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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
AUGUST, 1926
inclines men to do Good. So with us, our many Images represent to us the various perfections of that one God, whom both you and we worship. Here he stopped, expecting my Answer, which, I was in no condition to give him, but stood for some time perfectly confounded. 3
"I knew very well the explication he had given of the Trinity was the Sabellian Scheme, 4 which I could not assent to, and on the other hand I durst not say that there are three distinct persons equally God, lest he should charge me with Polytheism, which is as plain a violation of the first Commandment as the Adoration of Images is of the Second.
"In short I was glad to change the Discourse by asking what representations those were, pointing to the monstrous figures at a little distance. He told me one of them was a transformation of the God (Vishnu), and the other was the Devil, before whom on a certain day every year a thousand goats were sacrificed. This gave me a large Field of raillery on his Religion and the opportunity of my concealing my Ignorance of my own Religion
"When I came home and reflected on the passages of the day, I blush'd for shame that I had not been able to give a rationall Account of my own. Faith to a heathen, and resolv'd to lay hold on the first opportunity to examine a Doctrine I had been taught to believe was a mistery and note to be pry'd into. It happened the next Sunday the Athanasian Creed was read in Church."
9 I take it that the "one of the Religion" with Collet was an educated Brahman, who know English well and had studied Christianity. His exposition of the use of images in Hindu Temples and of Hindu monotheism goes to show that he must have been a Bhagavata, which sect is essentially monotheist, with devotional faith in one Personal God as its main doctrine. Bhagavatism is very old-pre-Christian in fact
- and has long been the faith of the educated Hindu, permeating both the Vaishnava and Shaiva forms of their religion.
At the end of the Second Century there was a great controversy between the Adoptisnists and the Modalists, holding respectively that Christ was the chosen Man of God and that Christ was a manifestation of God Himself. In the Third Century the protagonist of the Modalists (Unitarians) was Sabellius, a Libyan, whose doctrine created a great controversy (the Sabellian Heresy) and lasted till the end of the Fourth Century. The "Sabellian Scheme," with various modifications as time went on, was that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the same person, three names being thus attached to one and the same Being. The three forms of the One God in the Sabellian view were the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Giver of Life. It will be soon that Governor Collet was right in remarking that the Hinda's "explication of the Trinity" was "the Sabellian Scheme," and why, as a strict Trinitarian, he could not essent to s strictly Unitarian view.
5 Collet evidently was not aware of the Hindu Trinity (Trimurti), which is the three-fold manifestation of the Supremo Brahman, the Incomprehensible, with unity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, the three prominent, and to the people equal, Gode of the Epics, as the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer. The Hindu and the Christian Trinities are not, however, philosophically identical. The former Religion holds that there is one God and three manifestations of Him, and the latter that there are three Persona in one God.
The first image must therefore have been that of one of the avaldras or incarnations of Vishnu. What the other image represented, it is impossible to say, as Collet apparently did not wait to enquire if it was male or fomale. It was probably an image for the people, and did not belong to the "religion" of his informant, on whom, therefore, his "raillery " was lost.
7 Collet had very strong and free views on religious practice, and the Schism Act of 1714 roused him to much wrath and to a desire to fight it as soon as his government in India was over. Inter alia the Athanasian Creed was abominable to him.
