be open, on specified conditions, for religious instruction in the creed in which the parents desire their children to be brought up.  There is no call for compulsion.  This is just one of the questions in which the greatest latitude should be left to local Governments, who are more closely in touch than the Central Government with the sentiment and wishes of the different communities.  I am assured that there would be little difficulty in forming local committees to settle whether there was a sufficiently strong feeling amongst parents in favour of a course of religious instruction and to determine the lines upon which it should be given.  Some supervision would have to be exercised by the State, but in the Educational Service there are, it is to be hoped, enough capable and enlightened representatives of the different creeds to exercise the necessary amount of supervision in a spirit both of sympathy for the spiritual needs of their people and of loyalty to the Government they serve.  It may be objected that there are so many jarring sects, so many divisions of caste, that it would be impossible ever to secure an agreement as to the form to be imparted to religious instruction.  Let us recognize but not overrate the difficulty.  In each of the principal religions of India a substantial basis can be found to serve as a common denominator between different groups, as, for instance, in the Koran for all Mahomedans and in the Shastras for the great majority of high-caste Hindus.  At any rate, if the effort is made and fails through no fault of ours, but through the inability of Indian parents to reconcile their religious differences, the responsibility to them will no longer lie with us.

Another objection will probably be raised by earnest Christians who would hold themselves bound in conscience to protest against any facilities being given by a Christian State for instruction in religious beliefs which they reprobate.  Some of these austere religionists may even go so far as to contend that, rather than tolerate the teaching of “false doctrines,” it is better to deprive Indian children of all religious teaching.  To censure of this sort, however, the State already lays itself open in India.  There are educational institutions—­and some of the best, like the Mahomedan College at Aligurh—­maintained by denominational communities on purpose to secure religious education.  Yet the State withdraws from them neither recognition nor assistance because pupils are taught to be good Mahomedans or good Hindus.  Why should it be wrong to make religious instruction permissive in other Indian schools which are not wholly or mainly supported by private endeavour?  Is not the “harmonious combination of secular and religious instruction” for which the Maharajah of Jaipur pleads better calculated than our present policy of laisser faire to refine and purify Indian religious conceptions, and to bring about that approximation of Eastern to Western ideals, towards which the best Indian minds were tending before the present revolt against Western ascendency?