M'^i 
 
 
 m 
 
 rns
 
 OCCASIONAL PAPER. 
 
 Camkitrgt Pissbn to gclljl 
 
 IN CONNEXION WITH THE S.P.G. 
 
 CHRIST THE GOAL 
 
 OF 
 
 INDIA. 
 
 REV. G. A. LEFROY, M.A., 
 
 OF TRINITY COLLEGE AND THE CAMBRIDGE MISSION. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE: 
 
 PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 
 1889
 
 The Ramsden Sermon p-eached before the University 
 on Whitsu7iday^ June 9, 1889.
 
 Acts xvii. 23. 
 
 " Whom therefore ye ignorantly worships Him declare I imto you" 
 
 In the very opening of the ministry of our Blessed Lord, in that 
 first miracle which He did in Cana of Gahlee when He manifested 
 forth His glory and His disciples believed in Him, we have revealed 
 to us an important and most valuable feature of all His future work, 
 a principle of action which was for ever to underlie and characterise 
 His deahngs with and influence upon the world. He wished to 
 supply the wine that was needed at that marriage feast. Under 
 the same circumstances and endowed with the powers which He 
 possessed one can scarcely doubt of what kind our own action 
 would have been. There was, indeed, a store of water lying ready 
 to His hand, but it was to all appearances utterly useless for the 
 purpose which He had in view. Why then take any account of it? 
 Why seem to suggest limitations of His power, why take off from 
 the striking effect of so glorious an exercise of creative might by 
 introducing that water as the material on which He would act? 
 Why not by a sweep of His hand in the prerogative of His boundless 
 power have simply produced out of nothing the wine for the feast ? 
 So He assuredly could have done, so I suspect should we have 
 done, or at any rate the temptation to act so would have been very 
 strong upon us. And yet by acting so He would have deprived 
 this work of His of all, or almost all its value for us, and emptied it 
 of some of its deepest moral significance and teaching. For surely 
 one most essential feature of His act is just this, that He did not 
 disdain or sweep aside the already existing material, however poor 
 and weak and inadequate it might be, but rather He took it up and 
 dignified and ennobled it, and carried it on to a before undreamt of 
 perfection and worth and strength. Herein has always been seen 
 to lie the deepest meaning — the most valuable moral lesson and 
 revelation of this first work of His. So, too, in that other miracle, 
 the feeding of the four thousand, we see exactly the same principle 
 of continuity and perfecting observed. The seven loaves and the 
 few small fishes — what were they among so many — so palpably, so 
 hopelessly inadequate, so absurd even that the disciples themselves 
 seem scarcely to have given them a thought, they did not put them 
 forward, but Jesus Himself by His question, " How many loaves have 
 ye ? " had to draw their attention to them. And then as we see how 
 He takes them from their hands and blesses them, and gives them
 
 back, and they expand and develop and multiply till they become 
 adequate to satisfy the hunger of that great crowd, does not a 
 glorious law of all God's dealing with us open out before us ? Do 
 we not feel how under His supreme care. His divine husbandry, 
 nothing can be lost, but that all that is in our lives, however poor, 
 however stunted, however mean, can be, and if only we do not 
 forbid will be, conserved by our heavenly Father the husbandman, 
 and made by Him the basis of a more beautiful thing, a greater 
 strength, a truer manhood than has ever seemed possible to us ? 
 
 And as we pass from the more general relation of Christ to the 
 world in all its infinitely varied aspects to His relation to the various 
 religions of the world, we know that as regards Judaism, the truth 
 we have been dwelhng on finds general and ready recognition. 
 "I am not come to destroy but to fulfil." These words, which as 
 we have seen might serve as a motto of all Christ's deaHngs with 
 the world, were used by Him more particularly in relation to 
 Judaism. They affirm the truth — which we have more or less 
 apprehended — that He came not as the interrupter and destroyer, 
 but as the interpreter and perfecter of the Mosaic Law, lifting it up 
 to a dignity, and giving it a worth and meaning that could never 
 have been traced in it before, at the very time that He put it, in its 
 outward form, on one side, and claimed, its work of preparation and 
 foreshadowing having been ended, to take its place Himself, and 
 carry out to their fullest strength and beauty the shadows, the hints, 
 the suggestions of divine things which it had contained. 
 
