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The Indian Christian community occupies the peculiar position of sharing in the new-born national consciousness as strongly as any, and yet of being identified with the British side in the eyes of the Hindu and Mahomedan communities.

Thus, almost inevitably, an anti-British bias has been generated, one of the noteworthy and regrettable changes in the Indian mind within the last half-century. Probably many would declare that the unifying national consciousness of which I have spoken is nothing more than a racial anti-British bias. At all events, hear an independent Indian witness regarding the bias. "There is a strong and strange ferment working in certain ranks of Indian society.... Instead of looking upon the English rulers as their real benefactors, they are beginning to view their actions suspiciously, seizing every opportunity of criticising and censuring their rulers.... The race feeling between rulers and ruled, instead of diminishing, has increased with the increase, and spread with the spread, of literary education. That all this is more or less true at present cannot be denied by an impartial political observer." An up-to-date illustration of the bias appears in the address of the Chairman of the National Congress of 1906. "The educated classes," he says, "... now see clearly that the bureaucracy is growing frankly selfish and openly opposed to their political aspirations." While regretting that feeling and the prejudice that often mingles with it, let those interested in India at least understand the feeling. It is the natural outcome of the new national consciousness. Even educated natives are in general too ignorant of India, past and present, to appreciate the debt of India to Britain, and how great a share of the administration of India they themselves--the educated Indians--actually enjoy. For every subordinate executive position in the vast imperial organisation is held by a native of India, and "almost the entire original jurisdiction of Civil Justice has passed out of the hands of Europeans into those of Indians." But the anti-British bias, let us on our part understand. The attitude of educated Indians to the British Government of India, and to Anglo-Indians as a body, is that of a political opposition, ignorant of many pertinent facts, divided from the party in power by racial and religious differences, and with no visible prospect of succeeding to office. The National Congress is the permanent Opposition in India. A permanent Opposition cannot but be biassed, and its press will seize at everything that will justify the feeling of hostility.

An outstanding illustration of the anti-British spirit is the frequently expressed opinion that the Indian famines are a result of British rule, or at all events have been aggravated thereby. The reasoning is that India is being financially drained to the amount of between thirty and forty millions sterling a year, and that the people of India have thus no staying fund to keep them going when famine comes. Having said this, we ought perhaps to quote the opinion , on the other side, of Mr. A.P. Sinnett, ex-editor of one of the leading Indian newspapers, and, as a theosophist, very unlikely to be prejudiced in favour of Britain. He insists "that loss of life in famine time is infinitesimal compared with what it used to be." "As for impoverishment," he goes on to say, "we have poured European capital into the country by scores of millions for public works and the establishment of factories, and we have enriched India instead of impoverishing it to an extent that makes the Home Charges--of which such agitators as Digby always exaggerate the importance--a mere trifle in the balance." Lord Curzon's statement of three or four years back was that there were eight hundred and twenty-five crores of rupees of buried capital in India; and he might have added the easily ascertainable fact that the sum is yearly being added to. The anti-British idea was put forward in 1885 by the late Mr. William Digby, an ardent supporter of the Congress; the Congress adopted it in one of its resolutions in 1896, and the idea has lamentably caught on. In 1897 a Conference of Indians resident in London did not mince their language. In their opinion, "of all the evils and terrible misery that India has been suffering for a century and a half, and of which the latest developments are the most deplorable famine and plague arising from ever-increasing poverty,... the main cause is the unrighteous and un-British system of Government, which produces an unceasing and ever increasing bleeding of the country," etc. etc. Such language, such ideas, do not call for refutation, here at least; they are symptoms only of a state of mind now prevailing, out of which educated India must surely grow.

That the national feeling of Indians may become a main strand in a strong Imperial feeling, as is the national feeling of Scotland, must be the wish of all friends of India. But how is the Indian feeling to be transformed?

NEW RELIGIOUS IDEAS--ARE THERE ANY?

"From low to high doth dissolution climb.

Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear The longest date do melt like frosty rime, That in the morning whitened hill and plain And is no more; drop like the tower sublime Of yesterday, which royally did wear His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain Some casual shout that broke the silent air, Or the unimaginable touch of Time."

WORDSWORTH.

It would be interesting to speculate what the Renaissance of the sixteenth century would have done for Europe had it been unaccompanied by a Reformation of religion. Without the Reformation, we may aver there would have been for the British nation no Bible of 1611, no Pilgrim Fathers to America, and no Revolution of 1688, along with all that these things imply of progress many-fold. What might have been, however, although interesting as a speculation, is too uncertain to be discussed further with profit. I only desire to give a general idea of the religious situation in India at the close of the nineteenth century. There has been a Renaissance without a Reformation.

The case was similar among the Jews, we may remember. As recorded in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, two of the three injunctions of the Jerusalem Church to the Gentile Church at Antioch deal with these same socio-religious matters. Blood and animals killed by strangling were to be prohibited as food, and certain marriages also were forbidden.

India in the nineteenth century has been indeed a new touchstone to the Christian religion; and, in brief, to make plain how far Christianity has proved its force and its fitness to survive will occupy the remaining chapters of this book. What has been the nature and extent of the impact of Christian and modern thought upon India, and particularly upon Hinduism? Of course I am thinking particularly of the educated native Hindu community that has sprung up during the century just closed. The dynamic of Christianity, which it is our task to test, implies a measure of conscious and intelligent approval. Japan is another such testing ground. Indeed the only large fields where Christianity is presented to bodies of non-Christian men able to yield approval or refuse it on intelligent grounds, of which they are conscious, are India and Japan. In China also there are no doubt large bodies of literati, but as a class they have not yet come into the modern world and into contact with Christianity. Even down to the Boxer rising of 1900, the wall of conservative patriotism shut off the literati in China from the outer civilisation and religions.

Fortunately for students of India, her new literati are not merely in touch with the modern world, but express their minds readily in public meetings and in print. From themselves we shall chiefly quote in justifying the statements that will be made regarding the former or the modern religious opinions of India. To non-Christian or secular writers, also, we shall chiefly go, that the bias may rather be against than for the acknowledgment of change and progress. Our plan is to pronounce as little as possible upon either the Christian or the Hindu positions. We are observers of the religious ideas of modern India, and desire our readers to come into touch with modern Indians and to see for themselves.

As proved by observation in India, the dynamical elements of Christianity may be briefly enumerated as follows. Monotheism, tending more and more to the distinctively Christian idea of God, Our Father, is commending itself, and being widely accepted. Secondly, in a remarkable degree, Jesus Christ Himself is being recognised and receiving general homage. In a less degree, and yet notably, the Christian conception of the Here and Hereafter is commending itself to the minds of the new-educated Hindus. In the new religious organisations also, the Christian manner of worship and of public worship commends itself almost as a matter of course. In none of these spheres am I describing the outcome of visible conflict or of any loud controversy. Rather, Christianity brought close to the religious instincts and the religious ideas of India has been like a great magnet introduced among a number of kindred but non-magnetised bodies lying loosely around. In the presence, simply, of these dynamical elements, or in contact with them, Indian religious thought is becoming polarised. Towards and away from the same great points, Indian religious thought is setting. These dynamical elements of Christianity, and the illustration of their power, will be considered in the following chapters.

THE NEW RELIGIOUS ORGANISATIONS OF INDIA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE INDIAN CHRISTIAN CHURCH AND THE BRHMAS

Children of one family.

