be the momentary fashion of the day in which we live, that same tradition and testimony of the ages which commends Christianity to us has not been a chimera or a chameleon, but has had from the first, up to a certain point of development, one substantially definite meaning for the word, a meaning of mental as well as moral significance; and has, as a matter of history, expressed this meaning in the creeds. This Christianity has shed off from it, on this side and on that, after debate and scrutiny, and furthermore after doubt and even, sometimes, convulsion, all the conceptions irreconcilably hostile to its own essence, by a standing provision as normal as are the reparatory processes of material nature; and has been handed on continuously in uniformity of life, though not, it may be, in uniformity of health. It is in this sense what the visible church also claims to be, a city set on a hill; not, indeed, a city within walls that can neither grow nor dwindle, but yet a city widely spread, with a fixed heart and centre, if with a fluctuating outline; a mass alike unchangeable, perceptible, and also determinate, not absolutely or mathematically, but in a degree sufficient for its providential purpose in the education of mankind."

THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA.

66

AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE SOCIETY OF ARTS, LONDON, FEBRUARY 24, 1888, BY SIR WILLIAM WILSON HUNTER, AUTHOR OF THE IMPERIAL GAZETEER OF INDIA."

which

I LATELY read in a newspaper that the average cost of educating each student in a certain college at Oxford is £6,481. The calculation was, from an arithmetical point of view, unassailable. The revenues of the college were correctly given, and when divided by the number of so-called students they showed this enormous expenditure. The ingenious statist had, however, overlooked the fact that the income of that college is not applied to educating students, but to strengthening the teaching staff of the other colleges, or of the University, and to the endowment of research. No one, so far as I am aware, took the trouble to expose the miscalculation, and it passed as an amusing example of the abuse of figures. There is a miscalculation, similar in kind, but fraught with more serious consequences sometimes heard on English platforms, and reiterated in the press saddens the hearts of thousands of earnest men and women in this country, and which carries discouragement to hundreds of devoted workers in distant lands. When I hear the result of Indian missions estimated by dividing their expenditure among the number of their conversions, and then giving the cost of each new convert at so much a head, the same effect is produced on my mind as by the statement regarding the average expenditure on each of the so-called students at that Oxford college. There may be initial periods of missionary effort among the Polynesian and African races, to which a calculation of this sort can be properly applied. On that point I do not presume to offer an opinion. But speaking of the country in regard to which my own experience enables me to speak, the country which in our times forms the great field of missionary labor, I declare that no true ratio exists between missionary expenditure or missionary work in India and the number of new conversions. I affirm that calculations based on the assumption of such a ratio are fundamentally unsound. It has been my duty to inquire into the progress of the various religions of India. The inquiry discloses a rapid proportionate increase among the native Christians, unknown among the Muhammadan and Hindu population; but it also proves that the increase bears no direct relation to the new conversions from orthodox Hinduism and Islam. For this misapplication of statistics the friends of missionary enterprise were originally in some sense responsible. The great outburst of evangelistic effort in India took place during the upheaval of Dissent against lukewarm orthodoxy in

England. The first idea of our missionaries was to make converts from the established religions of India, as some of our Dissenting bodies at home hoped to swell their numbers at the expense of the Established Churches of Great Britain. During the past fifty years this idea has been modified. Experience has shown that a vast increase of activity and usefulness among the English and Scottish sects outside the Established Churches is not only consistent with, but has actually proved concurrent with a vast increase of activity and usefulness within those churches. It has also shown that the progress of Christianity in India is compatible with the progress of Hinduism and Islam. For as the Dissenting bodies of Great Britain have in our century won their great successes not by a large absorption of good churchmen, but by their noble labors among the encompassing masses on the outskirts of religious life, so the missionaries in India have chiefly made their converts, not from the well-instructed Muhammadans and Hindus, but among the more backward races, and from the lower castes, who are destitute of a high faith of their own. There have been many conspicuous exceptions to this rule. But the rule has been so general, and the possibility of common progress is so evident, that a violently aggressive attitude towards the native religions is felt to be unsuitable in India, very much as the old odium theologicum between the Established Church and Dissent is felt to be an anachronism in England. In both countries it is the poor that have had the gospel preached to them. In both countries the leaders of Christian thought have read again the opening words of the first missionary sermon, and recognized that in every nation he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted with Him. In India, especially, a religion must be judged, not by its alarms and incursions into other encampments, but by the practical work which it does for its own people. For in India religious organization plays a part in the social structure which it has long ceased to discharge among the more consolidated nationalities of Europe. The religious bond has to do in India for a dense population — subject to the overwhelming calamities of the tropics, and destitute of any poor law - what a highly developed system of state relief does for England. It has also to take the place of the innumerable charitable organizations which in England supplement and humanize state relief. The religious bond in India has to exercise the constraining moral influences on a multitude of self-contained communities which the cumulative force of public opinion exerts in more homogeneous nations. The religious force in India had, until our own days, to supply the motive power of education; nor are signs wanting that it will again assert itself actively in the spread of Indian schools. The religious bond in India forms an important factor in mercantile credit, and tends to concentrate trade within certain communities of joint believers. To sum up, religious organization in India does the work of public opinion and of poor law; it forms the basis of private benevolence and of mercantile credit; it supplied until lately the motive power of public instruction. In such a country, I repeat, a religion must stand or fall by what it does for the well-being of its own people. I propose to apply this principle to three