 But if as regards our Lord's relation to Judaism this truth has 
 been clearly seen and more or less consistently maintained, it is far 
 otherwise when we pass to the other chief religions of the world, 
 more particularly those with which by the widening of our commerce 
 and national responsibihties during the last century we have been 
 brought into such curiously close contact. The title of one of the 
 first books pubHshed on Mahomedanism in England, " The True 
 Nature of Imposture displayed in the life of Mahomed," is familiar 
 to many of us, and has often been referred to both from sympathetic 
 and from strongly opposing standpoints. We are not concerned now 
 to enquire whether, or how far, the charge laid in this title is true or 
 how much there may be either in the personal history of Mahomed 
 or in his creed to justify it, but this we may say, that it clearly does 
 not indicate any smallest grain of sympathy, any slightest wish to see 
 what there was of truth in the very remarkable system of which it 
 treated, what it had supplied, if anything, amidst the varied needs of 
 man, in what it had found its strength, wherein it was related to 
 Christianity, except in the broadest way as false to true, as darkness 
 
 ■jtgsa 
 
 uiuct
 
 5 
 
 to light, or what of hint or foreshadowing or craving in it could be 
 taken up and claimed, satisfied and perfected by the faith of Jesus 
 Christ. Nor is this an isolated instance. Rather may we say that 
 broadly speaking, and with not a few exceptions, some remarkable 
 ones, the standpoint here assumed has been a not uncommon one 
 alike for writers at home and still more for those who in the mission 
 field have been brought into closest, and ofttimes most repellent, con- 
 tact with all that is foulest and least Christlike in the Mahomedan or 
 heathen faiths, and who have thus been led to direct their strength 
 almost wholly to the exposure from an absolutely foreign and hostile 
 standpoint, and if it may be the destruction, of such pernicious error. 
 And, indeed, it may not be denied either on the one hand that 
 theoretically it is most necessary, with a view to the spread of the 
 truth, to lay bare at times with a strong unsparing hand the error 
 which is blighting and blinding the souls of men, and demonstrate 
 its utter powerlessness to answer the needs or fulfil the demands of 
 one made in the image of God ; or, on the other, that as a matter of 
 fact those who have chosen this line have done and are doing much 
 good work for Christ in the dark places of the earth ; and that much 
 of whatever progress in the mission field has hitherto been made 
 must be ascribed to them. It is foolish to let our theories prevail 
 against facts, and because we do not wholly approve of the method 
 blind our eyes to fruit which may have been granted of the Lord of 
 the harvest to the workers. Yet neither are we bound, because fruit 
 more or less has been so granted, to approve the method, assuming 
 that it is right in itself or the best possible, or even to suppress the 
 expression of our belief that there is another, a higher standpoint 
 from which the work may be approached, and that, as it seems to us, 
 the fruit of the labours of those very men, able, earnest, and loving 
 as they were, might have been still far more abundant had they 
 themselves approached it from that other standpoint. And in a very 
 special degree at the present time it would seem that w^e owe it to 
 our deepest convictions and to much of what is best and strongest in 
 the thought of our age, to strive to place ourselves in a more 
 sympathetic attitude and to claim to be in the power of Christ the 
 interpreters and fulfillers of all the past history of the world, more 
 especially of all the blind cravings for and feeHngs after God on the 
 part of men which form the deepest, most abiding part of that 
 history. I say this is a special feature of our own time. There is 
 much to make it so. In the first place, the very widening of our 
 commerce and our national relations with the enormous growth of 
 our empire has necessarily tended to break down the narrowness 
 and isolation from which we regarded all outside ourselves with
 
