the matters that should interest both them and their fellow-citizens in India, they have in them nothing save unreasoned feelings. These form the numerous class, of whom Sir Henry Cotton spoke in an address in London in February 1904, to whom it is an offence to travel in the same railway-carriage with Indians. These are the corrupters of good feeling between Britons and Indians, as sympathetic men are the salt that preserves what good feeling may still exist. In every Indian sphere the men of the latter class are well known to the native community, and are always spoken of with cordiality. The writer remembers trying to have a talk with a British soldier about the generals of the army, and how the man seemed unable to do more than say, with enthusiasm, of Lord Roberts and General Wauchope and others, "Yon was a man!" and as depreciatorily of others again, "Yon was no man at all." Such sympathetic "men," instinctively discerned, India has much need of, if this anti-British feeling, so far as it is not inevitable, is to be checked. In such "men" the new Indian feelings of manhood and citizenship and nationality will find recognition and response, in spite of displeasing accompaniments, for such feelings we must look for under
British rule and from English and Christian education. From such "men," also, the new Indians will accept frank condemnation of social irrationalities or political exaggerations, as e.g. the notion that those have right to claim full share in the British Empire's management who would outcaste a fellow-Indian for visiting Britain, even had he gone to state their case before the House of Commons. To speak of laymen only, there are no Anglo-Indians more trusted than those who make no secret of their desire for the advancement of India's welfare through a religious reformation, who hold that this purely pro-Indian national feeling is as yet imperfect because divorced from the idea of the unity of mankind and the concomitant idea of the progress of the whole race.
CHAPTER IX
NEW RELIGIOUS IDEAS—ARE THERE ANY?
A Renaissance without a reformation.
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.
Into the new intellectual world the Hindu mind has willingly entered, but progress in religious ideas has been slow and reluctant. The new political idea of the unity of India and the consciousness of citizenship were pleasing discoveries that met with no opposition; but that same new Indian national consciousness resented any departure from the old social and religious ideas.
Meaning of the term religious.