the person suffering in this
birth knows nothing of the experiences of a supposed previous birth,
and is, therefore, suffering for a past of which he is ignorant and
for which his conscience cannot hold him responsible.

5. I believe, also, that the Christian conception of sin is gaining
ever widening acceptance in India and will ultimately prevail as
against the Hindu idea.

The doctrine of atonement and the doctrine of sin are intimately
related; where the atonement is ignored or slighted, the conception of
sin is apt to lose its ethical content and to become formal. India,
through Buddha, abandoned, largely, its long-cherished principle of
vicariousness and the multiplicity of its sacrifices. The consequence
has been the gradual emasculation of the principle of atonement, until
the word has become emptied of content and degraded so as to mean only
the eating of a filthy pill because of a certain ceremonial
uncleanness, which all the best people of the land know to be no
uncleanness whatever.

It is natural, under these circumstances, to see the idea of sin also
cease to have reference to moral obliquity and violation of ethical
principles, and to refer only to intellectual blindness and (more
commonly) to ceremonial laxness and ritualistic malfeasance. It is not
surprising, therefore, that under this double departure from the
truth, conscience should have lost its place of importance and of
authority to so large an extent in this land.

But the day of better things has dawned upon India. The ethical
concept and the moral significance of life are beginning to grip India
very thoroughly. And I believe that the day will soon come when sin
will cease to be connected with intellectual delusion and ignorance,
and also with ceremonial irregularity, and will be recognized in its
true moral hideousness as a thing of will, and not of intellect, a
thing of deepest life, and not of puerile ritual.

Thus, with the coming of Christ and the emphasis of western thought
and western civilization upon moral integrity and nobility of
character, there is growing also a vision of sin in its right colour
and perspective. The gradual training of the people in British law and
in the social ethics of the West, and in the true meaning of the
righteousness of the Kingdom of God as promulgated by the Christian
faith, will, erelong, drive out the old pantheistic idea proclaimed by
Vivekananda, when he said that the only sin that man was cap