-
hausted in Christendom after eighteen centuries?
The diversities of the religions of Greece, their
tendencies to pass into one another, the ease
with which new cults obtained a footing in
Rome, the decline of any vital faith during the
last days of the republic supply abundant illus-
trations of the religious weakness of a nation
without scriptures.
On the other hand the dangers are obvious; the
letter takes the place of the spirit, the transitory
is confused with the permanent, the occasional is
made universal, the local and temporal is erect-
ed into the everlasting and absolute. Secondly,
the sacred book is indispensable for the mission-
ary religion. Even Judaism, imperfect as was its
development in this direction, discovered this.
And now one after another our age has witnessed
the resurrection of ancient literature. Philology
has put the key of language into our hands.
Shrine after shrine in the world's great
temple has been entered; the songs of praise,
the commands of law, the litanies of penitence
have been fetched from the tombs of the
Nile or the sanctuaries of the Ganges. The greater
Bible of humanity has been recovered. What will
it teach? I desire to suggest to this congress
that it brings home to us the need of a concep[-]
tion of revelation unconfined to any particular re-
ligion, but capable of application in diverse
modes to all. The word of God is not of single
application; it is boundless, unlimited. For each
man as he entered into being there is an idea in
the divine mind of what God means him to be.
That dwells in every soul, realizing itself,
not in conduct only, but in each sev-
eral highest form of human endeavor. It
is the fountain of all lofty thought;
it utters itself through the creation of beauty in
poetry and art; it prompts the investigations of
science; it guides the inquiries of philosophy.
There are so many kinds of voices in the world,
and no kind is without signification. So many
voices, so many words, each soul a fresh word,
with a new destiny conceived for it by God to be
something none that has preceded has ever been
before, to show forth some purpose of the divine
being just then and there which no one else could
make known. Thus conceived the history of re-
ligion gathered up into itself the history of hu-
man thought and life. It becomes the story of
God's continual revelation to our race. How-
ever much we may mar and frustrate it in this
revelation each one of us may have part. Its
forms may change from age to ago; its institu-
tions may rise and fall; its rights and usages
may grow and decline. These are the temporary,
the local, the accidental; they are not the essence
which abides. To realize the sympathy of relig-
ions is the first step towards grasping this great
thought. May this congress, with its noble rep-
resentation of so many faiths, hasten the day of
a mutual understanding, when God, by whatever
name we hallow him, shall be all in all.
   Trinitarian Conception of the Deity.
The Rev. J. W. Lee of Atlanta, a young
clergyman with a pronounced Southern ac-
cent, read an essay on "Christ the Reason of
the Universe," which was an involved piece of
theological reasoning after the method of
Hegel. A summary of his argument follows :
The human mind uses three words to shelter
and house all its ideas. These are nature, man,
and God. So deep and abiding has been the con-
viction that the different orders of existence de-
nominated by these words are real, that ideas of
them have been the presuppositions of all think-
ing. Man the self is dependent, and nature the
not-self is dependent. By the very necessities of
thought we are driven to assume the reality of
God.
In the philosophy of India too much is made of
God. In the system of Confucius too much is
made of man. In the thought of Thomas Henry
Buckle the boundaries of nature are widened till
but little room is left for man and God. In the
theory of Jean Jacques Rousseau man is empha-
sized to a point of independence out of all pro-
portion to his dependent and relative nature. In
the English deism of the eighteenth century God
was represented as an almighty clockmaker, the
world as a machine and men as so many atoms
related to one another mechanically, like the
grains of wheat in the same heap.
We call Christ the reason of the universe be-
cause he brings to thought such a synthesis of
the nature, man and God, as harmonizes human 
life with itself and with the facts of nature and
God, the facts of Christ's life and death and
resurrection and ascension, and underlie Western
civilization, and have been the potent factors in
its creation.
Christ owes the unrivaled place he holds today
among the sons of men to the fact that he came
solving the problems man saw in nature, in him-
self and in God, by living them out.
By his incarnation Christ united the two terms
found in the antithesis of an infinite past and a
finite present. By his resurrection he united in
a historic fact the two terms found in the an-
tithesis of an infinite future and a finite present,
and by his ascension he gave triumph and undy-
ing hope to life. He presents the unity of the
triune God. Proceeding from the Father and the
Son he goes out into the imperfect world, the Son
expressed, under conditions of time and space by
the thought of himself as eternally derived
from the Father. He thus hecame the en-
ergy and force of the material world,
the life of the unconscious plant and
animal world, and the real life and thought and
law of the human world. In the Father we have
will, a substance of the world; in the Son we
have reason, the form of the world; in the Spirit
we have life, the power of the world. Religions
other than the Christian religion have been lost
by emphasizing one or other of the distinctions.
