William Hastie

William Hastie MA DD (7 July 1842 – 31 August 1903) was a Scottish clergyman and theologian. He produced the first English translation of the Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven, by Immanuel Kant. Hastie led the General Assembly's Institution in Calcutta, where he was credited with developing the Hindu advocate Swami Vivekananda. Hastie recovered from a ruinous libel case in Calcutta to become the Professor of Divinity at University of Glasgow.

Quotes

• In 1882, William Hastie, principal of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland's institu- tion in Calcutta, in letters he addressed to "educated Hindus" about their religion, consid- ered that "no pen has yet adequately depicted all the hideousness and grossness of the monstrous system." Hastie was well aware that Hindu idolatry originated from the same Aryan stem as that of the Greeks. But the latter had been "recalled from their idolatrous errors," while India remained "the most stupendous fortress and citadel of ancient error and idolatry, . . . paralleled only by the spirits of Pandemonium," a country whose reli- gion consisted of "senseless mummeries, loathsome impurities and bloody barbarous sacrifices." It has "consecrated and encouraged every conceivable form of licentiousness, falsehood, injustice, cruelty, robbery, murder," and "its sublimest spiritual states have been but the reflex of physiological conditions in disease" (24-33).
  • quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 1

• Hastie (1882) appealed to the "twin branches on the same original Aryan stem"—in this case the ancient Greek and modern Indie cultures—in order to suggest that the Church could extinguish the "tenacious survival of the old Aryan world" in modern India just as Paul had extinguished "the brighter and fairer Hellenism" in the ancient West (25-26).
  • quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 1