In the New Testament the expressions of our union with Christ are often reversed:  instead of speaking of Christ as abiding in the hearts and lives of his people, they are sometimes said to abide in Him, and that not in the sense of absorption.  Paul speaks of the “saints in Christ,” of his own “bonds in Christ,” of being “baptized in Christ,” of becoming “a new creature in Christ,” of true Christians as being one body in Christ, of their lives being “hid with Christ in God.”  Believers are spoken of as being “buried with Christ,” “dead with Christ.”  Every form of expression is used to represent fellowship, intimacy, spiritual union with Him, but always in a rational and practical sense, and with full implication of our distinct and separate personality.  The essential hope of the Gospel is that those who believe in Christ shall never die, that even their mortal bodies shall be raised in his image, and that they shall be like Him and shall abide in his presence.  On the other hand, “The essence of this pantheistic system,” says Mr. Chatterji, “is the denial of real existence to the individual spirit, and the insistance upon its true identity with God” (Chapter IV.).

It only remains to be said that, whatever may be the similarities of expression between this Bible of pantheism and that of Christianity, however they may agree in the utterance of worthy ethical maxims, that which most broadly differentiates the Christian faith from Hindu philosophy is the salient presentation of great fundamental truths which are found in the Word of God alone.

1.  The doctrine that God in Christ is “made sin” for the redemption of sinful man—­that He is “the end of the law for righteousness” for them that believe; this is indeed Divine help:  this is salvation.  Divinity does not here become the mere charioteer of human effort, for the purpose of coaching it in the duties of caste and prompting it to fight out its destiny by its own valor.  Christ is our expiation, takes our place, for our sakes becomes poor that we through his poverty may become rich.  What a boon to all fakirs and merit-makers of the world if they could feel that that law of righteousness which they are striving to work out by mortifications and self-tortures had been achieved for them by the Son of God, and that salvation is a free gift!  This is something that can be apprehended alike by the philosopher and by the unlettered masses of men.

2.  Another great truth found in our Scriptures is that the pathway by which the human soul returns to God is not the way of knowledge in the sense of philosophy, but the way of intelligent confidence and loving trust.  “With the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made.”  Man by wisdom has never known God.  This has been the vain effort of Hindu speculation for ages.  The author of the Nyaya philosophy assumed that all evil springs from misapprehension, and that the remedy is to be found in correct methods of investigation, guided by skilfully arranged syllogisms.  This has been in all ages the chief characteristic of speculative Hinduism.  And the Bhagavad Gita furnishes one of its very best illustrations.  Of its eighteen chapters, fifteen are devoted to “Eight Knowledge.”  And by knowledge is meant abstract speculation.  It is a reaching after oneness with the deity by introspection and metaphysical analysis.