arlier missionaries who have
thus established links between Hindus and Christians, and have thus at
least brought Christ into the Hindu's presence. To Indian Christians
also such reasoning has often been a strength, furnishing as it were a
new justification of their baptism into Christianity; for looking back
they can perceive the finger of Hinduism itself pointing the way. But
had no other influence been exerted on the Indian mind, one could not
say what I now say, that Christ Himself is the feature of Christianity
that has most powerfully moved men in India. The person of Christ
Himself has been the great Christian dynamic. I am now speaking of
educated India, the India that is not dependent solely upon the preacher
for its religious ideas and feeling.

[Sidenote: Christianity identified with Britain and therefore
unpopular.]

[Sidenote: The anti-foreigner instinct.]

The grand new political idea in India is the idea of nationality, and
one of its corollaries is the championing of things Indian and
depreciation of things British. The strong anti-British bias among the
educated is one of the noteworthy and regrettable changes in the Indian
mind within the last half-century. It is not surprising then that all
over India the influence of Christ and of Christianity is lessened from
the identification of Christianity with the British. For a native of
India to accept the British religion is to run counter to the prevailing
anti-British and pro-Indian feeling; it is unpatriotic to become a
convert to Christianity. "Need we go out of India in quest of the true
knowledge of God?" wrote a distinguished Indian litterateur a few years
ago.[94] All that feeling is of course in addition to the instinctive
hostility to things foreign that has been nowhere stronger than in
self-contained India--self-contained between the Himalayas and the seas.
The exclusiveness of caste is based upon that feeling. The statement of
the late Rev. M.N. Bose, B.A., B.L., a native of Eastern Bengal,
regarding his youth [1860?] is: "I had a deep-rooted prejudice against
Christianity from my boyhood.... At this time I hated Christianity and
Christians, though I knew not why I did so."[95] We find the instinctive
hostility more bluntly expressed in China in the cry that drops
spontaneously from the opening lips of many Chinamen, as their greeting,
when they unexpectedly behold a European. The involuntary ejaculation
is: "Strike the foreign devil."

[Si