Hinduism and Christianity in India

Extract

It is a remarkable fact that the Church has been established in India for over fifteen hundred years and has had for the most part everything in its favour, and yet in all this time hardly one in a hundred of the people has been converted to the Christian faith. The position is, indeed, worse even than this figure would suggest, as the vast majority of Christians are concentrated in a few very small areas and in the greater part of India the mass of the people remains today untouched except in a very general way by the Christian faith. It is necessary to go even farther than this and to say that for the immense majority of the Indian people Christianity still appears as a foreign religion imported from the West and the soul of India remains obstinately attached to its ancient religion. It is not simply a matter of ignorance. This may have been true in the past, but in recent times there has been a remarkable revival of Hinduism, which is more or less consciously opposed to Christianity, and the educated Hindu today regards his religion as definitely superior to Christianity. These facts, which can scarcely be questioned, suggest that there has been something wrong with the way in which the Gospel has been presented in India (and the same remark would apply to all the Far East) and especially in the relation which has been established between Christianity and Hinduism.