After these statements from secular and official writers, we may refrain from quoting from Mission authorities more than the statement of the Decennial Conference of representative missionaries from all India in 1902.  The statement refers to South India.  “Christianity,” we are told, “is in the air.  The higher classes are assimilating its ideas."[48] Thus from East and North and South, from officials and non-officials, from Europeans and natives, comes concurrent testimony.  There is no declared Reformation, but Christian and Western religious ideas are leavening India.

[Sidenote:  Variety of religious ideas in India.]

To the student of Comparative Religion, or of Christianity, or of the general progress of nations, that testimony from India is particularly interesting.  To the student of Comparative Religion, India presents a particularly attractive field.  Not hidden away in sacred classics or in the records of travellers, but as elements of existing religions, professed by men around, are illustrations of most of the types of religious thought and practice.  There are the pantheism of certain Hindu ascetics, the polytheism of the masses, the animism of aboriginal races, and the varieties of theism of Christians, Mahomedans, and the new Hindus respectively.  There are the curious phenomena of goddesses as well as gods, and of distinctive features in the character and worship of the female deities.  There is the whole scale of worship up from bloody sacrifices and self-tortures and from worship where the priest is everything, to worship like that of Mahomedans and of Protestant Christians, where a mediatory priesthood is virtually repudiated.  There is the stage, still farther beyond, at which the worshipper is supposed to be able to say of himself “I am God.”  Of the first and last stages, India may be called the special fields, for probably nowhere else in the world are so many animals killed in sacrifice as at the temple of Kalighat in Calcutta; and the last stage, as an observable religious phenomenon, is peculiar to India.  In India there is presented to us salvation in the attainment of an eternal existence along with God, as among Christians and Mahomedans and many of the less educated Hindus; and there is salvation in deliverance from further lives, as among those Hindus who hold the doctrine of transmigration.  In India all these varieties of religious thought and practice are actual, perceptible phenomena, ready for first-hand observation by the student of Comparative Religion.  But still more interesting to him is that they are there in mutual contact, and telling upon each other.  For in the sphere of human beliefs, the student is much more than an outside observer and classifier.  He has his own conception of truth, and is interested in observing how far in each case there is a convergence towards truth or a divergence from it.  In the sphere of human beliefs he holds further, that, given opportunity, the nearer to truth the greater certainty of survival.  Given opportunity, as already postulated, the law of beliefs is the survival of the truest.  Truth will prevail.