[Sidenote: Transmigration and Predestination more properly contrasted.]
[Sidenote: Illustration from actual fact.]
There is room for the Christian thought of the Hereafter, because in reality, as theologians know, the doctrine of transmigration stands over against the Christian doctrine of predestination rather than over against the Christian doctrine of the Here and Hereafter. Transmigration is a doctrine of what has gone before the present life rather than of what will follow. Every educated Anglo-Indian whom I have consulted agrees that in a modern Hindu's mouth transmigration is only a theory of the incidence of actual suffering. Here is the doctrine of _karma_ (works), that is of transmigration or merited rebirth, in the actual life of India--transmigration and the pessimistic helplessness of which I have spoken? In the last great famine of 1899-1900, in a village in South-western India, a missionary found a victim of famine lying on one side of the village street, and not far off, upon the other side, two or three men of the middle class. The missionary reproached them for their callousness. What might be answered for them is not here to the point; their answer for themselves was, "It is his _karma_." The missionary did what he could for the famine sufferer, and then when repassing the group could not forbear remarking to them, "You see you were wrong about his _karma_." "Yes, we were wrong," they replied. "It was his _karma_ to be helped by you." The same views of karma and of transmigration, as referring to the past, not the future, are apparent in a recent number of _The Inquirer_, a paper conducted in Calcutta for the benefit of Hindu students and others. I take the following from the question column: "Do Christians believe in the doctrine of reincarnation? If not, how do you account for blindness at birth?" The questioner's idea is plain, and the coincidence with the question put to Christ in St. John's Gospel, chapter ix, is striking. Hindus thus have room for an idea of the _future_ of the soul, as Christians, on their side, have for a theory of the soul's origin.
[Sidenote: The idea of the Hereafter not dynamical with Christians at present.]
The Christian idea of the Hereafter cannot, as yet, be called a strongly dynamical doctrine of Christianity in the sense that the Person of Our Lord has proved dynamical. Not that interest in the subject is lacking. I have referred to questions put by educated Hindus in _The Inquirer_. Out of fifty-seven questions I find eight bearing on the Christian doctrine of the Hereafter or the Hindu doctrine of Transmigration. In the _Magazine of the Hindu College_, _Benares_, out of fourteen questions I find four bearing on the same subject. The want of force in the Christian doctrine no doubt reflects its want of force for Christians themselves in this present positive age. For even Tennyson himself was vague: