ives a positive answer to
the question, Is life worth living? That such a faith is strange to
India may be evidenced by the reception accorded to the poet Tagore in
India itself. Mr. Yeats gives us the judgement of a Bengali who said of
Tagore, 'He is the first among our saints who has not refused to live,
but spoken out of Life itself, and that is why we give him our love.'
Now Tagore's genius is thoroughly Indian, but his originality in this
respect is due directly or indirectly to contact with the influence of
the West. It is our belief in action and in the worth of human
achievement which is voiced in his poems and in his philosophy, and the
note is new in India.

Illustrations of this belief in progress and activity are superfluous,
though I may remind you of the prevalence of this temper in the realm of
philosophy as well as of religion at the present time. Perhaps it is
worth recalling that Harnack's great history of dogma ends with this
significant sentence from Zwingli: 'It is not the part of a Christian
man to be for ever talking grandly about dogma, but always to be
attempting big things in fellowship with God.' This represents as well
as anything our Western insistence on the worth of effort. As an
admirable embodiment at once of the faith in humanity and the faith in
progress, the close of Matthew Arnold's poem 'Rugby Chapel' recurs to
the mind. You remember how he conceives the function of great men to lie
in preserving the union of mankind, and how he conceives the life of
mankind as a journey towards a city that hath foundations.

These two characteristics, faith in the oneness of mankind and in the
reality of progress, do add a sense of common aspiration to the
civilization of the West. But of themselves they do not create a very
close unity. Men may believe in human solidarity and in the worth of
effort, and yet be following divergent ideals and divisive enthusiasms.
These beliefs are surrounded by haze and indefiniteness. In themselves
they scarcely constitute a religion that will satisfy, much less one
that can effectively unite us. However fully we share them, they will
not enable us to meet and surmount the present crisis. So far as I can
judge, these vaguer beliefs in humanity and progress are largely the
deposit of Christian faith, and to be rendered effective they need to be
ever reconnected with the central elements in that faith; in particular,
with the Christian judgement on sin and with the