Among the Wild Tribes of the Afghan Frontier / A Record of Sixteen Years' Close Intercourse with the Natives of the Indian Marches

by T. L. Pennell

Herein lies the inestimable value of the much-maligned mission schools and colleges. They do not produce a great crop of immediate baptisms, and so are belittled by some as barren agencies; but nothing else is more surely permeating the great mass of Muhammadan and Hindu thought with Christian thoughts, Christian ideals, and Christian aspirations.

We see all around us in present-day India attempts to reclothe Islam and Hinduism in Christian habiliments, or else ardent reformers, hopeless of that Augean task, creating new little sects and offshoots, in which Christian ideas are served up for Muhammadan and Hindu consumers thinly disguised in a dressing of their own religions. These sects sometimes affect a display of hostility to Christianity, lest those whom they wish to draw should mistake them for being only missionary ruses for catching them with guile; but, all the same, they are steps, and I think inevitable steps, in the gradual permeation of the country with the religion of Christ. India has been surfeited with philosophies and dogmas and rites and ceremonies from the hoary Vedic ages down, but she is hungering and thirsting for a living power to draw her God-ward, and such a power is Christ. She cannot have too much of Him, whether this life be set forth in the devoted service of Christian men and women, in hospitals, and schools, and zenanas, and plague camps, and leper asylums, or in the daily preaching and teaching of Him in town and village, in the crowded bazaars, or in the hermitages of the sadhus and faqirs.

This is not a work restricted to those who have been set apart as missionaries, but one which claims every professed Christian in the land. Every European Christian, be he in civil or military service, in trade or profession, or merely a temporary visitant for pleasure-seeking, can and should be doing this essentially Christian missionary work if he is living honestly and purely up to the tenets of his religion; and many of the best converts in the land have been first drawn to Christ by watching the consistent private and public Christian life of some such unobtrusive Englishman or Englishwoman, who never was or tried to be a missionary in the usual sense of the term.

On the other hand, the Christianizing of the country has been made all the more remote and difficult by those Englishmen who contemn or discredit the religion they profess, or live lives openly and flagrantly at variance with its ethics.

We do not gain anything from a missionary point of view, and we dishonour God, when we speak of everything in Islam or Hinduism as evil. The Mussulman has given a witness to the Unity of God and the folly of idolatry which has been unsurpassed in the religious history of the world, and he has qualities of devotion and self-abnegation which the Christian Church may well desire to enlist in her service rather than to ignore or decry. The Hindu has evolved philosophies on the enigmas of life, and sin, and pain, and death, which have for ages been the solace and guide of the myriad inhabitants of India, and he has attained heights of self-abnegation and austerity in the pursuit of his religious ideals which would have made the Christian ascetics of the early centuries of our era envious. Religion has been to them a pervading force which has coloured the most commonplace acts of daily life. Here we have qualities which have prepared the soil for the implanting of the Christian faith, and which, when imbued and enlightened with the love of Christ, will reach a luxuriance of Christian energy worthy of the religious East, in which so many of the religions of the world have had their birth. India, indeed, wants Christ, but the future Christianity of India will not be that Occidental form which we have been accustomed to, but something that will have incorporated all the best God-given qualities and capacities and thoughts of the Muhammadans and Hindus.

It is a great pity that missionary energy is still largely destructive rather than constructive. In the earlier days of mission work it was popularly supposed that missionaries were to attack the citadels of Islam and Hinduism, which were considered to be the great obstacles to the acceptance of Christianity by the people of India, and it was thought that, those once overthrown, we should find a Christian country. Much more probably we should find an atheistic and materialistic India, in which Mammon, Wealth, Industrial Success, and Worldliness had become the new gods. The real and most deadly enemies with which the missionary has to contend are infidelity and mammon worship. We may well try to enlist the religious spirit of all the Indian creeds in the struggle against these, the common enemies of all faiths, or we may find, when too late, that we have destroyed the fabric of faith, and set up nothing in its place. The old Islam, the old Hinduism, are already doomed, not by the efforts of the missionaries, but by the contact with the West, by the growth of commerce, by the spread of education, by the thirst for wealth and luxury which the West has implanted in the East. All the power of Christianity is required to give India a new and living and robust faith, which shall be able to withstand these disrupting forces.

Some of the Christian attacks on Eastern religions are painful to read, because one cannot help seeing that the same weapons have been used in the West, and often with success, against belief in the Christian Scriptures, and the missionaries are only preparing tools which will one day be used against themselves. They may for the moment win a Pyrrhic victory against the forces of Islam and Hinduism, but they are at the same time undermining the religious spirit, the ardent faith, the unquestioning devotion, which have been the crown and glory of India for ages. Let it rather be their endeavour to present a real, living, pulsating Christianity, capable of enlisting all these divine forces in its own service without weakening or destroying one of them, and all that is best in Islam and Hinduism will be drawn into it. The product will be nearer to the mind of Christ than much that passes by the name of Christianity in the West, yet has lost the power of the living Christ. Do not destroy, but give something worthy of acceptance, and be careful of the type.

Converts will come right enough when we work on these lines, but they will not so often be the man-made converts which have been drawn by the outward attractions which missions sometimes offer. They will more often be those who have been drawn of the Spirit, and become converts in spite of us and our little faith. And they will inherit the blessing of Isaac as assuredly as the first class partake of the waywardness of Ishmael.

The East has long possessed and developed in a myriad different ways the idea of sacrifice, while the more practical West has been tending more and more towards a philanthropic Christianity which makes a life of service its ideal. The best will be when we bring about a union of the religious devotion of the East with the altruism of the West.

So far the asceticism and devotion of the Orient has been rendered nugatory and disappointing by its uselessness—by, if we may use a paradoxical expression, its very selfishness—for it was directed to the emancipation of the individual soul rather than to the salvation of the race. But when the sacrifice of the Orient and the service of the Occident join hands and go forth in the name of Christ to mitigate and remove the ills and sorrows of this sad, sad world, then indeed will the spirit of Christ be fulfilled in His Church.