great religions of modern India - Muhammadanism, Hinduism, and Christianity. British rule has created a new world in India, with new problems of existence, which each community must solve for itself. What power do the various religions disclose of adapting themselves to this new world; what solutions do they offer for its new problems? I am well aware that any theological discussion, or even any expression of my own belief, would be out of place within these walls. But while, in addressing this society, I confine myself to the social results of Christianity in India, I by no means wish to urge my present point of view to the exclusion of its more spiritual aspects. There is a dense and dark mass of fifty millions of human beings in India, lying on the outskirts or beyond the pale of orthodox Hinduism and Islam. I believe that within fifty years these fifty millions will be absorbed into one or other of the higher faiths, and that it rests in no small measure with Christian England whether they are chiefly incorporated into the native religions or into Christianity. But a cordial recognition of the wide field for evangelical labors does not exempt Christianity in India from being judged by its present results. Nor need the friends of missionary enterprise shrink from the test; for while the number of native Protestant Christians has increased by fivefold during the thirty years preceding the last census, the number of their communicants has multiplied by nearly tenfold. The progress has been a progress of conversion, concurrent with a progress of internal growth and of internal discipline. It is the result, not alone of the zeal which compasseth the earth to make a proselyte, but also of the pastoral devotion which visits the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and labors to keep its flock unspotted from the world. In considering the practical aspects of the three religions, it is convenient to begin with the Muhammadans. Islam represents in British India a compact and coherent mass of forty-five millions, who, in spite of internal divisions, are more closely united than any equally large section of the people by a common religious bond. For this vast aggregate a rate of progress has been claimed in a recent discussion in “The Times," which, if well founded, would have an important political and social significance. We may miss the fine courtesy of St. Paul in the controversy of the canons; but their appeal to statistics was substantially a just appeal. Any general inferences, however, deduced for the whole of India from the last census are fallacious, for the great Muhammadan provinces lay outside the influence of the famine of 1877. That calamity fell with its full force on the essentially Hindu Presidency of Madras, and on the Hindu districts of Bombay. The British Provinces of the Indian continent beyond the famine area of 1877 were seven in number; the Lieutenant Governorship of Bengal, which contains nearly one half of the whole Muhammadans of British India, Assam, the Northwestern Provinces, Sind, the Central Provinces, the Punjab, and Oudh. In the first five of these a census was taken in 1872, and another census in 1881, and we can compare the results of those enumerations. In the last two-viz., the Punjab and Oudh -no census was taken in 1872, and the census officers of 1881 declared that in these two provinces data

did not exist for testing the progress of the religious divisions of the people. Taking the same area of enumeration, and avoiding the pitfalls into which persons unfamiliar with the Indian census are apt to stumble, the facts in the five Indian provinces outside the famine of 1877, and for which we possess comparative data, are as follows:

PROPORTIONATE PROGRESS OF MUHAMMADANS TO GENERAL POPULATION, FROM 1872 TO 1881.

The slight differences (where they exist) may be accounted for by local circumstances. Thus, in the Northwestern Provinces, the Musalmans live more in the cities than the Hindus, and they are less influenced by the intense pressure of the population on the soil, which keeps down the increase among the rural inhabitants. In Bengal the Muhammadans chiefly occupy the eastern districts, in which there is still plenty of spare land, and consequently a high normal increase of the population. The census officer for Bengal states that no conversions to Islam on a considerable scale can have taken place since 1872. The census officer for the Northwestern Provinces reports in the same sense, but in greater detail. "I have consulted experienced and observant district officers throughout the province," he writes, "and they all agree that there is no active propaganda of Islam to be met." There are, however, many motives apart from conscientious religious conviction, which induce Hindus to embrace the faith of Islam. Mr. T. Stoker, C. S., in a note furnished to me on the subject, writes: "In this part of India there has been no such thing as a religious conversion from the Hindu to the Musalman faith. Even a solitary case might be sought for in vain of such a change of religious belief from conscientious conviction. But a certain, though a small, amount of conversions is going steadily on. It proceeds from social and economical reasons, and is confined to the lower orders, and, I should judge, occurs oftener among females than males. Hindus who have, for one reason or another, lost caste; women who have fallen into an immoral life; men who have abandoned their family faith for the sake of a woman of the other creed; these, and such as these, release themselves from the restraints and inconveniences of caste rules by adopting Islam. In such conversions religious feeling has no place. Years of famine are fruitful in such changes. Children, or women, whose parents or relapersons of all ages and both sexes, who were

tives died or deserted them