Thus the transcendentalism of New England joins hands with the Buddhism and the Shintoism of Japan, and the Brahmanism of Calcutta, and all are in accord with Mr. Chatterji and the Bhagavad Gita.  Even the Theosophists profess their sympathy with the Sermon on the Mount, and claim Christ as an earlier prophet.  The one refrain of all is “Charity.”  All great teachers are avatars of Vishnu.  The globe is belted with this multiform indifferentism, and I am sorry to say that it is largely the gospel of the current literature and of the daily press.  In it all there is no Saviour and no salvation.  Religions are all ethnic and local, while the ignis fatuus of a mystic pantheism pervades the world.

Mr. Chatterji’s preface closes with a prayer to the “merciful Father of humanity to remove from all races of men every unbrotherly feeling in the sacred name of religion, which is but one.”  The prayer were touching and beautiful on the assumption that there were no differences between truth and error.  And there are thousands, even among us, who are asking, “Why may not Christians respond to this broad charity, and admit this Hindu eclectic poem to an equal place with the New Testament?” More or less indifferent to all religions, and failing to understand the real principles on which they severally rest, they are ready to applaud a challenge like that which we are considering, and to contrast it with the alleged narrowness and intolerance of Christian Theism.

I have dwelt thus at length upon Mr. Chatterji’s introduction, and have illustrated it by references to similar specious claims of other faiths, in order that I might bring into clearer view the main issue which this book now presents to the American public.  It is the softest, sweetest voice yet given to that gospel of false charity which is the fashion of our times.  Emerson and others caught it from afar and discoursed to a generation now mostly gone of the gentle maxims of Confucius, Krishna, and Gautama.  But now Krishna is among us in the person of his most devout apostle, and a strange hand of fellowship is stretched out toward us from the land of the Vedas.

It behooves us to inquire, first, into the pantheistic philosophy which underlies these sayings, and to ask for their meaning as applied in real life; and second, we shall need to know something of Krishna, and whether he speaks as one having authority.  It should be borne in mind that pantheism sacrifices nothing whatever by embracing all religions, since even false religions are a worship of Vishnu in their way, while Christianity by its very nature would sacrifice everything.  According to pantheism all things that exist, and all events that transpire, are expressions of the Divine will.  The one only existent Being embraces all causes and all effects, all truth and all falsehood.  He is no more the source of good than of evil.  “I am immortality,” says Krishna.  “I am also death.”  Man with all his thoughts and acts is but the shadow of God, and moves as he is moved upon.  Arjuna’s divine counsellor says to him:  “The soul, existing from eternity, devoid of qualities, imperishable, abiding in the body, yet supreme, acts not nor is by any act polluted.  He who perceives that actions are performed by Prakriti alone, and that the soul is not an actor, sees the truth aright.”