Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE. It certainly would seem hardly worth while to write a book, even a little book like the present, solely for the purpose of criticising such a production as Mr. Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia. But that production has accomplished, is still perhaps in course of accomplishing, a mission in America of influence upon the public mind important quite out of proportion to any significance attaching to the poem by virtue of its own intrinsic character. The publication of Mr. Arnold's work happened to coincide in time with a singular development, both in America and in Europe, of popular curiosity and interest concerning ethnic religions, especially concerning Buddhism. The Light of Asia was well adapted to hit this transient whim of Occidental taste. So I account, in part, for the instantaneous American popularity of the poem. At any rate, Mr. Arnold has, no doubt, whether by merit or by fortune, been, beyond any other writer, the means of widening the American audience prepared to entertain with favor the pretensions of Buddha and his teachings. The effect is very observable. There has entered the general mind an unconfessed, a half unconscious, but a most shrewdly penetrative, misgiving that perhaps, after all, Christianity has not of right quite the exclusive claim that it was previously supposed to possess, upon theattention and reverence of mankind. A letting up in the sense of obligation, on the part of Christians, to christianize the world, has followed. Nay. the individual Christian conscience itself has, if I mistake not, been disposed to wear more lightly its own yoke of exclusive loyalty to Jesus. In view of this state of the case, I have thought that it might not be amiss, if 1 should take occasion, by Mr. Arnold's book, to let in, from original sources, ...
Synopsis
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