rigid, it will be easily understood that Christian and modern ideas have made much greater headway in India than Christian customs and modes of worship. The mind of educated India has been Christianised to a much greater extent than the religious or domestic practices have been. Perhaps it might be said that all down the centuries of Christian Church history, opinion has often been in advance of worship and the social code, that social and religious conventionalities have lagged behind belief. If so, it is the marked conservatism in ceremonial that is noteworthy in India. While Hindu beliefs are dissolving or dropping out of the mind, Hindu practices are successfully resisting the solvent influences or only slowly being transformed.
More progress towards Christian thought than Christian practice.
It is not too much to say that the educated Hindu does not regard a fixed creed as a part of his Hinduism, but rather boasts of the doctrinal comprehensiveness of his religion. He joyfully lives in a ferment of religious thought, surrendering to the doctrine of a satisfying teacher, but the idea of creed subscription, or a doctrinal stockade, is utterly foreign to his nature. For him the standards are the fixed social usages and the brahmanical ritual. Hear a Hindu himself on the matter, the
historian of Hindu Civilisation during British Rule [i. 60]: "Hinduism has ever been and still is as liberal and tolerant in matters of religious belief as it is illiberal and intolerant in matters of social conduct." In a recent pamphlet[68] an Anglo-Indian civilian gives his evidence clearly, if too baldly, of the fixity of practice and the mobility of belief. "The educated Hindu," he writes, "has largely lost his belief in the old myths about the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, and has learned to smile at many of the superstitions of his uneducated countrymen. But Hinduism as a religion that tells a man not only what he shall eat, what he shall drink, and wherewithal he shall be clothed, but tells him how to perform innumerable acts that men of other nations never think have anything to do with religion at all, Hinduism as an intricate social code, stands largely unaffected by the flood of Western education that has been poured upon the country. He instances a brahman, one of his own subordinates, college-bred and English-speaking, who, when away from home with his superior officer, had to cook his food for himself, because the brahman servant he had with him was of a
lower division than his own, and he could not afford to hire a man of his own status among brahmans."
Thought independent of act.
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.
No Theological Faculties.
How is it so? I say nothing of the climate of tropical India as a contributory cause. The way in which Hindu learning was and is transmitted, is itself almost sufficient explanation of the independence and the fluidity of religious doctrine. Hinduism has no recognised Theological Faculties as training schools for the priesthood. Buddhist monasteries of the early Christian centuries we do read of, institutions corresponding to our universities, to which crowds of students resorted, and where many subjects were taught; but the Hindu lore is transmitted otherwise. Beside or in his humble dwelling, the learned Hindu pandit receives and teaches and shares his poverty with his four, five, or it may be twenty disciples, who are to be the depositaries of his lore, and in their turn its transmitters. Such an institution is a Sanscrit tol, where ten to twenty years of the formative period of a young pandit's life may be spent. Without printed books and libraries and