sense of brotherhood with all mankind and the possibility of relief from the burden of sin through knowing God as he really is were far from familiar ideas. The natural outgrowth, due to the joint labors of these New Englanders and of other followers of the same faith and program, is so colossal in extent, so varied in character, so far-reaching in effect that it would require volumes to set it forth in detail. An array of hospitals and dispensaries, a chain of colleges and schools-industrial, normal and hightoward the support of which the government gives liberal annual grants; printing plants sending forth tons of literature in the vernacular; orphanages, industries of many kinds, improvements in methods of agriculture, successful crusades against widow-burning, infanticide, animal sacrifice, hook-swinging, prostitution, poverty and famine; relief extended to great masses of population on the verge of starvation, all bear witness to what the New England pioneers initiated and their successors have brought to pass. The mission hospitals and schools merit the attention of the traveller quite as much as do the temple and palace, with which the guide-books are chiefly concerned. Throughout India the civil authorities and educators, whether Hindu, Mohammedan or Christian, all who have the real good of their country at heart, recognize and rejoice in the evidence of New England thrift, enterprise, high moral standards, unselfishness and consecration. Not less to the credit side of the ledger should be entered the notable gains evidenced not in buildings and outward reforms only, but in the temper and ideals of the people. The disintegration in certain sections of Hinduism, the reform movements that have grown up within that religion, the substitution to some extent of the Christian for the pagan conception of marriage and the Christian method of burial for pagan rites, bear witness to the quiet but potent inward working of the leaven from overseas. Mutitudes of girl babies, who if they had been born one hundred years earlier would have had an unhappy lot, are tenderly cherished today in respectable homes. A native church with competent leaders recruited from its own ranks, constantly increasing in strength, holds the key of the future for India. The rising tide of nationalistic feeling, now finding expression in the motto, "India for Indians," must have been fed especially by those Americans who were continuators of the movement toward democracy which the Pilgrims and Puritans originated. At the same time the old Pilgrim-Puritan idea of liberty under law, of the duties as well as of the rights that belong to free peoples, have operated to keep the nationalistic feeling within safe bounds and to guide its expression through proper channels. India is still the pity and the wonder of the world. But it is a vastly different India,-less self-centered, less impervious to the touch of the world's life,-from what it was when the first New Englanders began their work of enlightenment. It is bound to take its place and a commanding one in the world of affairs. When the day of its full awakening comes, a long line of New Englanders from Adoniram Judson and Gordon Hall down to Theodore Lee and Edward Carter will see of the travail of their souls and be satisfied. |