upon the mental make-up and peculiar
spiritual aspect of the Indian Christian. And until he is able to
furnish and to enforce this, which I call the Oriental type of
Christianity, he will never be able to make his faith appeal to his
brothers, and to make it an indigenous faith in India.

Nor do I think that the Christianity which is to prevail in India will
be encased in the present ecclesiasticism which assumes and claims
monopoly of our faith. I can conceive the possibility of there being a
vast amount of Christianity--a living and a self-propagating
Christianity--outside the pale of organized and institutional
Christianity in India. It is so in the West to-day. The organized
churches of the West have within themselves an ever diminishing
portion of the vital Christian life and aspirations of the country.
Christianity has overleapt ecclesiastic bounds. Its spirit is
overflowing, in living streams, into the life of a thousand
organizations which are altruistic and philanthropic, outside the
limits of ecclesiastical Christianity. It will be so in India, and
throughout the world. And the Christian Church must take this into
account and shape its policy accordingly.

However this may be, East Indians will increasingly claim, as the
Japanese are now claiming, the right to decide for themselves the
forms of polity and the types of ritual which they will choose and
cultivate as their own.

I do not say, of course, that the present forms will be entirely
discarded. But they will be so modified and supplemented that they
will present an ecclesiastical type of their own.

And why should they not, if our faith is to fit well the Oriental
mind, and is to become a gracious power in its life? The growing
opposition among the educated men of India, at the present time, is
not really antagonism to Christianity itself, but to its western garb
and spirit. And there is much reason for this attitude of mind.
Conciliation and adaptation has not been the characteristic of the
mind of the West in presenting its faith to the East. This did not
make so much difference, so long as the Indian was submissive and had
not waked up to the spirit of self-assertion. But to-day, when that
spirit is so rampant, and when a new nationalism and a half-spurious
patriotism glories in everything eastern and is annoyed by all that
is western, the matter of adaptation has become all-important.

The relative barrenness of our faith during past centuries