review of that development as it is seen through successive ages in the loftiest aspirations of a great people; and finally in the lesson taught by the intellectual and religious fate of them among that people that have substituted, like the Brahman ritualist, form for spirit; like the Vedantist, ideas for ideals; like the sectary, emotion for morality.  But greatest, if woeful, is the lesson taught by that phase of Buddhism, which has developed into Lamaism and its kindred cults.  For here one learns how few are they that can endure to be wise, how inaccessible to the masses is the height on which sits the sage, how unpalatable to the vulgar is a religion without credulity.

Ever since Cotton Mather took up a collection to convert the Hindus,[38] Americans have felt a great interest in missionary labor in India.  Under the just and beneficent rule of the British the Hindus to-day are no longer plundered and murdered in the way they once were; nor is there now so striking a contrast between the invader’s precept and example as obtained when India first made the acquaintance of Christian militants.

The slight progress of the missionaries, who for centuries have been working among the Hindus, is, perhaps, justified in view of this painful contrast.  In its earlier stages there can be no doubt that all such progress was thereby impeded.  But it is cause for encouragement, rather than for dismay, that the slowness of Christian advance is in part historically explicable, sad as is the explanation.  For against what odds had not the early missionaries to struggle!  Not the heathen, but the Christian, barred the way against Christianity.  Four hundred years ago the Portuguese descended upon the Hindus, cross and sword in hand.  For a whole century these victorious immigrants, with unheard-of cruelty and tyranny, cheated, stripped, and slaughtered the natives.  After them came the Dutch, but, Dutch or Portuguese, it was the same.  For it was merely another century, during which a new band of Christians hesitated at no crime or outrage, at no meanness or barbarity, which should win them power in India.  In 1758 the Dutch were conquered by the English, who, becoming now the chief standard-bearers of the Christian church, committed, Under Varisittart, more offences against decency, honor, honesty, and humanity than is pleasant for believer or unbeliever to record; and, when their own theft had brought revolt, knew no better way to impress the Hindu with the power of Christianity than to revive the Mogul horror and slay. (in their victims’ fearful belief) both soul and body alike by shooting their captives from the cannon’s mouth.  Such was Christian example.  It is no wonder that the Christian precept (’thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’) was uttered in vain, or that the faith it epitomized was rejected.  The hand stole and killed; the mouth said, ‘I love you.’  The Hindu understood theft and murder, but it took him some time to learn English.  One may hope that this is now forgotten, for the Hindu has not the historical mind.  But all this must be remembered when the expenditures of Christianity are weighed with its receipts.[39]