y
have categorically rejected altruism, and denied that they have a duty
towards their neighbour, and done their best to shut up the doors
of sympathy, yet even with them human nature refuses to be utterly
crushed, and will assert itself. One can often discern a suppressed,
yet insuppressible, hunger after sympathy, and one has no doubt but
that the sympathy which finds its highest expression in the love of
Christ, whether acted or recounted, will penetrate their hearts, and
find a response. Unused, any organ will atrophy, and so their capacity
for sympathy may be latent and not easily roused. Let someone, however,
go to them as a fellow-creature, full of love and sympathy--not to
despise and to fault-find, but to take hand in hand and bring soul
to soul--and he will find that the Sadhus of Rishikes are human,
very human, with the same spiritual hungerings and thirstings, and
able to realize and rejoice in the same salvation.

It is a pity that more missionaries have not devoted themselves
to working among these people. They would need to be men of great
devotion and self-abnegation, but there have been many such in other
spheres. They would be repelled and disappointed by the callousness and
fraud of the majority, but there are the gems to be sought out, and
how much hard granite is the miner willing laboriously to crush when
he is sure of finding nuggets of gold here and there! And among these
Sadhus are men who, converted to Christianity, would be apostolic in
their zeal and devotion, and might, by travelling up and down India,
not now in the vain accumulation of merit, but as heralds of the
Gospel of goodwill, become the Wesleys and Whitefields of a mighty
mass movement of the people towards Christ.

As an example of such a one and the way in which he was converted from
the life of a Sadhu to that of a Christian preacher, I will quote here
the account that Rev. B. B. Roy gives of his conversion. It shows how
strong a hold the ascetic Sadhu idea has on a religiously-minded Hindu,
and how spontaneously his heart seeks in austerity and retirement for
the peace which a growing sense of sin and of the evil of the world has
taken away. At the same time it shows that, as in the case of Buddha,
asceticism fails to afford any lasting comfort or peace to the weary
storm-tossed soul. He says: "Constant starvation and exposure to all
sorts of weather reduced my body to a living skeleton.

"After a few months' travel I came t