 doubt and suspicion. If this has its dangers, as it assuredly has, it 
 we feel that a false cosmopolitanism may for one thing by effacing 
 distinctions which lie in our very nature as man, make impossible 
 the very unity and catholicity its advocates profess to seek, for only 
 in the recognition of diversity and of the relationship which is thus 
 possible between the various members, can the true unity of the 
 body be attained ; if, moreover, as a deeper, sadder loss still widen- 
 ing of sympathy is too often perverted into a loss of all definiteness 
 of personal creed and clearness of personal conviction and of the 
 eternal distinctions of right and wrong — this and all such like 
 perversions surely ought not to drive us back into a narrow reaction 
 against that widening, enlarging spirit of sympathy and fellowship 
 which is after all the very glory of the thought of our age. We know 
 that all such perversions of this God-like spirit are perversions ; that 
 all that is God -like and noblest and best is above all exposed to and 
 certain to suffer from such perversions, and yet that they must 
 be met, and denied, and confuted, not by abandoning, but by 
 asserting the truth of which they are the corruption, and which 
 alone can win back for us and to us that which in such corruption 
 has been lost. 
 
 Again, it is not only to an enlarging sense of national obhgation 
 and relation, due chiefly to increased intercourse with and juster 
 appreciation of those who have hitherto been strangers, that we may 
 trace this change of view, but may we not say that in the moral 
 attitude of our time towards all such questions there is something 
 which answers, if 1 may so speak, to the law of the conservation ot 
 energy in the material world — a sense that the past of any nation or 
 of any creed cannot be wholly lost, simply swept away as meaning- 
 less and useless? In this the.e is a semblance of waste and caprice 
 from which the truest instincts of those who have entered most into 
 the purposes and methods of God's dealings with His creation rebel. 
 We demand not that all the groans and sighs and struggles and 
 would-be growth of the past should be swept away, but that in the 
 truest sense the law of development and evolution should find its 
 place, and Christ, if He be Christ indeed, should be seen to be able 
 to gather up and to carry on to its proper consummation, not the 
 anticipations only, but the struggles, aye and the moans, the failures, 
 the sorrows of the w^orld. Each age has its own lesson to learn of 
 the meaning and methods of the Cross and the Resurrection and 
 the Ascension, and the Mission as on this day of the Holy Spirit, 
 ■and what that lesson for ourselves is we can learn, we shall only 
 learn, not by opposing ourselves, in faithlessness and a practical 
 denial of the present sovereignty and omnipotence of our risen Lord,
 
 to all the movements of thought and life and action that are pressing 
 around us, but by throwing ourselves into them, strong in the faith 
 of Christ, viewing them and interpreting them in the light of His 
 Resurrection. 
 
 And once again, to Englishmen always perhaps, and certainly 
 now, in their practical positive matter-of-fact way of looking at 
 things, mere destruction is always repellent. The words of a great 
 American preacher will, I suspect, find a ready response in many a 
 heart here. "Who would go a hundred miles merely to make a 
 Mahomedan disbelieve Mahomed? who would not go half round 
 the world to make him believe Christ and know the richness of the 
 Saviour.!^" Certainly, for my own part, home as I am from India 
 chiefly to ask of Cambridge to give us of her best for an extension of 
 our work in the mission field, I feel that the call will come to the 
 best minds and hearts among you, those whom we need most, 
 infinitely more powerfully and attractively if I ask you to help me 
 not in uprooting and destroying so much as in perfecting, correcting, 
 consummating the faith of the many millions of that land. And why 
 is the appeal thus put more attractive? Is it not because it thus 
 has greater truth ? Is it not that this standpoint is that of St Paul, 
 who believed, who knew, that God made of one every nation of 
 men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined 
 their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation; that 
 they should seek God, if haply they might feel after Him and find 
 Him ? What do these words mean if not this, that not Christians 
 only, but all the nations of the earth are under the care of the 
 Almighty Father, that He really is the King of Kings and Lord of 
 Lords, who in things moral surely no less than things material 
 ruleth over all the kingdoms of the world and giveth them to 
 whomsoever He will, and disposes, and guides, and governs all with 
 this supremest purpose, that through diverse disciplines and manifold 
 paths, alike through that of truth which they have and through thti 
 hunger and thirst for that which they lack. He may gather up all the 
 nations of the earth into one in Christ, into the fulness of Him in 
 whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and who filleth 
 all in all ? It is in this aspect surely that the work and relation of 
 Christ to the world is viewed by him who describes Him as the light 
 which lighteneth every man coming into the world — it is in this 
 aspect that St Paul viewed Him and proclaimed Him, it is in thus 
 viewing and thus proclaiming Him that we shall enter most into their 
 spirit, and thus entering shall we most effectively win to our side as a 
 priceless ally in the fight the iestimo7iium animce naturalitur Christiamc. 
 
