Settlements under private management. Hitherto only Christian bodies have been willing and able to undertake the task, and until quite recently the Salvation Army alone has had Settlements; but long-established Missions, with their communities, Churches, Industrial Schools and Industries, and their knowledge of the local conditions, are in many respects in a position of great advantage for dealing with the problem, though at present they have not the experience of the Salvation Army. It may also be noted that the Panjab Government recently invited several of the leading Hindu and Muḥammadan societies to take a share in the work. The problem is so large that there would appear to be ample scope for all suitable voluntary agencies to aid in its solution.

CHAPTER VII

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MOVEMENTS

I. The most prominent characteristic of the long series of religious movements we have dealt with is the steady advance of the ancient faiths. The earlier organizations were very radical indeed in the treatment they proposed for the troubles of the time, and adopted great masses of Christian thought and practice. But as the years passed, men found courage to defend an ever larger amount of the old theology, until a number undertook to prove every scrap of the ancient structure good. Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism and Zoroastrianism each leaped up into new vigorous activity, every prominent sect experiencing a mysterious awakening. Finally, under the impulse of national feeling, the tables were completely turned: not only the religions but everything Oriental was glorified as spiritual and ennobling, while everything Western received condemnation as hideously materialistic and degrading. An immense quantity of literature pours from the press, and considerable sums of money are subscribed for defence purposes, above all for sectarian education.

Hence the Hindu, the Jain, the Buddhist, the Parsee and the Muslim are to-day filled with overflowing confidence each in his own religion; a confidence which tends to be hostile to spiritual life as well as to a reasonable estimate of the old faiths. Many a man has a pride in his tone, and shews an arrogance towards outsiders, which are scarcely characteristic of health, whether religious

or intellectual. The Modern Review, perhaps the best and most representative of the monthlies at present, frequently contains a good deal of bombast; and the youthful graduates who speak and write on Hinduism have usually far too much of Vivekānanda's swagger about them. Hundreds of men of the student class, under Dayānanda's influence, believe that the ancient Hindus were as far advanced in the natural sciences1 as modern Europeans are, and that they had invented not only firearms and locomotives but telegraphs and aeroplanes as well.

Yet the arrival of the new spirit was necessary for the health of the country. The long decades during which not only the European but the cultured Hindu looked down upon the religion, philosophy and art of India effectually opened the door to the influence of the West, without which the Awakening would have been impossible; but they as effectually depressed the Indian spirit to a point at which the doing of the best work was impossible. Hence the return of self-respect was sorely needed; and that has come since the twentieth century opened.

II. But there is another aspect of the situation which requires to be clearly realized. The triumphant revival of the old religions, with their growing body-guard of defence organizations, has been accompanied by continuous and steadily increasing inner decay. This most significant of all facts in the history of these movements seems to be scarcely perceived by the leaders. They believe that the danger is past. This blindness arises largely from the fact that they draw their apologetic and their inspiration almost entirely from Rāmakṛishṇa, Vivekananda, Sister Nivedită, Dayananda and Mrs. Besant; and it is clear that neither capable thinking nor clear-eyed perception can be bred on such teaching as theirs.

1 P. 116, above.

We shall here attempt only a very brief statement of the evidence for this inner decay in the case of Hinduism. While the apologists have been busy building their defences these last forty years, Western influence has been steadily moulding the educated Hindu mind and rendering it altogether incapable of holding the ideas which form the foundation of the religion. Hence we have many defences of idolatry but no faith in it. In spite of all that has been said in favour of the Hindu family, no educated Hindu has found any religious basis for pre-puberty marriage, for widow-celibacy, for polygamy, for the zenana. The modern man simply cannot believe that his dead father's spirit comes and eats the rice-cake offered at the ŝrāddha, far less that his place in heaven is dependent on it. Much (has been said to make caste seem a most reasonable form

of social organization; yet thinking Hindus no longer hold that which is the foundation of the system, the doctrine that each man's caste is an infallible index of the stage of spiritual progress his soul has reached in its transmigrational journey. The Depressed Classes Mission is clear proof that Hindus no longer believe that the Outcaste is a soul whose past record is so foul that physical contact with him is spiritually dangerous to the caste Hindu. What student believes that that is true of the European Principal and Professors of his college? Yet, if these things are incredible, caste has no religious basis left. Then the Vedic Schools are dying. Asceticism is clearly dying. The great Sankaracharya founded four monasteries, at Sringeri in Mysore, at Dvārikā in Kathiawar, at Badrinārāyaṇa in the Himalayas, and at Puri. In February last, at Rajkot, Kathiawar, I had a personal interview with the Sankara who is the head of the Dvārikā monastery. Instead of a fine company of intelligent men studying the Vedānta, he has only some half a dozen boys of six or seven

years of age as his disciples. They came marching into the verandah where we were seated, each little fellow dressed in a rough brown blanket and carrying the wand of a brahmachārī, and saluted the achārya. He also informed me that the Badrinārāyaṇa monastery is now extinct.1

III. The causes which have combined to create the movements are many. The stimulating forces are almost exclusively Western, viz. the British Government, English education and literature, Christianity, Oriental research, European science and philosophy, and the material elements of Western civilization; but the beliefs and the organization of the ancient faiths have been moulding forces of great potency. The Arya Samaj is an interesting example of the interaction of rationalism and modern inventions with belief in transmigration and the inerrancy of the Vedic hymns. The Deva Samaj shews us Western evolutionary science in unstable combination with Hindu guru-worship. Theosophy is a new Gnosticism which owes its knowledge to Western Orientalists but takes its principles from Buddhism and its fireworks from occultism.

IV. While the shaping forces at work in the movements have been many, it is quite clear that Christianity has ruled the development throughout. Christianity has been, as it were, a great searchlight flung across the expanse of the religions; and in its blaze all the coarse, unclean and superstitious elements of the old faiths stood out, quite early, in painful vividness. India shuddered; and the earlier movements were the response to the revelation. But the same light which exposed all the grossness gradually enabled men to distinguish the nobler and more spiritual elements of the religions. Consequently the Hindu, the

1 A great deal of evidence on the subject of the decay of Hinduism is gathered in the author's Crown of Hinduism, pp. 34, 42, 113-15, 148–51, 177– 87, 191, 273-6, 334-9, 342, 421-4, 446-7.