In speaking of the development of religious ideas in India, I use the
term _religious_ in the modern sense. Under religion, in India is
comprehended much that in Europe would be reckoned within the _social_
sphere. In India all questions of inter-marriage and of eating together,
many questions regarding occupations and the relations of earning
members of a family to idle members, are religious not social questions.

The case was similar among the Jews, we may remember. As recorded in the
fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, two of the three
injunctions of the Jerusalem Church to the Gentile Church at Antioch
deal with these same socio-religious matters. Blood and animals killed
by strangling were to be prohibited as food, and certain marriages also
were forbidden.

Perhaps among Europeans the question of burial _v_. cremation may be
instanced as a matter of social custom that has been made a religious
question. But in no country more than in India have customs, _mores_,
come also to mean morals. A halo of religious sanctity encircles the
things that have been and are. Taking "religion," however, in the modern
sense, we ask: Although there has not been any great Reformation of
religion, have religious ideas undergone no noteworthy development? It
is well to put the question definitely with regard to religion, although
in the opening chapter abundant testimony to a general change in ideas
has already been cited. There _is_ no lack of specific evidence as to
religious changes, and the adoption of certain Christian ideas.

Sir Alfred Lyall's observations let us first of all recall, for he
possesses all the experience of an Indian Civil Servant and Governor of
a Province--the United Provinces. He speaks both for officials and for
Europeans conversant with India.[47] Speaking in the person of an