[Sidenote:  Meaning of the term religious.]

In speaking of the development of religious ideas in India, I use the term religious in the modern sense.  Under religion, in India is comprehended much that in Europe would be reckoned within the social sphere.  In India all questions of inter-marriage and of eating together, many questions regarding occupations and the relations of earning members of a family to idle members, are religious not social questions.

The case was similar among the Jews, we may remember.  As recorded in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, two of the three injunctions of the Jerusalem Church to the Gentile Church at Antioch deal with these same socio-religious matters.  Blood and animals killed by strangling were to be prohibited as food, and certain marriages also were forbidden.

Perhaps among Europeans the question of burial v. cremation may be instanced as a matter of social custom that has been made a religious question.  But in no country more than in India have customs, mores, come also to mean morals.  A halo of religious sanctity encircles the things that have been and are.  Taking “religion,” however, in the modern sense, we ask:  Although there has not been any great Reformation of religion, have religious ideas undergone no noteworthy development?  It is well to put the question definitely with regard to religion, although in the opening chapter abundant testimony to a general change in ideas has already been cited.  There is no lack of specific evidence as to religious changes, and the adoption of certain Christian ideas.

Sir Alfred Lyall’s observations let us first of all recall, for he possesses all the experience of an Indian Civil Servant and Governor of a Province—­the United Provinces.  He speaks both for officials and for Europeans conversant with India.[47] Speaking in the person of an orthodox brahman surveying the moral and material changes that English rule is producing in India, he says:  “We are parting rapidly under ... this Public Instruction with our religious beliefs.”  The old brahman warns the British Government that the old deities are being dethroned, and that the responsibility for famines, formerly imputed to the gods, is being cast upon the British Government.  Another official witness speaks still more plainly. The Bengal Government Report upon the publications of the year 1899 asserts:  “All this revolution in the religious belief of the educated Hindu has been brought about as much by the dissemination of Christian thought by missionaries as by the study of Hindu scriptures; for Christian influence is detectable in many of the Hindu publications of the year.”  The writer of the Report is a Hindu gentleman.  The Report of the Census of India, 1901, declares that “the influence of Christian teaching is ... far reaching, and that there are many whose acts and opinions have been greatly modified thereby.”