tion
has been different. Pantheism is melting out of the sky of the educated,
and if nothing else take its place, it will be a selfish materialism or
agnosticism, not avowed or formulated yet shaping every motive, that the
new morality will have to reckon with.

CHAPTER XV

JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF

"Tandem vicisti, Galilaee"

--said to have been uttered by Julian, the Apostate emperor.

[Sidenote: Pantheism does not lead to belief in "the Son of God."]

Pantheism, it has been said, lends itself to the lead to belief idea of
avatars or incarnations of deity, and Hinduism, therefore, is familiar
with avatars. Observation contradicts this _a priori_ reasoning, nay, it
justifies a statement almost contrary. To the philosopher who is
thinking out a pantheistic system, or to the ascetic who is seeking
after identity of consciousness with the One, the Hindu Avatars are only
a part of the delusion, the Maya, in which men are steeped. To a
pantheist, holding that his own consciousness of individuality is
delusion, born of spiritual darkness and ignorance, the conception of an
avatar or concrete presentation of deity as an individual is only still
grosser delusion. "The name of God and the conventions of piety are as
unreal as anything else in Maya," writes a modern British apostle of
Hinduism, while advocating the realisation of Maya as our salvation.[88]
It does not seem to me justifiable to say that through Pantheism the
Indian mind can approach the thought of Christ the Son of Man and the
Son of God. But pantheism, with its allied doctrine of transmigration,
may encourage the thought that our Lord was a great jogi or religious
devotee, the last climax of many upward transmigrations, and that Christ
had attained to the goal of illumination of the jogi, namely, identity
of consciousness with deity, when he felt "I and the Father are one."
That statement about Our Lord is sometimes made in India.

[Sidenote: The avatars of popular theology.]

It is not through the pantheism of the brahmanically learned and of
religious devotees that the Indian mind has come within Christ's sphere
of influence, but rather through the beliefs of the multitude and the
new education of the middle class. And how, we ask, has Christ been
introduced to India by association with the popular beliefs--how,
rather, has the attempt been made to do so? The theology of the people
begins, as has been already stated, with the Hindu Triad,