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New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments by John Morrison
page 83 of 233 (35%)
soul to soul was a tremulously intense realisation of the family of God
and the love of God for men, represented in Christ's voluntary death
upon the cross, love for the neglected and the enslaved in their sins
and their sorrows. And again in our own day, when we are tempted to say
that the consciousness of God and the eternal, the primary religious
instincts, are fading, what by common consent is really dynamical among
educated men? Assuredly not the shibboleths of High or Low Church. It is
the person of Jesus Christ that is dynamical; what He was on earth, what
He has been ever since in the hearts of individuals and in the Church.
In a real sense we are starting again from and with Himself.
Anticipating, let us say that these two elements most recently dynamical
in Britain have had force likewise in India.

[Sidenote: India a new touch-stone of Christianity.]

India in the nineteenth century has been indeed a new touchstone to the
Christian religion; and, in brief, to make plain how far Christianity
has proved its force and its fitness to survive will occupy the
remaining chapters of this book. What has been the nature and extent of
the impact of Christian and modern thought upon India, and particularly
upon Hinduism? Of course I am thinking particularly of the educated
native Hindu community that has sprung up during the century just
closed. The dynamic of Christianity, which it is our task to test,
implies a measure of conscious and intelligent approval. Japan is
another such testing ground. Indeed the only large fields where
Christianity is presented to bodies of non-Christian men able to yield
approval or refuse it on intelligent grounds, of which they are
conscious, are India and Japan. In China also there are no doubt large
bodies of literati, but as a class they have not yet come into the
modern world and into contact with Christianity. Even down to the Boxer
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