,
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 a