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The people of India among whom Siddhartha wandered for many years were just then in a
state of change. Their ancestors, the native Indians, had been conquered without great
difficulty by the war-like Aryans (our distant cousins) and thereafter the Aryans had been
the rulers and masters of tens of milions of docile little brown men. To maintain themselves
in the seat of the mighty, they had divided the population into different classes and
gradualy a system of "caste" of the most rigid sort had been enforced upon the natives.
The descendants of the Indo-European conquerors belonged to the highest "caste," the
class of warriors and nobles. Next came the caste of the priests. Below these folowed the
peasants and the business men. The ancient natives, however, who were caled Pariahs,
formed a class of despised and miserable slaves and never could hope to be anything else.
Even the religion of the people was a matter of caste. The old Indo-Europeans, during
their thousands of years of wandering, had met with many strange adventures. These had
been colected in a book caled the Veda. The language of this book was caled Sanskrit,
and it was closely related to the different languages of the European continent, to Greek
and Latin and Russian and German and two-score others. The three highest castes were
alowed to read these holy scriptures. The Pariah, however, the despised member of the
lowest caste, was not permitted to know its contents. Woe to the man of noble or priestly
caste who should teach a Pariah to study the sacred volume!
The majority of the Indian people, therefore, lived in misery. Since this planet offered them
very little joy, salvation from suffering must be found elsewhere. They tried to derive a little
consolation from meditation upon the bliss of their future existence.
Brahma, the al-creator who was regarded by the Indian people as the supreme ruler of
life and death, was worshipped as the highest ideal of perfection. To become like Brahma,
to lose al desires for riches and power, was recognised as the most exalted purpose of
existence. Holy thoughts were regarded as more important than holy deeds, and many
people went into the desert and lived upon the leaves of trees and starved their bodies that
they might feed their souls with the glorious contemplation of the splendours of Brahma,
the Wise, the Good and the Merciful.
Siddhartha, who had often observed these solitary wanderers who were seeking the truth
far away from the turmoil of the cities and the vilages, decided to folow their example. He
cut his hair. He took his pearls and his rubies and sent them back to his family with a
message of farewel, which the ever faithful Channa carried. Without a single folower, the
young prince then moved into the wilderness.
Soon the fame of his holy conduct spread among the mountains. Five young men came to
him and asked that they might be alowed to listen to his words of wisdom. He agreed to
be their master if they would folow him. They consented, and he took them into the hils
and for six years he taught them al he knew amidst the lonely peaks of the Vindhya
Mountains. But at the end of this period of study, he felt that he was stil far from
perfection. The world that he had left continued to tempt him. He now asked that his
pupils leave him and then he fasted for forty-nine days and nights, sitting upon the roots of
an old tree. At last he received his reward. In the dusk of the fiftieth evening, Brahma
revealed himself to his faithful servant. From that moment on, Siddhartha was caled
Buddha and he was revered as the Enlightened One who had come to save men from their
unhappy mortal fate.
The last forty-five years of his life, Buddha spent within the valey of the Ganges River,
teaching his simple lesson of submission and meekness unto al men. In the year 488
before our era, he died, ful of years and beloved by milions of people. He had not
preached his doctrines for the benefit of a single class. Even the lowest Pariah might cal
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himself his disciple.
This, however, did not please the nobles and the priests and the merchants who did their
best to destroy a creed which recognised the equality of al living creatures and offered
men the hope of a second life (a reincarnation) under happier circumstances. As soon as
they could, they encouraged the people of India to return to the ancient doctrines of the
Brahmin creed with its fasting and its tortures of the sinful body. But Buddhism could not
be destroyed. Slowly the disciples of the Enlightened One wandered across the valeys of
the Himalayas, and moved into China. They crossed the Yelow Sea and preached the
wisdom of their master unto the people of Japan, and they faithfuly obeyed the wil of their
great master, who had forbidden them to use force. To-day more people recognise
Buddha as their teacher than ever before and their number surpasses that of the combined
folowers of Christ and Mohammed.
As for Confucius, the wise old man of the Chinese, his story is a simple one. He was born
in the year 550 B.C. He led a quiet, dignified and uneventful life at a time when China was
without a strong central government and when the Chinese people were at the mercy of
bandits and robber-barons who went from city to city, pilaging and stealing and murdering
and turning the busy plains of northern and central China into a wilderness of starving
people.
Confucius, who loved his people, tried to save them. He did not have much faith in the use
of violence. He was a very peaceful person. He did not think that he could make people
over by giving them a lot of new laws. He knew that the only possible salvation would
come from a change of heart, and he set out upon the seemingly hopeless task of changing
the character of his milions of felow men who inhabited the wide plains of eastern Asia.
