o the student of Comparative Religion, India presents a
particularly attractive field. Not hidden away in sacred classics or in
the records of travellers, but as elements of existing religions,
professed by men around, are illustrations of most of the types of
religious thought and practice. There are the pantheism of certain Hindu
ascetics, the polytheism of the masses, the animism of aboriginal races,
and the varieties of theism of Christians, Mahomedans, and the new
Hindus respectively. There are the curious phenomena of goddesses as
well as gods, and of distinctive features in the character and worship
of the female deities. There is the whole scale of worship up from
bloody sacrifices and self-tortures and from worship where the priest is
everything, to worship like that of Mahomedans and of Protestant
Christians, where a mediatory priesthood is virtually repudiated. There
is the stage, still farther beyond, at which the worshipper is supposed
to be able to say of himself "I am God." Of the first and last stages,
India may be called the special fields, for probably nowhere else in the
world are so many animals killed in sacrifice as at the temple of
Kalighat in Calcutta; and the last stage, as an observable religious
phenomenon, is peculiar to India. In India there is presented to us
salvation in the attainment of an eternal existence along with God, as
among Christians and Mahomedans and many of the less educated Hindus;
and there is salvation in deliverance from further lives, as among those
Hindus who hold the doctrine of transmigration. In India all these
varieties of religious thought and practice are actual, perceptible
phenomena, ready for first-hand observation by the student of
Comparative Religion. But still more interesting to him is that they are
there in mutual contact, and telling upon each other. For in the sphere
of human beliefs, the student is much more than an outside observer and
classifier. He has his own conception of truth, and is interested in
observing how far in each case there is a convergence towards truth or a
divergence from it. In the sphere of human beliefs he holds further,
that, given opportunity, the nearer to truth the greater certainty of
survival. Given opportunity, as already postulated, the law of beliefs
is the survival of the truest. Truth will prevail.

[Sidenote: Dynamical elements of Christianity.]

[Sidenote: Dynamical doctrines in other spheres]

To the student of Ch