When we consider how the face of a country has been altered during the lapse of time, two great changes may be noticed, both of them due to the action of man. First we may observe that the whole general character of the country has undergone transformation. Gone are the ancient forests of Scotland, which of old in many districts clad the whole countryside, and with them have gone the wild animals which they sheltered. The forests destroyed, and the rainfall in consequence less abundant, the surface marshes and lakes have in many places vanished, taking the old agues and fevers in their train. Instead of the strongholds of chieftains in their fastnesses, surrounded by bands of their clansmen and retainers, has come the sober, peaceful, life of independent tenants, agricultural or artisan. And so on, down through the general changes wrought on the face of a land by modern conditions of life, we might watch the evolution of new features of the landscape. But we turn to the other kind of change, which is more noticeable at first sight, and is more directly due to the action of man. Great, laboriously cultivated, fields now stretch where formerly there was only waste or forest, or at best small sparsely scattered patches; and the very products of the soil in these new spacious fields are in many cases new. Where, for example, even in Britain before the close of the seventeenth century, were the great fields of potatoes and turnips and red clover, and even of wheat, which now meet the eye everywhere as the seasons return? Where in India before the British period were the vast areas now under tea and coffee, jute and cotton, although the two last have been grown and manufactured in India from time immemorial? "It might almost be said that, from Calcutta to Lahore, 50 per cent. of the prevalent vegetation, cultivated and wild, has been imported into India within historic times."

All that, of course, is a parable. Likewise, in the new India we are studying, product of new modern influences direct and indirect, two kinds of religious changes impress us. There is, first, the gradual change coming over the whole thought of the people, a transformation like that wrought upon the face and climate of many lands. There is, further, the religious change, more immediately evident, in the new Indian religious organisations of the past century, analogous to the new, cultivated, products of the soil.

The Indian Christian Church is a living organisation, or congeries of organisations, over two and a half million souls all told, and growing rapidly. The exact figures in 1901 were 2,664,313, showing an increase during ten years of 30.8 per cent. The figures exclude Eurasians and Europeans; and in Anglo-Indian speech, we may remark, all Americans and Australians and South African whites and the like are Europeans. The attitude of the Indian Christian Church to the new ideas introduced by the British connection and by the modern world can readily be understood. Cut off, cast off, by their fellow-countrymen, and brought into closer contact than any others with Europeans in their missionaries and teachers, their minds have been open to all the new ideas. We know in fact that Indian Christians are often charged, by persons who do not appreciate the situation, with being over-Europeanised. It may be so in certain ways, but, irrespective of Christianity or Hinduism, the adoption of European ways results from contact with Europeans, and in certain respects is almost a condition of intercourse with Europeans. Let those, for example, who talk glibly about Indians sticking to their own dress, know that gentlemen in actual native dress are not allowed to walk on that side of the bandstand promenade in Calcutta where Europeans sit--a scandal crying for removal. With regard to the new national consciousness, it may be repeated that the Indian Christian community is almost as alive with the national feeling as the educated Hindu community. As the Indian Church becomes at once more indigenous and more thoroughly educated in Western learning, as it becomes less identified with European denominations, and less dependent upon stimulus from without, it will no doubt become still more national in every sense, be more recognised as one of India's institutions, and become a powerful educator in India. Once within the environment of the national feeling, the seed of Christian thought and modern ideas will spring up and spontaneously flourish. The future progress of the Indian Church may be said to depend upon the growth of that national consciousness within it. The sense of independence and the duty of self-support and union are, properly, being fostered in the native churches. But one of the dangers ahead undoubtedly is that, like one of the other religious movements of the past century, or like the Ethiopian Church in South Africa, the Indian Church may become infected with the political rather than the religious aspect of the idea.

Raja Rammohan Roy, the brave man who made a voyage to Britain in defiance of caste, the champion of the widow who had often been virtually obliged to lay herself on her dead husband's pyre, the strenuous advocate of English education for Indians, the supporter of the claim of Indians to a larger employment in the public service, has not yet received from New India the recognition and honour which he deserves. To every girl, at least in Bengal, the province of widow-burning, he ought to be a hero as the first great Indian knight who rode out to deliver the widows from the torturing fire of Suttee.

