Miss S. D. Collet's Indian Theism in its Relation to
Christianity (Strahan), the republished form of an article in the Contemporary Review for February, to which we called attention at the time, is a most able and interesting account of the religious tendencies of the movement. Miss Collet has since made several minute corrections as to matters of fact, and has re-written "the passage concerning the Brahmic view of regenerating faith and its relation to good works,'" on which she had supposed Keshub Chunder Sen to teach a far more Augustinian doctrine than he really maintains. The essay in its present shape is a very conven- ient as well as valuable introduction to Mr. Sen'a writings. Part of a letter from Mr. David Duncan to the authoress is prefixed, in which Mr. Duncan says that Mr. Son "enables us to understand by his own simpli- city and capacity to enter into spiritual things somewhat of the depth and power of the teaching of the 'Master,' which we have lost through our traditions, and through that coarseness of fibre of the Western mind which brings everything into a logical formula." There is truth and wisdom in this, but there is also something, we should say, worthy of Mr. Sen's attention in the converse criticism on his apparent dread of theological formulae ;—we mean, that it is quite as easy to lose all tho specific value of a spiritual truth by vagueness and want of definition, as it is by over-definition. We may lose our grasp of a spiritual influence simply because we will recognize nothing which we cannot formulate. But we may also lose our grasp of it through the habit of ignoring the boundaries between one province of the spiritual life and another.
Previous page