All men are characteristic of the nature of God.
To the ignoring of all the rest and the Christian
trinity we have a conception of God which meets
the manifold apprehensions and opinions which
the human race has had of God and all ages and
its painful and varied experience.
       Teachings of Buddha.
The most comprehensive statement of
Buddhism that has been made before the Par-
liament of Religions was that of H.
Dharmapala, Secretary of the Improved So-
ciety of Buddhism of Southern India. Mr.
Dharmapala is a thorough English scholar
and is devoted to the religion of Asia. His
presentation of Buddhism gave to his hearers
a new and clearer view of Buddhism and its
uplifting mission, and many of the preju-
dices which have existed in their minds were
cleared away. Mr. Dharmapala read only the
first section of his paper at the afternoon ses-
sion. The rest he will read tonight. He said
in part yesterday:
Five hundred and forty-three years before the
birth of Christ Buddha was born in the Royal
Lumbini Gardens in the City of Kapilavastu.
His mother was Maya, the Queen of Raja Sudd-
hodana, of the Solar race of India. The story
of his conception and birth and the details of his
life up to the 29th year of his age, his great re-
nunciation, his ascetic life, and his enlighten-
ment under the great Bo tree at Buddhajaya in
Middle India are embodied in that incomparable
epic, "The Light of Asia," by Sir Edwin Arnold.
Six centuries before Jesus of Nazareth walked
over the plains of Galilee, preaching a life of holi- 
ness and purity, Jothajata Buddha, the enlight- 
ened Messiah of the world, with his retinue of Ar- 
hats (holy men) traversed the whole peninsula of 
India with the message of peace and holiness to 
the sin-burdened world. Heart-stirring were the 
words he spoke to the first five disciples at the 
deer park, the Hermitage of Sains, Benares. This 
was the first message of Buddha: "Open ye your 
ears, O Bhikkhus, deliverance from death is found, 
I teach you: I preach the law, if ye walk accord- 
ing to my teaching ye shall be partakers in a 
short time of that for which sons of noble fami-
lies leave their homes—the highest end of relig- 
ious effort. Ye shall even in this present life ap-
prehend the truth itself and see it face to face."
And then the exalted Buddha spake thus: "There
are two extremes of Bhikkhus, which the truth- 
seeker ought not to follow—the one a life 
of sensualism, which is low, ignoble, vul-
gar, unworthy, and unprofitable; the other the
pessimistic life of extreme asceticism, which is
painful, unworthy, and unprofitable. There is a 
middle path, discovered by the Tathagata, a path 
which opens the eyes and bestows understanding, 
which leads to peace of mind, to the higher wis- 
dom, to full enlightenment, to eternal peace, 
This middle path whicn the Tathagata has dis-
covered is the noble eightfold path—viz.: right
knowledge, the perception of the law of cause and
effect; right thinking, right speech, right actions,
right professions, right exertion, right mindfullness,
right contemplation.
   BISHOP KEANE ON THE INCARNATION.
Eloquent Address Made at the Evening
Session of the Parliament.
The Rev. William M. Lawrenee presided
over the evening session in the ab-
sence of Dr. Barrows. A large at-
tendance was present and some brilliant
papers were read. The Rt.-Rev. John J. Keane
of Washington, D. C., was the first speaker.
He spoke without notes and aroused the audi-
ence to great enthusiasm many times during
his address. His subject was "The Incarna-
tion." He first pointed out the illogical de-
fects in the Eastern and Western faiths of
Asia, their useless attempts to reconcile the
finite with the infinite. Coming down to
Christianity, he said:
Whatever has an existence, whatever has a
beginning is necessarily finite. From the very
beginning everything pointed to the one who is
expected. The patriarchs told their descendants
of the Great One who is to come. When ques-
tioned the patriarch said "I am not he, I am
simply a type of the expected"; they say "I am
but a figure of the sinless one who
is to lead the children of men into the promised
land." All the prophets told of him who was to
be the savior of men. Outside in the Gentile na-
tions tales were told of an expected re-
deemer. Greece, Rome—all had records of
prophesies of a great leader. This expectancy
was not frustrated. The angel of God