The influence of the Brhma Samj has been far greater than its numerical success. Reckoned by its small company of 4050 members, some of them certainly men of the highest culture and of sincere devoutness, the Brhma Samj is a limited and local movement, limited largely to the province of Bengal, and even to a few of the larger towns in the province. But if the taint of the intellectual origin of the Brhma Samj be still visible in the eclecticism that it professes, in its rejection of the supernatural, and in its poor numerical progress, it has nevertheless done great things for India.

As yet the Brhma Samj has remained unaffected by the political aspect of the new national feeling. Early in its history there was, indeed, a section of the Samj resolved to limit the selection of scriptures to the scriptures of the Hindus, but the late Keshub Chunder Sen successfully asserted the freedom of the Samj, and probably saved it from the narrow patriotic groove and from the political character of the third of the new religious organisations, the rya Samj.

NEW RELIGIOUS ORGANISATIONS

THE RYAS AND THE THEOSOPHISTS.

"Let us receive not only the revelations of the past, but also welcome joyfully the revelations of the present day."

--BISHOP COLENSO.

Founded in 1875, the ryas are the most rapidly increasing of the new Indian sects. In 1901 they numbered 92,419, an increase in the decade of 131 per cent. What ideas have such an attraction for the educated middle class, for to that class the ryas almost exclusively belong? In certain parts of the United Provinces and the Punjab, it seems as much a matter of course that one who has received a modern education should be an rya, as that in certain other provinces he should be a supporter of the Congress.

The prime motive ideas are two. One is the result of modern education and of Christian influence, namely, a consciousness that in certain grosser aspects, such as polytheism, idolatry, animal sacrifices, caste, and the seclusion of women, the present-day Hinduism cannot be defended. Those things the ryas repudiate,--all honour to them for their protest in behalf of reason, although in respect of caste and the seclusion of women, their theory is said to be considerably ahead of their practice. In the same modern spirit every rya member pledges himself to endeavour to diffuse knowledge; and a college and a number of schools are carried on by ryas in the Punjab. Repudiating all those current customs, of course the ryas have parted company with the orthodox Hindus. rya preachers denounce the corruptions of Hinduism, and in turn, what may be called a Great Council of orthodox Hindus has pronounced condemnation on the ryas. At an assembly of about four hundred Hindu pandits, held in 1881 in the Senate House of the University in Calcutta, the views of the founder of the ryas, Dyanand Saraswati, were condemned as heterodox.

The second motive idea is the new national consciousness, the new patriotic feeling of Indians. The patriotic feeling is manifest in the name; the ryas identify themselves with the ryans, the Indo-European invaders of India, from whom the higher castes of Hindus claim to be descended. Virtually, we may say, the ryas claim by their name to be the pure original Hindus.

The rya Samj in Bombay does not repudiate caste. One of their principles is that no member is expected to violate any of his own special caste rules. Why, one cannot help asking, this invertebrate character of the new Indian religious associations in Western India? It is patent that what the Prrthan Samjes of Western India are to the Brhma Samj of Bengal, the rya Samj in Bombay is to that in the Punjab and the United Provinces--only feeble echoes. Bombay Indians lead their countrymen in commercial enterprise, and in political questions they take as keen an interest as any of the Indian races. With hesitation and with apologies to Parsee friends, we ask whether it is the numerous Parsees in Bombay who have made their fellow-westerns only worldly-wise. For to great commercial enterprise, the Parsees add a stubborn conservatism in religion.

Consistently enough, when the society was transplanted to India, it entered into partnership with the rya Samj; for two years, indeed, Madame Blavatsky, the first leader of the Theosophists, had been corresponding from America with the founder of the ryas. The rya tenet of the infallibility of the original Hindu Scriptures needed no reconciliation with the Theosophist declaration of the ancient spiritual glories of India. But the ryas are also religious reformers, while, as enlightened Hindus now complain, the Theosophists are more Hindu than the Hindus. After three years, in 1881, difference arose on the question of the personality of God. The ryas, we have seen, are monotheist; the Theosophical Society, we shall see, is identified with brahmanical pantheism.