 To illustrate the principle for which I have been contending, let
 
 8 
 
 me turn for a few moments to Hinduism, the faith of nearly two 
 hundred millions of our fellow-subjects in India. What in that is 
 there on which we can lay hold in the way I have suggested, as 
 anticipations, foreshadowings, feelings after the fulness of the truth 
 as it is in Christ Jesus ? 
 
 I will pass by sacrifice, which as it is the most widely spread 
 probably of all religious rites, so is also of deepest import and form, 
 the most remarkable of all the points of connexion between the 
 universal religious instincts of man and their satisfaction in Christ. 
 It is not, remember, as absent from Hinduism that I omit it, for its 
 prevalence is far greater probably than almost any here present have 
 any idea of I believe I am right in saying that all the meat killed 
 in Calcutta — including that provided for and purchased by English- 
 men there — is offered at the shrine of the goddess Kali and 
 dedicated to her. And so far north as Jeypur, though the more 
 characteristic rites of Hinduism disappear, it may roughly be said, 
 exactly in proportion as you enter the more northern zone of old 
 Mahomedan domination, I have myself seen the daily sacrifice of a 
 goat and a kid to the same dread deity. I pass it by only because 
 it is so universal, and choose rather three points more or less 
 peculiar to Hinduism. 
 
 And most prominent of all take that caste system which is so 
 constantly referred to and with such abundant justice as one of the 
 greatest curses of the land. Of the mischief it is doing at present 
 no one can speak too highly. For one thing it has so dominated 
 the entire life of man there, and has forced into such exclusive 
 prominence the social instinct and the social aspect of life, that all 
 individuality and clear strong personaHty, all sense therefore of 
 personal responsibility and relation to God, is almost wholly lost. 
 In the words of an acute observer of Indian life and thought, 
 "There is in the system of caste no sense of personal responsibility, 
 and the social cravings are so far more than satisfied, that society 
 submerges and swallows up the individual in itself, and wraps the 
 welcomed swathing bands of infancy round the limbs of men. Thus, 
 there is a positive surfeit of the social appetite. Society wanting in 
 all elements of greatness and dividing men from each other by 
 barriers which are in every sense inseparable, stagnates, yet lives on, 
 stifles aspirations, and yet in some sense satisfies desire, crushes 
 conscience to death, while it fills hfe with a religion, subdues a man 
 to meanness of servifity in which he ceases even to care for being 
 free."^ These words may be sufificient and more than sufficient 
 
 1 Indian Missions, p. 38. A letter addressed to the Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury by the Bishop of Bombay. (Rivingtons, 1873.)
 
 without my trying to bring before you in detail any of the other 
 terrible evils which accompany the caste system — its crushing of all 
 human sympathies outside the narrowest limits, its deadening of all 
 spirit of enterprise and free movement, its purely physical conditions, 
 its want of all moral aspiration and power. And yet in the face of 
 this what are we to do ? It is easy to turn round and denounce the 
 whole system as false, a lie, of the devil, and call upon men to break 
 off from it. This has been often done, and the most unfettered 
 individualism has been offered as a substitute in its place. But it 
 may well be doubted whether the evil of the latter spirit, if it ever 
 became dominant in a country Uke India, would not surpass the 
 evils of the former, whether their last state under such teaching 
 might not be worse than their first. Truer surely would it be to 
 point out to them that while in its negative, exclusive, narrowing 
 aspect their theory of society is false and as the best spirits among 
 themselves are beginning plainly to see, fearfully harmful, yet in its 
 positive assertion of the brotherhood of men, of their being members 
 of one body in which no man liveth to himself and no man dieth to 
 himself, but in which if one member suffer all the members suffer 
 with it, or if one member is honoured all the members rejoice 
 with it— in all this it is most true, and we would call upon them not 
 to abandon it, but to enter in deed and in truth into the fullest 
 possession of it in Christ, in whom there can be neither Jew nor 
 Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female, for all are one 
 in Christ Jesus. So avoiding the dangers of an untempered indivi- 
 dualism on the one hand, and with all the hardening, cramping, 
 degradmg condition of the present caste system swept away on the 
 other, may the country pass to a fuller, newer and yet thoroughly 
 congenial and natural life. 
 
