Book Description

Excerpt from Christianity, the World-Religion: Lectures Delivered in India and Japan My second purpose was to lodge in the Hindu mind our conviction that Christianity is essen tially a universal religion, divinely adapted to the spiritual needs of each man, whatever his race, rank or nation. The sensitive Hindu, who for long ages has scarcely looked beyond his own beloved Aryavarta, is not easily: °disposed to favor the claim that anything outside of India is mighty enough to take up and include his own land, with its great religious philosophies and its three thousand years of intellectual history. Christianity, although it had lingered since the fourth century on the West Coast in the Syrian Church, and although it had touched Southern India in the apostolic labors of Xavier, appeared to the Hindu mind chiefly as the religion of his English conquerors. Then he came to regard it as the faith belonging in various forms to the Western world of railroads and iron steamers, the world of fire-arms and materialistic science. He saw clearly some of the unlovely aspects of Christendom, and the name Christian had none of the attractiveness for him which it possesses for Europeans and Americans. Flattered by the praises, sometimes indiscriminate, of Western scholars, who unearthed for him his own sacred literature, he began to think that he possessed something already which rendered Christianity, at least for him, unnecessary. Of late years. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.