The Chinese had never been much interested in religion as we understand that word. They
believed in devils and spooks as most primitive people do. But they had no prophets and
recognised no "revealed truth." Confucius is almost the only one among the great moral
leaders who did not see visions, who did not proclaim himself as the messenger of a divine
power; who did not, at some time or another, claim that he was inspired by voices from
above.
He was just a very sensible and kindly man, rather given to lonely wanderings and
melancholy tunes upon his faithful flute. He asked for no recognition. He did not demand
that any one should folow him or worship him. He reminds us of the ancient Greek
philosophers, especialy those of the Stoic School, men who believed in right living and
righteous thinking without the hope of a reward but simply for the peace of the soul that
comes with a good conscience.
Confucius was a very tolerant man. He went out of his way to visit Lao-Tse, the other
great Chinese leader and the founder of a philosophic system caled "Taoism," which was
merely an early Chinese version of the Golden Rule.
Confucius bore no hatred to any one. He taught the virtue of supreme self-possession. A
person of real worth, according to the teaching of Confucius, did not alow himself to be
ruffled by anger and suffered whatever fate brought him with the resignation of those sages
who understand that everything which happens, in one way or another, is meant for the
best.
At first he had only a few students. Gradualy the number increased. Before his death, in
the year 478 B.C., several of the kings and the princes of China confessed themselves his
disciples. When Christ was born in Bethlehem, the philosophy of Confucius had already
become a part of the mental make-up of most Chinamen. It has continued to influence
their lives ever since. Not however in its pure, original form. Most religions change as time
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goes on. Christ preached humility and meekness and absence from worldly ambitions, but
fifteen centuries after Golgotha, the head of the Christian church was spending milions
upon the erection of a building that bore little relation to the lonely stable of Bethlehem.
Lao-Tse taught the Golden Rule, and in less than three centuries the ignorant masses had
made him into a real and very cruel God and had buried his wise commandments under a
rubbish-heap of superstition which made the lives of the average Chinese one long series
of frights and fears and horrors.
Confucius had shown his students the beauties of honouring their Father and their Mother.
They soon began to be more interested in the memory of their departed parents than in the
happiness of their children and their grandchildren. Deliberately they turned their backs
upon the future and tried to peer into the vast darkness of the past. The worship of the
ancestors became a positive religious system. Rather than disturb a cemetery situated
upon the sunny and fertile side of a mountain, they would plant their rice and wheat upon
the barren rocks of the other slope where nothing could possibly grow. And they
preferred hunger and famine to the desecration of the ancestral grave.
At the same time the wise words of Confucius never quite lost their hold upon the
increasing milions of eastern Asia. Confucianism, with its profound sayings and shrewd
observations, added a touch of common-sense philosophy to the soul of every Chinaman
and influenced his entire life, whether he was a simple laundry man in a steaming basement
or the ruler of vast provinces who dwelt behind the high wals of a secluded palace.
In the sixteenth century the enthusiastic but rather uncivilised Christians of the western
world came face to face with the older creeds of the East. The early Spaniards and
Portuguese looked upon the peaceful statues of Buddha and contemplated the venerable
pictures of Confucius and did not in the least know what to make of those worthy
prophets with their far-away smile. They came to the easy conclusion that these strange
divinities were just plain devils who represented something idolatrous and heretical and did
not deserve the respect of the true sons of the Church. Whenever the spirit of Buddha or
Confucius seemed to interfere with the trade in spices and silks, the Europeans attacked
the "evil influence" with bulets and grape-shot. That system had certain very definite
disadvantages. It has left us an unpleasant heritage of il-wil which promises little good for
the immediate future.
THE REFORMATION
THE PROGRESS OF THE HUMAN RACE IS BEST COMPARED TO A
GIGANTIC PENDULUM WHICH FOREVER SWINGS FORWARD AND
BACKWARD. THE RELIGIOUS INDIFFERENCE AND THE ARTISTIC AND
LITERARY ENTHUSIASM OF THE RENAISSANCE WERE FOLLOWED BY
THE ARTISTIC AND LITERARY INDIFFERENCE AND THE RELIGIOUS
ENTHUSIASM OF THE REFORMATION
OF course you have heard of the Reformation. You think of a smal but courageous group
of pilgrims who crossed the ocean to have "freedom of religious worship." Vaguely in the
course of time (and more especialy in our Protestant countries) the Reformation has come
to stand for the idea of "liberty of thought." Martin Luther is represented as the leader of
the vanguard of progress. But when history is something more than a series of flattering
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speeches addressed to our own glorious ancestors, when to use the words of the German
historian Ranke, we try to discover what "actualy happened," then much of the past is
seen in a very different light.
