ut that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of Time."

WORDSWORTH.

[Sidenote: A Renaissance without a reformation.]

It would be interesting to speculate what the Renaissance of the
sixteenth century would have done for Europe had it been unaccompanied
by a Reformation of religion. Without the Reformation, we may aver there
would have been for the British nation no Bible of 1611, no Pilgrim
Fathers to America, and no Revolution of 1688, along with all that these
things imply of progress many-fold. What might have been, however,
although interesting as a speculation, is too uncertain to be discussed
further with profit. I only desire to give a general idea of the
religious situation in India at the close of the nineteenth century.
There has been a Renaissance without a Reformation.

Into the new intellectual world the Hindu mind has willingly entered,
but progress in religious ideas has been slow and reluctant. The new
_political_ idea of the unity of India and the consciousness of
citizenship were pleasing discoveries that met with no opposition; but
that same new Indian national consciousness resented any departure from
the old _social_ and _religious_ ideas.

[Sidenote: Meaning of the term _religious_.]

In speaking of the development of religious ideas in India, I use the
term _religious_ in the modern sense. Under religion, in India is
comprehended much that in Europe would be reckoned within the _social_
sphere. In India all questions of inter-marriage and of eating together,
many questions regarding occupations and the relations of earning
members of a family to idle members, are religious not social questions.

The case was similar among the Jews, we may remember. As recorded in the
fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, two of the three
injunctions of the Jerusalem Church to the Gentile Church at Antioch
deal with these same socio-religious matters. Blood and animals killed
by strangling were to be prohibited as food, and certain marriages also
were forbidden.

Perhaps among Europeans the question of burial _v_. cremation may be
instanced as a matter of social custom that has been made a religious
question. But in no country more than in India have customs, _mores_,
come also to mean morals. A halo of religious sanctity encircles the
things that have been and are. Taking "religion," however, in the modern
sense, we ask: Although there has not been any great Reformation of
r