 Take again the theory of transmigration of souls. While there is 
 much of error in this as at present held, notably in the confusion 
 between the soul and spirit of man made in the image and with the 
 capacity for the knowledge of God, and the life of animals which it 
 introduces, as well as in other respects, yet may we not confidently 
 say that two great truths underlie it, and in virtue of those truths may 
 we not here again present ourselves less as its opponents and would- 
 be destroyers than as its interpreters and fulhllers ? For in the first 
 place it is an assertion of that continuous existence, that personal 
 immortahty for which the soul of man craves with such an undying 
 unquenchable hope, and with which has always been felt to be bound 
 up the highest and noblest possibilities of human life. That this 
 should have been grasped so firmly, even if in perverted, distorted 
 form, is surely a thing to be thankful for, one more instance that
 
 lO 
 
 God's Spirit has not been wholly withdrawn from that nation. And 
 in the second place the doctrine of transmigration would seem to be 
 the assertion in an uncouth and repulsive form of the permanence of 
 the consequence of all our actions. It is viewed indeed in a purely 
 mechanical way and, the idea of righteousness as a personal relation 
 having been in no wise grasped, there is neither any place found for 
 the possibility of forgiveness, nor is it conceived of as possible that a 
 wholly new element of divine nature should enter as a new and 
 living factor into the life of man and by thus materially modifying 
 the constituent parts modify not less materially the issues and destiny 
 of the whole. Still, under whatever of corruption and abuse, we 
 would seem to have here the underlying assertion of that truth 
 which is one of the bases not only of morality, but of the whole 
 orderly course of the world's working, the truth, namely, that what 
 a man soweth that shall he also reap, for " he that soweth unto his 
 own flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption, but he that soweth unto 
 the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap eternal Ufe." Here then again we 
 step forward, denying the error, it is true, but denying it rather by 
 offering the perfected truth in its place, even Christ who is the Truth, 
 whose Resurrection is the one supreme vindication of that hope 
 which seemed sometimes so hopeless, so impossible, while His 
 divine Personality is no less the pledge than the groundwork of 
 our own, into which our little fragmentary broken lives can fit, 
 and find in that large unbroken life permanence meaning consistency. 
 " I am He that liveth and was dead, and behold I am afive for ever- 
 more," and "Because I live ye shall live also."^ 
 
 And yet once more turn to those incarnations which form such 
 a very remarkable feature of Hindu mythology and in which it 
 contrasts most remarkably perhaps of all with the Mahomedanism 
 which places so absolute a gulf between Creator and creature 
 and so sternly refuses any smallest effort to bridge that gulf. 
 Terribly perverted and corrupt indeed these Hindu incarnations 
 often are, and they exercise a fearfully corrupting influence to 
 this day on the life of the people, helping to obscure some of 
 the most elementary principles of morality, and utterly degrading 
 God to man rather than raising man in any sense up to partici- 
 pation in the Divine Nature. Yet once again, must we not admit, 
 nay, welcome, their infinite significance seen in the light of the 
 gospel of Christ, as declaring that between man and God, in Whose 
 Image and for conformity to Whose likeness he has been made, there 
 is not the absolute, hopeless, abysmal gulf which Mahomedanism 
 
 ^ See " Sermons" by Rev. Philip Brooks, p. 213.
 
 II 
 
 would place, but that of all mankind, in varying measure, it is true 
 that their souls thirst for Him, their flesh longs after Him, even 
 though it be in a barren and dry land, where no water is ? 
 
