CHAPTER XV - THE COLLEGE AND ITS SPIRITUAL FRUIT

Summary

When Dr. Duff landed at Calcutta to begin the second period of his work in India, even he was astonished at the outward signs of progress which ten years of English education under really enlightened British administration had brought about. No one could doubt that, in the great cities and intellectual centres at least, as in Italy of the first three centuries, and again of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Renaissance was a fact. Even on his way from the ship to his own college-building and principal's or senior missionary's residence, which he had yet to see, he passed through a succession of such outward evidences, which he reported in his own graphic style to Dr. Brunton.

The first object that had caught his eye on landing was a signboard on which were marked in large characters the words, “Ram Lochun Sen & Co., Surgeons and Druggists.” Not six years had passed since the pseudo-orientalists had declared that no Hindoo would be found to study even the rudiments of the healing art through anatomy. But here, scattered over the native town, were the shops of the earlier sets of duly educated practitioners and apothecaries who had begun to find in medicine a fortune long before the chicane of law attracted them to our courts.