The Theosophists, it should be noted, do not figure as such in the Census. Indian Christians, Brahmas, and ryas have all taken up a definite new position in respect of religion, and ticket themselves as such; the Theosophists are now at least mainly the apologists of things as they are, and require no name to differentiate themselves.

THE NEW MAHOMEDANS

The Mahomedans, the other great religious community of India, have been far less stirred by the new era than the Hindus, whom hitherto we have been chiefly considering. Only a small number of Mahomedans belong to the professional class, so that modern education and the awakening have not reached Mahomedans in the same degree as Hindus. Quite outnumbered also by Hindus, they identify themselves politically with the British rather than with the Hindus, so that as a body they do not support the Congress, the great Indian Political Association, and have no anti-British consciousness. Mahomedan solidarity is strong enough, but it is religious not national, and so it is only in the religious sphere that we find the new era telling upon Mahomedans. Two small religious movements may be noted curiously parallel to the rya and Brhma movements among Hindus, and suggesting the operation of like influences.

HINDU DOCTRINES--HOW THEY CHANGE

"As men's minds receive new ideas, laying aside the old and effete, the world advances. Society rests upon them; mighty revolutions spring from them; institutions crumble before their onward march."

We recall the statements made on ample authority in an earlier chapter, that certain aspects of Christianity are attracting attention in India and proving themselves possessed of inherent force and attractiveness. These, the dynamical elements of Christianity, were specially the idea of God the Father, the person of Jesus Christ, and the Christian conception of the Here and Hereafter. For although Hinduism declares a social boycott against any Hindu who transports his person over the sea to Europe, within India itself the Hindu mind is in close contact with such modern religious ideas. The wall built round the garden will not shut out the crows. Indeed, like the ancient Athenian, the modern Hindu takes the keenest interest in new religious ideas.

To comprehend the impression that such new religious ideas are making, we must realise in some measure the background upon which they are cast, both that part of it which the new ideas are superseding and the remainder which constitutes their new setting and gives them their significance. In brief, what is the present position of India in regard to religious belief; and in particular, what are the prevailing beliefs about God?

A rough classification of the theological belief of the Hindus of the present day would be--the multitude are polytheists; the new-educated are monotheists; the brahmanically educated are professed pantheists. Rough as it is, we must keep the classification before us in trying to estimate the influence upon the Indian mind of the Christian idea of God. From that fundamental classification let us try to understand the Hindu position more fully.

The experience of the late Dr. John Henry Barrows, President of the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, may be quoted in confirmation of the absence of a Hindu creed. After he had won the confidence of India's representatives as their host at Chicago, and had secured for them a unique audience there, being himself desirous to write on Hinduism, he wrote to over a hundred prominent Hindus requesting each to indicate what in his view were some of the leading tenets of Hinduism. He received only one reply.

No one doctrine is distinctive of Hinduism. It is an extreme misleading statement, nevertheless, to say as some Western writers have done, and at least one Hindu writer, that Hinduism is not a religion at all, but only a social system. There are several doctrines to which a great many Hindus would at once conventionally subscribe, and these I venture to call Hindu doctrines. In theological conversations with Hindus, three doctrines very frequently show themselves as a theological background. These are, first, Pantheism; secondly, Transmigration and Final Absorption into Deity; and, thirdly, Maya, i.e. Delusion, or the Unreality of the phenomena of Sense and Consciousness. I find a recent pro-Hindu writer making virtually the same selection. In the ninth century, she writes, Sankarachargya, the great upholder of Pantheism, "took up and defined the current catch-words--maya, karma , reincarnation, and left the terminology of Hinduism what it is to-day."... "But," she also adds, "they are nowhere and in no sense regarded as essential." Naturally, then, the inquiry that we have set ourselves to will at the same time be an inquiry how far Christian thought has affected these three main Hindu doctrines of Pantheism, Transmigration, and Maya.