 In these and many more such ways we may, if we will, come 
 before India, not as the setters forth of wholly new truth which 
 attaches itself to and explains and perfects nothing in all the long 
 history of their past, but rather as taking up and claiming, inter- 
 preting, purifying, perfecting, and fulfilling that past. And may 
 God grant that the day may quickly come when our English 
 nation as a nation, and our English Church which has such singular, 
 such unique endowments for the task, may wake up more than it 
 has yet to a consciousness of the extraordinary privilege and dignity, 
 and therewith the infinitely solemn responsibility, which is entailed 
 on us by the possession of that vast dependency. If ever the hand 
 of God could be traced in any history it is not too much to say that 
 it can be traced with quite peculiar clearness in the steps by which 
 a little trading company, entering that great continent without the 
 thought or wish of anything beyond a petty trade, gradually ex- 
 panded into one of the most important and glorious empires the 
 world has ever seen. And is it too much to say that our greatest 
 national glory or our deepest national shame will in the eye of 
 history turn on the way in which we recognize our responsibilities 
 and discharge our obligations to that land more perhaps than on any 
 other single aspect of our national life? That our contact with 
 India must, whether we will it or not, be fraught with issues of the 
 most momentous importance to that land is patent to everyone who 
 is the least acquainted with the conditions of life there. Even 
 putting all distinctive missionary effort out of the question, the mere 
 contact of Western thought and culture and education is inevitably 
 breaking up the older forms of Hindu thought. But it lies with us 
 whether that contact shall be charged with infinite blessing leading 
 them on to a higher, deeper, truer faith and a new national life, or 
 whether, cutting them adrift from their old moorings, we leave them 
 without Christ, strangers from the covenant of promise, having no 
 hope and without God in the world. But if, indeed, this is the 
 return we make them, if, after holding the land for our own benefit 
 and skimming it of its choicest productions, and pouring into it, as a 
 happy solution of difficulties at home, in ever increasing streams our 
 sons as civilians, soldiers, engineers, professional men, men of busi- 
 ness, artisans, mechanics, and the like, we express our inability or 
 our unwillingness to satisfy its deeper need, to minister to its sore 
 sickness, how think you will this stand in the eyes of a righteous 
 God who loveth righteousness, whose countenance will behold the
 
 12 
 
 thing that is just? Let us be very sure that, to put it on no higher 
 ground, if we thus betray the trust He has reposed in us and neglect 
 the marvellous opportunity He has put before us, He will assuredly 
 tear the kingdom from us, and give it to some neighbour of ours, be 
 it who it may, who is better than us. And that England has as yet 
 in any kind of adequate degree realised her responsibilities, or that 
 the efforts she is at present making to win the nations of India to 
 the faith of Christ are in any degree commensurate to the immensity 
 of the task and the very singular and almost unique difficulties which 
 beset it, no one surely could for a moment maintain. 
 
 As one looks round a congregation such as that which fills this 
 place this minute, and realises how enormous are the potentialities 
 for the future which it contains, and thinks what it would mean for 
 India if even any fraction, any proportion which could on the most 
 ultra-moderate estimate of her claims be computed just, were to 
 devote themselves to her, one cannot but pray the Lord of the 
 Harvest that as on that first Whitsunday so once again the Holy 
 Spirit may descend in Hfe-giving inspiring power, awakening a truer 
 sense of our position, and providing a more abundant supply of 
 workers. And such a movement would be twice blest — blessing the 
 Church which gives no less than the land which receives, for the very 
 hfe of the Church is sacrifice — to lose its life is to gain it. To it if 
 it be indeed the very body of Christ must apply with supremest force 
 the principle, "There is that scattereth and yet increaseth, there is 
 that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty." 
 
 Give then ungrudgingly, unstintingly to the nations of the world 
 at large, and more pecuharly to India, as it has been given more 
 peculiarly to us. Give of your best, yourselves, your sons and 
 daughters, your prayers, your sympathy, and your alms. " Give, and 
 it shall be given unto you, good measure, pressed down and shaken 
 together and running over, shall men give into your bosoms." Give, 
 that you may hasten the day for which all that is most of Christ 
 within us looks and longs and labours and waits and prays, the day 
 when there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither 
 shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away ; 
 for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters 
 cover the seas ; for Christ shall be all in all. Amen. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE : PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. & SONS AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
 
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