Chaitanya Chandrodaya

Author(s): Kavi Karnpur, Vishvanath Shastri, Rajendralal Mittra
Publisher: Bapist Mission Press

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INTRODUCTION.
About the time when Luther was engaged in reforming the Church of Christ in Europe, a Bráhman in Bengal employed himself in a similar mission with regard to the religion of the Hindus. The European reformer exerted his head and heart to cleanse the Church of the manifold corruptions which ages of papal supremacy and priestcraft had engrafted on the simple doctrines of the Bible, while his Bengal contemporary laboured assiduously to revive the neglected theosophy of the Bhagavat. The one inculcated the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and the other the mystery of Bhaktí. But the course of the two reformers did not run parallel. The monk of Wittenburg commenced and ended a reformer, and his life was devoted most successfully to the redemption of Europe from the thraldom of priestcraft, while the speculative Bráhmaņ early retired from the busy scenes and cares of life to meditate in ascetic seclusion on divine love and mercy, and his ardent exertions to break through the trammels of caste and the despotic influence of the Indian hierarchy served but to create a system of gloomy mysticism.
This system is called by its followers the doctrine of Bhaktimárga or the “translation of faith.” It owes its origin to a disposition for metaphysical enquiry operating upon a very ardent and enthusiatic temperament—to a conflict of doubt and uncertainty resulting from a longing of the mind to penetrate deeper into those mysterious secrets, the nature and the attributes of the Deity, which have often employed, but uniformly baffled, human comprehension; and as the result of such a cause, traces of it may be found in some shape or other in every religion of