s
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 thi