Few things in human life are either entirely good or entirely bad. Few things are either
black or white. It is the duty of the honest chronicler to give a true account of al the good
and bad sides of every historical event. It is very difficult to do this because we al have
our personal likes and dislikes. But we ought to try and be as fair as we can be, and must
not alow our prejudices to influence us too much.
Take my own case as an example. I grew up in the very Protestant centre of a very
Protestant country. I never saw any Catholics until I was about twelve years old. Then I
felt very uncomfortable when I met them. I was a little bit afraid. I knew the story of the
many thousand people who had been burned and hanged and quartered by the Spanish
Inquisition when the Duke of Alba tried to cure the Dutch people of their Lutheran and
Calvinistic heresies. Al that was very real to me. It seemed to have happened only the day
before. It might occur again. There might be another Saint Bartholomew's night, and poor
little me would be slaughtered in my nightie and my body would be thrown out of the
window, as had happened to the noble Admiral de Coligny.
Much later I went to live for a number of years in a Catholic country. I found the people
much pleasanter and much more tolerant and quite as inteligent as my former countrymen.
To my great surprise, I began to discover that there was a Catholic side to the
Reformation, quite as much as a Protestant.
Of course the good people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who actualy lived
through the Reformation, did not see things that way. They were always right and their
enemy was always wrong. It was a question of hang or be hanged, and both sides
preferred to do the hanging. Which was no more than human and for which they deserve
no blame.
When we look at the world as it appeared in the year 1500, an easy date to remember,
and the year in which the Emperor Charles V was born, this is what we see. The feudal
disorder of the Middle Ages has given way before the order of a number of highly
centralised kingdoms. The most powerful of al sovereigns is the great Charles, then a
baby in a cradle. He is the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabela and of Maximilian of
Habsburg, the last of the mediaeval knights, and of his wife Mary, the daughter of Charles
the Bold, the ambitious Burgundian duke who had made successful war upon France but
had been kiled by the independent Swiss peasants. The child Charles, therefore, has falen
heir to the greater part of the map, to al the lands of his parents, grandparents, uncles,
cousins and aunts in Germany, in Austria, in Holand, in Belgium, in Italy, and in Spain,
together with al their colonies in Asia, Africa and America. By a strange irony of fate, he
has been born in Ghent, in that same castle of the counts of Flanders, which the Germans
used as a prison during their recent occupation of Belgium, and although a Spanish king
and a German emperor, he receives the training of a Fleming.
As his father is dead (poisoned, so people say, but this is never proved), and his mother
has lost her mind (she is traveling through her domains with the coffin containing the body
of her departed husband), the child is left to the strict discipline of his Aunt Margaret.
Forced to rule Germans and Italians and Spaniards and a hundred strange races, Charles
grows up a Fleming, a faithful son of the Catholic Church, but quite averse to religious
intolerance. He is rather lazy, both as a boy and as a man. But fate condemns him to rule
the world when the world is in a turmoil of religious fervour. Forever he is speeding from
Madrid to Innsbruck and from Bruges to Vienna. He loves peace and quiet and he is
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always at war. At the age of fifty-five, we see him turn his back upon the human race in
utter disgust at so much hate and so much stupidity. Three years later he dies, a very tired
and disappointed man.
So much for Charles the Emperor. How about the Church, the second great power in the
world? The Church has changed greatly since the early days of the Middle Ages, when it
started out to conquer the heathen and show them the advantages of a pious and righteous
life. In the first place, the Church has grown too rich. The Pope is no longer the shepherd
of a flock of humble Christians. He lives in a vast palace and surrounds himself with artists
and musicians and famous literary men. His churches and chapels are covered with new
pictures in which the saints look more like Greek Gods than is strictly necessary. He
divides his time unevenly between affairs of state and art. The affairs of state take ten
percent of his time. The other ninety percent goes to an active interest in Roman statues,
recently discovered Greek vases, plans for a new summer home, the rehearsal of a new
play. The Archbishops and the Cardinals folow the example of their Pope. The Bishops
try to imitate the Archbishops. The vilage priests, however, have remained faithful to their
duties. They keep themselves aloof from the wicked world and the heathenish love of
beauty and pleasure. They stay away from the monasteries where the monks seem to have
forgotten their ancient vows of simplicity and poverty and live as happily as they dare
without causing too much of a public scandal.
Finaly, there are the common people. They are much better off than they have ever been
before. They are more prosperous, they live in better houses, their children go to better
schools, their cities are more beautiful than before, their firearms have made them the
equal of their old enemies, the robber-barons, who for centuries have levied such heavy
taxes upon their trade. So much for the chief actors in the Reformation.
