Again, the educated Hindu finds himself employing about the dead and the hereafter not the language of transmigration, but words that convey the idea of a continuation of our present consciousness in the presence of a personal God.  For life is becoming worth living, and the thought of life continuing and progressing is acceptable.  This present life also has become a reality; a devotee renouncing the world may deny its reality; but how in this practical modern world can a man retain the doctrine of Maya or Delusion.  It has dropped from the speech and apparently out of the mind of the educated classes.

[Sidenote:  The ideas of Sin and Salvation by faith in Jesus Christ not yet dynamical.]

I have suggested that those features of Christianity that are proving to be dynamical in India will be found to be those same that are proving to be dynamical in Britain.  The converse also probably holds true, as our religious teachers might do well to note.  The doctrines of Sin and Salvation through faith in Jesus Christ do not yet seem to have commended themselves in any measure in India.  Positive repudiation of a Christian doctrine is rare, but the flourishing new sect of the North-West, the [=A]ryas, make a point of repudiating the Christian doctrine of salvation by faith, although not explicitly denying it in their creed.  Over against it they set up the Justice of God and the certainty of goodness and wickedness receiving each its meed.  One can imagine that salvation by faith in Jesus Christ, the outstanding feature of Christianity, may have been unworthily presented to the [=A]rya leaders, so that it appeared to them merely as some cheap or gratis kind of “indulgences.”  The biographer of the Parsee philanthropist, Malabari, a forceful and otherwise well-informed writer, sets forth that idea of salvation by faith, or an idea closely akin.  He is explaining why his religious-minded hero did not accept the religion of his missionary teachers.  “The proud Asiatic,” he says, “strives to purchase salvation with work, and never stoops to accept it as alms, as it necessarily would be if faith were to be his only merit.”  The unworthy presentation of “salvation by faith” may have occurred either in feeble Christian preaching or in anti-Christian pamphlets.  Neither is unknown in India; and anti-Christian pamphlets have been known to be circulated through [=A]rya agencies.

[Sidenote:  The ideas of sin incompatible with pantheism.]

To appreciate the attitude of the Hindu mind to the doctrines of Sin and Salvation, we must return again to the rough division of Hindus into—­first, the mass of the people, polytheists; secondly, the educated classes, now largely monotheists; thirdly, the brahmanically educated and the ascetics, pantheists.  It is only with the monotheists that we have now to deal.  As already said—­to the pantheist the word sin has no meaning.  Where all is God, sin or alienation from God is a contradiction in terms.