SIR ANDREW WINGATE, K.C.I.E., ON INDIA. 



67 



We know that the Indian Church is realizing its calling and 

 that there are important movements towards Christianity. 

 The influence of this body will become increasingly energetic, 

 specially if the education of the children of Indian Christians, 

 to enable them to occupy leading positions, is recognized by the 

 Missionary Societies as the primary consideration. 



Discussion. 



Mr. E. J. Sewell said : — The paper to which we have all listened 

 with so much interest suggests a great number of questions which 

 come crowding upon us and calling for answers. In the course of 

 his masterly sketch of the long panorama of Indian history which 

 enables us to understand the present state of affairs in India by show- 

 ing as how it came into existence, the writer of the paper gives us 

 outlines and hints of his answer to one of these questions. It is the 

 question which perhaps most interests this audience, i.e., whether 

 we can (apart from faith) reasonably expect India to become 

 Christian. The chief obstacles to this are — on the philosophic 

 side of religion, a pantheism which efEectively divorces belief from 

 conduct ; and on the practical side — idolatry. 



The writer of the paper tells us on pp. 63 and 64 of a remarkable 

 revolution in moral character and even in spiritual conceptions, 

 and of the influence of the Great War in bringing to the surface a 

 fuller recognition that there is one God and Father of us all. That 

 belief sounds the knell of pantheism. 



As regards idolatry, we may, I think, trust for its eradication 

 to the spread of education and to that instrument of unbounded 

 power, the printing press. If men would only awake to its enormous 

 potentialities and use it for Christ as it should be used, we should, 

 I am persuaded, see a revolution in the moral and spiritual world 

 of India greater than anything that has ever been known there 

 hitherto. 



We come then to the second pair of obstacles to the adoption 

 by India of Christianity, viz., the doctrine of Karma and the 

 institution of caste. The doctrine of Karma, it has been pointed 

 out, gives a rational vsanction to the caste system. That one man 

 should be born a Brahman and another a pariah is quite reasonable 



