Supplementary Notes
Supplementary Note 1—Source footnote 67
See Chas. F. Aiken in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. VII, pp. 358 sq.; M. Williams, Hinduism, New York, 1897; L. D. Barnett, Hinduism, London, 1906; J. E. Carpenter, Theism in Medieval India, London, 1921; W. Crooke, Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, Allahabad, 1894; new ed., 2 vols., Westminster, 1896; J. A. Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies, tr. by H. K. Beauchamp, 2 vols., 3rd ed., Oxford, 1906; Guru Prasad Sen, An Introduction to the Study of Hinduism, Calcutta, 1893; H. Jacobi, Die Entwickelung der Gottesidee bei den Indern und deren Beweise für das Dasein Gottes, Bonn and Leipsic, 1923; W. J. Wilkins, Hindu Mythology, Vedic and Puranic, Calcutta, 1882; Modern Hinduism, an Account of the Religious Life of the Hindus in Northern India, London, 1887.—The official number of the deities of the Hindu pantheon is given as 330,000,000, and whilst it can hardly be claimed that this number has been accurately checked, the actual number is certainly very large. “Hinduism is, in fact, the most striking and in most ways the most typical Polytheism that we know.” (Th. H. Robinson, An Outline Introduction to the History of Religions, pp. 77–78.) Professor de La Vallée Poussin notes that whenever we affirm something of Buddhism, we should hold ourselves ready to affirm also the contrary. There is no Buddhist orthodoxy, but only a complexus of heterodoxies, which on account of their origin and a certain family resemblance, we call Buddhism. The same remark applies a fortiori to Hinduism, whose only unity is one of culture and not of philosophy or of faith. Modern Hinduism is largely rationalistic. S. Radhakrishnan in his book The Hindu View of Life (London, 1927) shows how a very modernized Hindu views the dharma of his fathers and interprets it to himself. All mythology, all the “supernatural,” has, of course, been discarded. Of all the possible Hindu points of view, from idolatry to rank Pantheism, it is the Advaita of Samkara that has been taken as the norm, the other points of view being considered as aberrations or adaptations thereof, and this Advaita has been rendered more religious by the infusion of what is best in bhakti and more modern by opening its sâdhana to all men and dropping its antiquated views as, e. g., on the nature of sruti. What Professor Radhakrishnan admires most in Hinduism is its intellectual tolerance and the worldly-wise balance of its dharma. Hinduism has received within its fold all doctrines, creeds and practices, from Vedic Aryan “henotheism” to animist or tantric practices. It “has understood that all men are not made in the same mould and that what is poison to the one may be amrita to the other. The dharma with its castes and four âsramas outlines a plan of life which reconciles the ideal and the real.” (See The Week, Calcutta, 12 May, 1927, p. 408).
Supplementary Note 2—Source footnote 133
S. S. Farrow, Faith, Fancies, and Fetich: or, Yoruba Paganism. Being Some Account of the Religious Beliefs of the West African Negroes, particularly of the Yoruba Tribes of Southern Nigeria, London, 1927. In a lengthy review of this book W. H. Kent in his trenchant way calls attention to certain facts which deserve special consideration in connection with the study of religion among the “primitives.” He says inter alia:
“The missioner, like all other teachers, must needs have a full and accurate knowledge of the doctrine he is to teach to his hearers. But for many reasons it is no less necessary that he should have a real knowledge and understanding of their previous beliefs, the measure of their knowledge of truth, and the nature of their errors and prejudices. Without this the most accurate and luminous exposition of the true doctrine may often be foredoomed to failure. For the errors must be removed and eradicated to gain admission for the truth, and this cannot be done very effectually by one who has only a vague notion of their nature. And the truth itself cannot well be presented in a manner really intelligible and attractive to the hearers unless the teacher has a fair notion of the amount of their previous knowledge and of their ways, and of their habits of thought and language. … But, unfortunately, it is often a matter of peculiar difficulty for the Christian teacher to get a real knowledge of the mind of his pagan pupils and the nature of their beliefs and superstitions. We all know how strangely our own doctrines and devotions have been misapprehended and distorted by some of our non-Catholic countrymen, in spite of the fact that they speak the same language and have the same national habits and fashions of thought. And from this we may gather how easily European travellers may be led to form erroneous notions of the real beliefs of Negro pagans, whose language and customs and religion are so widely different from our own. To acquire a true knowledge of their beliefs and so to be in a position to correct the mistaken impressions too often put on record by more superficial observers, a missioner must live among the natives for a considerable time and make himself familiar with their language and customs and characteristics. Happily, as we have seen before now from the valuable papers by Father Schebesta and other Catholic missioners, brought together in the records of ‘La Semaine d’Ethnographie Religieuse,’ many of our missioners have already done this necessary service among various tribes in many parts of the world. And while their papers have a high scientific value, the better knowledge of the native religions resulting from their patient and prolonged study of the subject will do much to facilitate the conversion of these tribes to Christian truth. … Such studies on religious beliefs and superstitions may be of good use to theologians and Christian apologists as well as to those who labor in the missionary field. Those who are familiar with earlier writers on Natural Theology and Christian Apologetics will remember the importance attached to the argument from the common consent of mankind, and the attention given to the possibility of attaining to knowledge of religious truth among the heathen nations, whether by the light of reason or by remnants of tradition. And we may be sure that the old theologians who were occupied with these problems would have welcomed any fresh evidence as to the religious beliefs prevailing in hitherto unknown or little known heathen lands. But in these days, when evolutionary philosophers come forward with new-fangled theories on the origin of religion, whether in Nature Worship, or Animism, or the Worship of Ancestors, there is more need than ever of a serious and systematic study of the tenets and practices of these pagan tribes. For these questions are no longer left in the hands of theologians who work on the time-labored lines of tradition. And we have to do with a new science of Comparative Religion in which the divers forms of religious beliefs and worship are treated by the scientific methods already made familiar by such well-established sciences as Comparative Anatomy and Comparative Philology. It is idle to object that there is a deeper element in religion which cannot be reached by the instruments and methods employed with such eminent success in the field of natural science, and to urge the necessity of the student of Comparative Religion being a man of religion as well as a man of science. An anthropologist who had to treat of the music cultivated by various African or Australian tribes would surely recognize the need of musical knowledge here, and if he felt himself incompetent to deal with the subject, he would call in the aid of a musician. But a philosopher or scientist without religious belief or spiritual perception is too often apt to be unconscious of his own incompetence. If only for this reason it is scarcely surprising that some of our modern scientific writers on the origin of religion have labored with little result, and have been led to adopt mistaken and conflicting theories. But what is more surprising is the fact that there is another flaw in their method of conducting the inquiry. We may have a shrewd suspicion that the methods of natural science alone would not lead to a successful result. But the odd thing is that some of these new theorists in this field have not really observed the accepted rules of scientific research and experiment. A student of Comparative Philology who turns to the work of some exponents of the younger comparative science may well be reminded of the crude efforts of pre-scientific etymologists, who were too often misled by the superficial resemblance between words of widely different origin, and grouped together languages as remote from one another as Celtic and Phœnician.” (The Tablet, 16 Apr., 1927, pp. 512 sq.)