Now let us see what the Renaissance has done to Europe, and then you wil understand
how the revival of learning and art was bound to be folowed by a revival of religious
interests. The Renaissance began in Italy. From there it spread to France. It was not quite
successful in Spain, where five hundred years of warfare with the Moors had made the
people very narrow minded and very fanatical in al religious matters. The circle had grown
wider and wider, but once the Alps had been crossed, the Renaissance had suffered a
change.
The people of northern Europe, living in a very different climate, had an outlook upon life
which contrasted strangely with that of their southern neighbours. The Italians lived out in
the open, under a sunny sky. It was easy for them to laugh and to sing and to be happy.
The Germans, the Dutch, the English, the Swedes, spent most of their time indoors,
listening to the rain beating on the closed windows of their comfortable little houses. They
did not laugh quite so much. They took everything more seriously. They were forever
conscious of their immortal souls and they did not like to be funny about matters which
they considered holy and sacred. The "humanistic" part of the Renaissance, the books, the
studies of ancient authors, the grammar and the text-books, interested them greatly. But
the general return to the old pagan civilisation of Greece and Rome, which was one of the
chief results of the Renaissance in Italy, filed their hearts with horror.
But the Papacy and the Colege of Cardinals was almost entirely composed of Italians and
they had turned the Church into a pleasant club where people discussed art and music and
the theatre, but rarely mentioned religion. Hence the split between the serious north and
the more civilised but easy-going and indifferent south was growing wider and wider al the
time and nobody seemed to be aware of the danger that threatened the Church.
There were a few minor reasons which wil explain why the Reformation took place in
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Germany rather than in Sweden or England. The Germans bore an ancient grudge against
Rome. The endless quarrels between Emperor and Pope had caused much mutual
bitterness. In the other European countries where the government rested in the hands of a
strong king, the ruler had often been able to protect his subjects against the greed of the
priests. In Germany, where a shadowy emperor ruled a turbulent crowd of little
princelings, the good burghers were more directly at the mercy of their bishops and
prelates. These dignitaries were trying to colect large sums of money for the benefit of
those enormous churches which were a hobby of the Popes of the Renaissance. The
Germans felt that they were being mulcted and quite naturaly they did not like it.
And then there is the rarely mentioned fact that Germany was the home of the printing
press. In northern Europe books were cheap and the Bible was no longer a mysterious
manu-script owned and explained by the priest. It was a household book of many families
where Latin was understood by the father and by the children. Whole families began to
read it, which was against the law of the Church. They discovered that the priests were
teling them many things which, according to the original text of the Holy Scriptures, were
somewhat different. This caused doubt. People began to ask questions. And questions,
when they cannot be answered, often cause a great deal of trouble.
The attack began when the humanists of the North opened fire upon the monks. In their
heart of hearts they stil had too much respect and reverence for the Pope to direct their
salies against his Most Holy Person. But the lazy, ignorant monks, living behind the
sheltering wals of their rich monasteries, offered rare sport.
The leader in this warfare, curiously enough, was a very faithful son of the church Gerard
Gerardzoon, or Desiderius Erasmus, as he is usualy caled, was a poor boy, born in
Rotterdam in Holand, and educated at the same Latin school of Deventer from which
Thomas a Kempis had graduated. He had become a priest and for a time he had lived in a
monastery. He had traveled a great deal and knew whereof he wrote, When he began his
career as a public pamphleteer (he would have been caled an editorial writer in our day)
the world was greatly amused at an anonymous series of letters which had just appeared
under the title of "Letters of Obscure Men." In these letters, the general stupidity and
arrogance of the monks of the late Middle Ages was exposed in a strange German-Latin
doggerel which reminds one of our modern limericks. Erasmus himself was a very learned
and serious scholar, who knew both Latin and Greek and gave us the first reliable version
of the New Testament, which he translated into Latin together with a corrected edition of
the original Greek text. But he believed with Salust, the Roman poet, that nothing prevents
us from "stating the truth with a smile upon our lips."
In the year 1500, while visiting Sir Thomas More in Eng-land, he took a few weeks off
and wrote a funny little book, caled the "Praise of Foly," in which he attacked the monks
and their credulous folowers with that most dangerous of al weapons, humor. The
booklet was the best seler of the sixteenth century. It was translated into almost every
language and it made people pay attention to those other books of Erasmus in which he
advocated reform of the many abuses of the church and appealed to his felow humanists
to help him in his task of bringing about a great rebirth of the Christian faith.
But nothing came of these excelent plans. Erasmus was too reasonable and too tolerant to
please most of the enemies of the church. They were waiting for a leader of a more robust
nature.
He came, and his name was Martin Luther.
Luther was a North-German peasant with a first-class brain and possessed of great
personal courage. He was a university man, a master of arts of the University of Erfurt;
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afterwards he joined a Dominican monastery. Then he became a colege professor at the
theological school of Wittenberg and began to explain the scriptures to the indifferent
ploughboy