And yet I strongly believe in the ultimate triumph of our faith in India. Under God this mighty fortress of Hinduism will capitulate. Nor do I think that the day of Christian dominance is so far away as many missionaries are inclined to think. There is an accumulation of forces and a multiplication of spiritual powers which are now operating in behalf of our faith and against the ancestral religion of India, such as will work wonders in the future religious development of the land. But this conquest of our faith will not be that which too many of us are wont to anticipate and to pray for. The religious forms of life and of thought, which we of the West have inherited and in whose environment we have grown up, we have come to identify with the essence of our religion; and it seems all but impossible for us to think of a Christianity apart from these outward forms. I believe that there is to be a rude awakening for our children and grandchildren, if not for ourselves, in this matter.

The western type of Christianity will not survive the conflict in India. Western modes of thought and forms of belief will be supplanted by those better suited to the land. Occidental doctrines and aspects of our faith will give way to those conceived from the Oriental standpoint. I believe, for instance, that the most mischievous doctrine of pantheism will surrender its elements of truth (for it has an important admixture of truth) to the formation of a new conception of God, which will appeal to and captivate the Indian mind and heart. Indeed, we are witnessing, this very day, even in the far West, the influence of India in her monistic overemphasis upon the divine immanence, working toward a new Christian conception of God. Modern interchange of thought is thus giving to India, even in America, her influence in the shaping of modern belief. And if it be thus in matters of fundamental belief, much more will it be so in matters of outward expression and in the unessential forms of Christian truth. Some of us of the West are seeing increasingly the serious incongruity which exists between our way of thinking and of putting our thought into living form, and the way of the people about us. And we are not convinced, as we perhaps once were, that it is the obtuseness, or the religious perversity, of the Indian mind which is the cause of this. The sooner the better we realize that between the people of the East and of the West there is a wide mental gulf which may, indeed, by our associating together, be narrowed, but never eliminated. And the outward type of Christianity, after western pressure has been taken away from this land, will depend upon the mental make-up and peculiar spiritual aspect of the Indian Christian. And until he is able to furnish and to enforce this, which I call the Oriental type of Christianity, he will never be able to make his faith appeal to his brothers, and to make it an indigenous faith in India.

Nor do I think that the Christianity which is to prevail in India will be encased in the present ecclesiasticism which assumes and claims monopoly of our faith. I can conceive the possibility of there being a vast amount of Christianity—a living and a self-propagating Christianity—outside the pale of organized and institutional Christianity in India. It is so in the West to-day. The organized churches of the West have within themselves an ever diminishing portion of the vital Christian life and aspirations of the country. Christianity has overleapt ecclesiastic bounds. Its spirit is overflowing, in living streams, into the life of a thousand organizations which are altruistic and philanthropic, outside the limits of ecclesiastical Christianity. It will be so in India, and throughout the world. And the Christian Church must take this into account and shape its policy accordingly.

However this may be, East Indians will increasingly claim, as the Japanese are now claiming, the right to decide for themselves the forms of polity and the types of ritual which they will choose and cultivate as their own.

I do not say, of course, that the present forms will be entirely discarded. But they will be so modified and supplemented that they will present an ecclesiastical type of their own.

And why should they not, if our faith is to fit well the Oriental mind, and is to become a gracious power in its life? The growing opposition among the educated men of India, at the present time, is not really antagonism to Christianity itself, but to its western garb and spirit. And there is much reason for this attitude of mind. Conciliation and adaptation has not been the characteristic of the mind of the West in presenting its faith to the East. This did not make so much difference, so long as the Indian was submissive and had not waked up to the spirit of self-assertion. But to-day, when that spirit is so rampant, and when a new nationalism and a half-spurious patriotism glories in everything eastern and is annoyed by all that is western, the matter of adaptation has become all-important.

The relative barrenness of our faith during past centuries in India was largely, if not entirely, due to its foreign ecclesiastical forms and its shibboleths pronounced in foreign tongues. The Christianity of the future in India must breathe of the spirit, and speak forth in the language and life, of the people.

I am inclined to believe that the battle cry of the Christian Church will soon be lost in the ever swelling tide of enthusiasm for the Kingdom of God. Christians will seek less to promote this or that denomination, and more and more to cause to come in power the Kingdom of Heaven. And India is a land which will lend itself very readily to this transfer of emphasis. There is much in the mystical type of the Hindu mind that leads us to anticipate preËminence for India in this change of emphasis from outward organization to deep-working spiritual forces and realities.

India, which has been the most prolific land in giving birth to religions, and in being at present the asylum of all the great faiths of the world, will not be slow to give to Christianity that form and aspect which will most please her.

It is therefore important that all the Christian leaders of India should not only take note of these facts, but should also do their utmost to help in the desired consummation, and make Christianity in India a faith that will appeal to every man and woman in the land.