How extensive is this influence will of course depend on the many or the few devoted to this work, and the wisdom and energy with which they pursue it. The number of missionaries in India is very small compared with the vast population. And yet the picture here drawn of one village is reproduced in hundreds of villages. Take the representatives of all the churches and societies of Protestant Christendom, they would make a very respectable force. But even this does not represent the full amount of influence they exert. Moral influences cannot be weighed and measured like material forces. Nor are missionaries to be counted, like the soldiers of an army. They are not drawn up on parade, and do not march through the streets, with gleaming bayonets. Their forces are scattered, and their work is silent and unseen.
But in all quiet ways, by churches, schools, and orphanages, their influence is felt; while by the printing-press they scatter religious truth all over India, the effect of which, in tens of thousands of those whom it does not "convert," is to destroy the power of their old idolatry.
That more Hindoos do not openly embrace Christianity is not surprising, when one considers the social influences which restrain them. When a Hindoo becomes a Christian, he is literally an outcast. His most intimate friends will not know him. His own family turn him from their door, feeling that he has brought upon them a disgrace far greater than if he had committed a crime for which he was to perish on the scaffold. To them he is dead, and they perform his funeral rites as if he were no more in this world. The pastor of the native church in Bombay has thus been buried or burned by his own family. Another told me that his own father turned from him in the street, and refused to recognize him. These things are very hard to bear. And so far from wondering that there are not more conversions among the natives of India, I wonder that there are so many.
But what sort of Christians are they? Are they like English or American Christians? When I landed in India, and saw what a strange people I was among, how unlike our own race, I asked a question which many have asked before: Whether these people could become Christians? It is a favorite idea of many travellers—and of many English residents in India—that not only is the number of conversions small, but that the "converts" are not worth having when they are made. It is said that it is only low caste natives, who have nothing to lose, that will desert their old religion; and that they are influenced only by the lowest motives, and that while they profess to be converted, they are in no wise changed from what they were, except that to their old heathen vices they have added that of hypocrisy. Hearing these things, I have taken some pains to ascertain what sort of people these native converts are. I have attended their religious services, and have met them socially, and, so far as I could judge, I have never seen more simple-minded Christians. Some of them are as intelligent as the best instructed members of our New England churches. As to their low caste, statistics show, among them, a greater proportion of Brahmins than of any other caste, as might be expected from their greater intelligence.
The work, then, has not been in vain. The advance is slow, but it is something that there is an advance. I am told, as the result of a careful estimate, that if the progress continues in the future as it has for the last fifteen years, in two centuries the whole of India with its two hundred millions of people, will be converted to the Christian religion. This is a spread of Christianity more rapid than that in the age of the apostles, for it was three centuries before the faith which they preached became master of the Roman empire.
With such a record of what Christian Missions have done in India, with such evidences of their good influence and growing power, they are entitled to honor and respect as one of the great elements in the problem of the future of that country. To speak of them flippantly, argues but small acquaintance with the historical forces which have hitherto governed India or indeed Britain itself. It ill becomes Englishmen to sneer at missions, for to missionaries they owe it that their island has been reclaimed from barbarism. When Augustine landed in Britain their ancestors were clothed in skins, and roaming in forests. It was the new religion that softened their manners, refined their lives, and in the lapse of generations wrought out the slow process of civilization.
In Johnson's "Tour to the Hebrides," he refers to the early missionaries who civilized Britain in a passage which is one of the most eloquent in English literature: "We were now treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion.... Far from me and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery or virtue. That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona."
That power which has made England so great; which has made the English race the foremost race in all this world; is now carried to another hemisphere to work the same gradual elevation in the East. It is a mighty undertaking. The lifting up of a race is like the lifting up of a continent. Such changes cannot come suddenly; but in the slow lapse of ages the continent may be found to have risen, and to be covered, as it were, with a new floral vegetation; as that faith, which is the life of Europe, has entered into the vast populations of Asia.