Page:Future of England - Peel.djvu/220

208 nor any hope of it in the immediate future; on the contrary, the educated classes seem to me further off from the definite acceptance of the Christian faith to-day than they were when I first came out to India twenty-five years ago."

In these circumstances the Bishop would turn, if the analogy may be permitted, from Judæa to Galilee, from Capernaum to the villages. He would wish, in plain terms, Christian endeavour to concentrate itself on the outcasts, the pariahs, the depressed classes, among whom so much good work has been done already, in Southern India especially. In this aspect of affairs he claims that "the work in India, so far from being a failure, has been going forward for the last thirty years by leaps and bounds, and we have the definite prospect before us of creating and building up a powerful Church of some ten million Christians within the next fifty years."

I drew rein. It would have been no bad task to have analysed further the reasons of this history and of these hopes. But it was beyond my sphere and purpose. Besides, time pressed, and the night felt its way over London.

Enough to conclude that, at no date within the range of present consideration will Christianity win India as a whole.

But if this be so; if Islam and Hinduism are still to divide that world; if all alike are to be immovably at one in the desire to settle old scores and see who is master; if unredeemed arrears of