New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 205 pages of information about New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century.

New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 205 pages of information about New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century.
fellowship.” There are the four doors of the Chet Rami sanctuary.  There also we have the Theosophical Society of India, professing in its constitution to be “the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, representing and excluding no religious creed.”  Ammonius, founder of the Neo-Platonists, was a pantheist like the present leader of the Theosophical Society, Mrs. Besant, and like her too, curiously, had begun as a Christian.[104] We recall that of Indian Theosophy in general, in 1891, the late Sir Monier Williams declared that it seemed little more than another name for the “Vedanta [or Pantheistic] philosophy.”  Exactly like the earlier theosophists also, Ammonius, the Neo-Platonist, held that the purified soul could perform physical wonders, by the power of Theurgy.  In its constitution the Theosophical Society professed “to investigate the hidden mysteries of nature and the psychical powers latent in man.”  Many can remember how, in the eighties, Madame Blavatsky took advantage of our curiosity regarding such with air-borne letters from Mahatmas in Thibet.  Again Ammonius, we read, “turned the whole history of the pagan gods into allegory.”  There we have the Neo-Krishnaites of to-day.  “He acknowledged that Christ was an extraordinary man, the friend of God, and an admirable Theurgus.”  There we have the stand point of the educated Indians who have come under Christ’s spell.  For two centuries the successors of Ammonius followed in these lines.  “Individual Neo-Platonists,” Harnack tells us, “employed Christian sayings as oracles, and testified very highly of Christ.  Porphyry of Syria, chief of the Neo-Platonists of the third century, wrote a work “against Christians”; but again, according to Harnack, the work is not directed against Christ, or what Porphyry regarded as the teaching of Christ.  It was directed against the Christians of his day and against the sacred books, which according to Porphyry were written by impostors and ignorant people.  There we have the double mind of educated India,—­homage to Christ, opposition to His Church.  There also we have the standpoint of Sahib Mirza Gholam Ahmad of Qadian.  Some, we read, being taught by the Neo-Platonists that there was little difference between the ancient religion, rightly explained and restored to its purity, and the religion which Christ really taught, not that corrupted form of it which His disciples professed, concluded it best for them to remain among those who worshipped the gods.  There is the present Indian willingness to discover Christian and modern ideas in the Hindu Scriptures, especially in the original Vedas that the new [=A]rya sect declare to be “the Scripture of true knowledge.”  The practical outcome of the Neo-Platonic movement was an attempt to revive the old Graeco-Roman religion,—­Julian the apostate emperor had many with him.  There we have the revival of the worship of Krishna in India, and the apologies for idolatry and caste.  The most recent stage of the Theosophical Society in India
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New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.