Rising to the next stage, namely, the theism of the educated class--the blending of their theism with the polytheism of the masses is illustrated in the July number of the magazine of the Hindu College, Benares, the headquarters of the late Hindu revival and of the pantheistic philosophy. In answer to an inquirer's question--"Is there only one God?" the reply is, "There is one supreme Lord or Ishvara of the universe, and there are minor deities or devas who intelligently guide the various processes of nature in their different departments in willing obedience to Ishvara." The Hindu College, Benares, be it remembered, is primarily one of the modern colleges whence the modern new-Indians come.

Take a statement of the mingling of polytheism, monotheism, and pantheism from the extreme south of India, a thousand miles away from Benares. "Though those men all affirmed," we read, "that there is only one God, they admitted that they each worshipped several. They saw nothing inconsistent in this. Just as the air is in everything, so God is in everything, therefore in the various symbols. And as our king has diverse representative Viceroys and Governors to rule over his dominions in his name, so the Supreme has these subdeities, less in power and only existing by force of Himself, and He, being all pervasive, can be worshipped under their forms."

At the top of all is the pure pantheist, a believer in the illusion of the senses, and generally though not always an ascetic. For life is not worth living if it is merely an illusion, and the illusion must be dispelled, and the world of the senses renounced. If "father and brother, etc., have no actual entity," said the reformer Raja Rammohan Roy when combating pantheism, "they consequently deserve no real affection, and the sooner we escape from them and leave the world the better." So the pantheist is generally an ascetic cut off from the world to be consistent in his pantheism. Yet again, we repeat that such pure pantheists are very rare, and that "in India forms of pantheism, theism, and polytheism are ever interwoven with each other."

To one familiar with India, such a medley is neither inconceivable nor improbable; the debatable question only is, what sufficient account of the cause thereof can be given. Why is it that Hindu doctrine has never set? Why this incongruity between doctrine and domestic practice? Why this double-mindedness in the same educated individual? Much might be said in the endeavour to account for these characteristic features of India, the despair of the Christian missionary. I confine myself to the bearing of the question upon the influence of Christian ideas, and particularly of Christian theism.

We ask again for the cause of this progress in thought and stagnation in practice. In India, creed and practice go their own way; thinking is independent of acting. Listen to the naive standpoint assumed in the Confession or Covenant of a Theistic Association established in Madras in 1864. We read in article 3 that the person being initiated makes this declaration: "In the meantime, I shall observe the ceremonies now in use, but only where indispensable. I shall go through such ceremonies, where they are not conformable to pure Theism, as mere matters of routine, destitute of all religious significance--as the lifeless remains of a superstition which has passed away." And again in article 4: "I shall never endeavour to deceive anyone as to my religious opinions." In the revision of 1871, both articles were dropped, but in the earlier form there was no attempt to disguise that thought was independent of act. The familiar figure of Buddha in meditation, seated cross-legged and motionless, with vacant introspective eyes, oblivious of the outer world, is a type of the separation of thought from act that seems natural to India or to the Indian mind, type also of the independence of each thinker. The thinker secludes himself; "the mind is its own place." To become a thinker signifies to become an ascetic recluse; even modern enlightenment often removes an Indian from fellow-feeling with his kind.

THE NEW THEISM

"The idea of God is the productive and conservative principle of civilisation; as is the religion of a community, so will be in the main its morals, its laws, its general history."

As further confirmation of the change in the Indian mind, we may cite the paper read at the Congress on the History of Religions, Basel, 1904, by the Deputy High-priest of the Parsees, Bombay. The dualism of the Zoroastrian theology has hitherto been regarded as its distinctive feature, but the paper sought to show "that the religion of the Parsees was largely monotheistic, not dualistic."

"It is with Pantheism, not Polytheism, that a rising morality will have to reckon," says Sir Alfred Lyall. The result of all our observation has been different. Pantheism is melting out of the sky of the educated, and if nothing else take its place, it will be a selfish materialism or agnosticism, not avowed or formulated yet shaping every motive, that the new morality will have to reckon with.

JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF

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