Gandhi Before Gandhi

Author(s): Bipin Doshi, Priti Shah
Publisher: Jain Academy Educational Research Center Promotion Trust Mumbai

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GANDHI BEFORE GANDHI4
No religion is in its pure and unadulterated state We all fully understand that the debasement of a nation's coinage is most disastrous to its commerce and revenues. It is an acknowledged fact to day the world over, that the spiritual coinage has become debased. It is also a
fact that all religions, worthy of the name are making great efforts to purify and return to their original standard except Christianity. The intellectual Hindus do not deny this fact. Christians surely must know, even with greater certainty, that the 19th Century Christianity is not the religion taught by Jesus. Christians also very well know that their religion has been changed and corrupted as comparative theology and philological and other criticisms of their sacred books are more advanced than in the case of any other religions. During the past century and especially during the past quarter century, the origin of Christianity has been fully-exposed, its rise has been traced in detail, its early struggles noted, its gradual changes recorded, its growth, its dogmas and doctrines have been patiently studied and minutely described. Its familiar likeness to other religions has been noted and its relationship discovered. For this it is easy to see how
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much Christianity has adopted from other and older religions and older cosmogony, "whence it copied its organization and from whence it collected the miscellaneous literature to form its Bible; whence it took its festivals, its liturgies and rituals and even its architecture, its tenets and sacred paraphernalia?"
"The whole world for Christ?"
Christians also know that there is not an article in their creed which has not been analyzed by reason and logic, and tested by the canons; of morality and justice and they know that the result of this examination, made by men as religious and as intelligent as themselves, is the utter condemnation of the central ideas of their religion an angry God and vicarious atonement-which are contrary to every fact in nature, as to
the better aspirations of the human heart, and, in our present stage of enlightenment, are absurd, preposterous and blasphemous propositions.
Christians well know that their much decorated sculptured statue is not of pure chiseled marble, but that it is of clay, cemented together by blood and tears and hardened in the fires of hatred and persecution.. And still the cry of the most of Christendom is "The whole world for Christ."