Village Christian Church, South India.
High And Normal School For Girls, Madura.
(d) Educational work is increasingly utilized. Formerly missionary effort was mostly the work of the preacher—it was the direct Gospel message and appeal. To this has been added the no less necessary, indeed the deeper, work of transforming the thought of the land and of introducing everywhere a Christian philosophy and a process of thinking which will undermine the old methods and foundations of Hinduism. This Christian education, which is now being imparted in India to nearly half a million youth in our schools, is a leavening power the extent of [pg 191] whose influence no one can compute. And it carries within itself untold possibilities for the conversion of India. By these institutions, Sir William Muir truly tells us, “the country has been inoculated with Christian sentiment.”
Sir Charles U. Atchison declares that, in his judgment, “the value of educational missionary institutions, in the present transition state of Indian opinion, can hardly be overrated. It is more than ever the duty of the Church to go forward in its educational policy.”
In other ways also, medical and industrial, Christian work has broadened out so that it reaches the people at all points and lifts up the Christian community into a self-respecting power which will abide and grow in influence.
In modern missions the Word of God, translated into all the vernaculars of the people, has become the mightiest instrument of progress in Christian life, and the most ubiquitous messenger of Christian truth. The Bible was almost a sealed book to the people of India when William Carey arrived at the close of the eighteenth century. The Roman Catholic and Syrian Christians had done nothing to bring this blessing to the people. The Danish mission, as we have seen, had translated it into the Tamil tongue. And that was all. How wonderful the work of the last century whereby this blessed Word has been translated into every language and many dialects of polyglot India. Among its 300,000,000 inhabitants there are few who cannot find God's own Word translated into their own speech, published and brought to their doors. Can any one realize how great a leverage this [pg 192] is in the work of overturning that land religiously and in bringing Christ into the life of India?
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Thus the history of Christian effort in India has not been without its many lessons. And these lessons have brought wisdom and, with that wisdom, confidence and growing efficiency to the Christian forces now at work in the land.
For this reason the progress of the Kingdom of Christ in India will, during the present century, be much more marked and its triumphs more signal than in the past centuries. And for this well-founded assurance we thank God.