y
missionaries are inclined to think. There is an accumulation of forces
and a multiplication of spiritual powers which are now operating in
behalf of our faith and against the ancestral religion of India, such
as will work wonders in the future religious development of the land.
But this conquest of our faith will not be that which too many of us
are wont to anticipate and to pray for. The religious forms of life
and of thought, which we of the West have inherited and in whose
environment we have grown up, we have come to identify with the
_essence_ of our religion; and it seems all but impossible for us to
think of a Christianity apart from these outward forms. I believe that
there is to be a rude awakening for our children and grandchildren, if
not for ourselves, in this matter.

The western _type_ of Christianity will not survive the conflict in
India. Western modes of thought and forms of belief will be supplanted
by those better suited to the land. Occidental doctrines and aspects
of our faith will give way to those conceived from the Oriental
standpoint. I believe, for instance, that the most mischievous
doctrine of pantheism will surrender its elements of truth (for it has
an important admixture of truth) to the formation of a new conception
of God, which will appeal to and captivate the Indian mind and heart.
Indeed, we are witnessing, this very day, even in the far West, the
influence of India in her monistic overemphasis upon the divine
immanence, working toward a new Christian conception of God. Modern
interchange of thought is thus giving to India, even in America, her
influence in the shaping of modern belief. And if it be thus in
matters of fundamental belief, much more will it be so in matters of
outward expression and in the unessential forms of Christian truth.
Some of us of the West are seeing increasingly the serious incongruity
which exists between our way of thinking and of putting our thought
into living form, and the way of the people about us. And we are not
convinced, as we perhaps once were, that it is the obtuseness, or the
religious perversity, of the Indian mind which is the cause of this.
The sooner the better we realize that between the people of the East
and of the West there is a wide mental gulf which may, indeed, by our
associating together, be narrowed, but never eliminated. And the
outward type of Christianity, after western pressure has been taken
away from this land, will depend