India, Its Life and Thought

by John P. Jones

It should also be remembered that Protestant missionaries, as a body, are no longer isolated from each other and animated by mutual suspicions and impelled by petty jealousies, as in the past. Their development in amity, comity, and organized fellowship, even during the last decade, is marvellous. Federation and organic ecclesiastical union are becoming the order of the day. Four denominations of America and Scotland are now perfecting such a scheme in South India; and this is only the beginning of an ever expanding movement for Christian fellowship all over the land. No one knows what grand results it will achieve. We all know, however, that the fraternal regard, sympathy, and confidence is far removed from the sad divisiveness of the past, that it is pregnant with blessing in the coming of the Kingdom of God, and that it is far in advance of the spirit of union which prevails in England or America. In this we believe that the East is to open the way for the West.

These and many other facts encourage those who look to the speedy Christianizing of this land. And yet we cannot, I repeat, ignore the fact of the relative meagreness of the results. It is a sad truth that the total Protestant Indian community, at the present time, is only one three-hundredth part of the population!

I would not be pessimistic, however, even in this matter of numerical growth. In the past, we have too much made a fetich of figures, and our faith has been too much pinned to statistics.

But the lessons of history must be well learned and thoroughly digested, if the future of Christianity is to improve upon her past in India. For, be it remembered, Christianity never met with so doughty a foe as that which confronts it in this land. The ancient faiths of Greece and Rome, which Christianity overcame, were infantile and imbecile as compared with the subtle wisdom and the mighty resistance of Brahmanism. The conditions of the conflict in India are different from those ever met before by our militant faith. The subtle and deadening philosophy of the land, the haughty pride of its religious leaders, the great inertia of the people, the mighty tyranny of caste, the debasing ritual of Hinduism and its debauching idolatry,—all these constitute a resisting fortress whose overthrow seems all but impossible.

II

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.