gious teaching, it could only result in
failure. For the Hindu, perhaps more than for any other, religion
governs life from the hour of his birth to that of his death. His birth
and his death are in fact only links in a long chain of existences
inexorably governed by religion. His religion may seem to us to consist
chiefly of ritual and ceremonial observances which sterilize any higher
spiritual life. But even if such an impression is not due mainly to our
own want of understanding, the very fact that every common act of his
daily life is a religious observance, just as the caste into which he is
born has been determined by the degree in which he has fulfilled similar
religious observances in a former cycle of lives, shows how completely
his religion permeates his existence. The whole world in which he lives
and moves and has his being, in so far as it is not a mere illusion of
the senses, is for him an emanation of the omnipresent deity that he
worships in a thousand different shapes, from the grotesque to the
sublime.

Yet in a country where religion is the sovereign influence we have, from
the beginning, absolutely ignored it in education. It is no doubt quite
impossible for the State in a country like India with so many creeds and
sects, whose tenets are often repugnant to all our own conceptions not
only of religion but of morality, to take any direct part in providing
the religious instruction which would be acceptable to Indian parents.
But was it necessary altogether to exclude such instruction from our
schools and colleges? Has not its exclusion tended to create in the
minds of many Indians the belief that our professions of religious
neutrality are a pretence, and that, however rigorously the State may
abstain from all attempts to use education as a medium for Christian
propaganda, it nevertheless uses it to undermine the faith of the rising
generations in their own ancestral creeds? Even if they acquit us of any
deliberate purpose, are they not at any rate entitled to say that such
have been too often the results? Did not the incipient revolt against
all the traditions of Hinduism that followed the introduction of Western
education help to engender the wholesale reaction against Western
influences which, underlies the present unrest?

Few problems illustrate more strikingly the tremendous difficulties that
beset a Government such as ours in India. On the one hand, Indian
religious conceptions are in many way