"MAN AND THE SUPERNATURAL" [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—In Miss Underhill's remarkable book, Man and The Supernatural, recently reviewed in- your columns, I find the very barest mention of what to some thinkers is the most interesting phenomenon of the religious life of to-day; tamely, the re-emergence in the West of the philosophical ideas of the Aryans.'
Miss Underhill writes of Bhakti-marga, or the path (01 devotion, as " coming nearer than anything else in religious literature to the temper of Christocentric devotion." She does not suggest .(and probably would not admit) that this was putting the cart before the horse, and yet the worship of Krishna is a thousand years older than the worship of Christ, and it is reasonable to suppose that the teaching of Christianity must have derived from some older human source. For Christ came to earth as Man among men. His teaching, for all its divine inspiration, was derived from the world about Him. His message transcends, but in no way annuls, that Ancient Wisdom which Miss Underhill rather unkindly coin- pares to tinned .asparagus. Miss Underhill has drunken of the paradisal milk of meditation. Was there, no such vital sustenance 'on earth before Christ came ?
If there was, then surely the earthly and temporal sources at which Christ Himself may have sought refreshment demand a reverent approach and a serious study which Miss Underhill does not give them. She speaks coldly of the "arid abstrac- tions of Brahma-worship." Does she know of the Vedanta doctrine of the Trinity ? Has she read the Bhagavad Oita (she quotes-from it) without seeing in its lofty symbolism an ethic that is almost Christian ? Can she maintain,. in face of the Upanishads, that our Western mystics are not indebted to the East ?
Miss Underhill may say that the mystical literature of Christianity is study enough for a lifetime. I make bold to suggest to her that that literature cannot be understood save by reference to methods of thinking that are still being taught in the country of the Ganges. To talk of mysticism and ignore India is like writing a treatise on seamanship without mentioning England.—I am, Sir, &c., BENGAL LANCER.
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