transmigration, "karma,"
"bhakti" and final absorption into the Supreme Soul are all but
universally held by the people of all sects and divisions, however much at
variance with these their peculiar beliefs may seem to be.

The prominent staple of Hindu religious thinking in all ages has doubtless
been Vedantism--that subtle form of pantheism which has charmed and
bewildered not a few of the great minds of the Occident also. The
paramount influence of this philosophy upon all religious thought and life
in India is unmistakable today, as it has been through the centuries. Of
this Max Mueller says,--"If the people of India can be said to have now any
system of religion at all ... it is to be found in the Vedanta philosophy,
the leading tenets of which are known to some extent in every village....
Nothing will extinguish that ancient spirit of Vedantism which is breathed
by every Hindu from his earliest youth, and pervades, in various forms,
even the prayers of the idolater, the speculations of the philosopher, and
the proverbs of the beggar."

We may therefore, without hesitation, so far as Hinduism is concerned
regard as philosophic Hinduism those basal doctrines and their corollaries
which, from the earliest days, have been the stock in trade of all
Indo-Aryan thinkers and at the same time the source and solvent of all the
mysteries of their faith.

By a study of these one may easily reach the heart of Hindus and of
Hinduism and can weigh and measure the forces which enter into their
religious life and thinking, and can compare them with the teachings and
institutions of Christianity.

This study will bring a twofold blessing to Christians of the West,
especially to missionaries who have given themselves to the regeneration
of India. It will give them a larger degree of respect for that great
people of the East and a new appreciation for Hindu thought and religious
speculation. We of the West have been imbued with too much of an
intellectual arrogance and a spirit of contempt for "the benighted Hindu."
Even if we ever learned, we certainly have too easily forgotten, that
many, many centuries ago--when our ancestors were grovelling in the lowest
depths of primitive savagery--the rishis of India were engaged in perhaps
the highest self-propelled flights of religious speculation the world has
ever known and were working out a philosophy, or more correctly a system
of ontology, which is today the wonder and admiration o