To Indian Christians also such reasoning has often been a strength, furnishing as it were a new justification of their baptism into Christianity; for looking back they can perceive the finger of Hinduism itself pointing the way. But had no other influence been exerted on the Indian mind, one could not say what I now say, that Christ Himself is the feature of Christianity that has most powerfully moved men in India. The person of Christ Himself has been the great Christian dynamic. I am now speaking of educated India, the India that is not dependent solely upon the preacher for its religious ideas and feeling.
Christianity identified with Britain and therefore unpopular.
The anti-foreigner instinct.
The grand new political idea in India is the idea of nationality, and one of its corollaries is the championing of things Indian and depreciation of things British. The strong anti-British bias among the educated is one of the noteworthy and regrettable changes in the Indian mind within the last half-century. It is not surprising then that all over India the influence of Christ and of Christianity is lessened from the identification of Christianity with the British. For a native of India to accept the British religion is to run counter to the prevailing anti-British and pro-Indian feeling; it is unpatriotic to become a
convert to Christianity. "Need we go out of India in quest of the true knowledge of God?" wrote a distinguished Indian littérateur a few years ago.[94] All that feeling is of course in addition to the instinctive hostility to things foreign that has been nowhere stronger than in self-contained India—self-contained between the Himalayas and the seas. The exclusiveness of caste is based upon that feeling. The statement of the late Rev. M.N. Bose, B.A., B.L., a native of Eastern Bengal, regarding his youth [1860?] is: "I had a deep-rooted prejudice against Christianity from my boyhood.... At this time I hated Christianity and Christians, though I knew not why I did so."[95] We find the instinctive hostility more bluntly expressed in China in the cry that drops spontaneously from the opening lips of many Chinamen, as their greeting, when they unexpectedly behold a European. The involuntary ejaculation is: "Strike the foreign devil."
Christ reverenced; Christians disliked.
In the first part of the nineteenth century, along with the great development of modern missions, and of modern education, we may say that Christ
came again to India. The national and anti-British feeling had not then arisen to interpose in His path, but, coming as an alien, His name evoked great hostility. The popular mood was Christianos ad leones, as many incidents and witnesses testify. Now, in spite of the old anti-foreign hostility and the new currents of feeling, a remarkable attitude to Christianity—far short of conversion, no doubt—is almost everywhere manifest. There is a profound homage to its Founder, coupled with that strong resentment towards His Indian disciples. Christ Himself is acknowledged; His church is still foreign and British. Resentfully ruled by a Christian nation, but subdued by Christ Himself, is the state of educated India to-day. In spite of His alien birth and in spite of anti-British bias, Christ has passed within the pale of Indian recognition. Indian eyes, focused at last, are fastened upon Him, and men wonder at His gracious words. Again I direct attention to a significant event in Indian history—the incoming of an influence that will not stale, as mere ideas may. "Is there a single soul in this audience," said the Brahmo leader, the late Keshub Chunder Sen,[96] to the educated Indians of Calcutta, mostly Hindus, "who would
scruple to ascribe extraordinary greatness and supernatural moral heroism to Jesus Christ and Him crucified?"
"That incarnation of the Divine Love, the lowly Son of man," writes another, even while he is rejoicing over the revival of Hinduism.[97]