All this India indubitably owes to England. Nor is there any point on which the intellectual methods of the West have been brought more strongly to bear in Asia than on its creeds. The ancient monotony of religious practice divorced from religious intelligence, is slowly giving place to intrusive questionings which will not be appeased by mere formulae, and men of all faiths are discussing and reasoning where a hundred years ago they only asserted. We have witnessed within the last generation something of this everywhere in Western Asia, but in India it is perhaps still more marked; and it seems certain that, whatever evil may have been there wrought to other interests, the interests of its religions will have been served by our rule, unconsciously, perhaps, and unwillingly, but none the less really. Paradoxical as it may sound, the wholly secular rule of aliens, whose boast it is that they have established no State creed, will be found to have renewed the life of faiths and given them a stronger, because a more intelligent, mode of being. The spiritual believer will be strengthened; and the very pagan will be no longer “suckled in a creed outworn,” but in living beliefs which will seek to exercise a moral influence on his conduct more and more for good. To speak precisely, what I see will be the outcome of such education as England is giving to the Indian races is a reformation of each of their several religious faiths, leading to purer thought in their followers, and above all to purer practice.
The creeds of India, speaking generally, are four: the Hindu, which under various forms embraces four-fifths of the whole population; the Mohammedan, which is principally powerful in the North of India and Bengal, and which includes a census of fifty millions; the Christian (Roman Catholic), found mainly in the extreme South; and the Parsi.
Of these, Hinduism alone would seem to be a truly indigenous faith, or one wholly in harmony with the instincts of the rural population; and it is impossible for a traveller not to be struck with the tenacity of the ancient superstitions which are its groundwork. Hinduism belongs to an older order of religions than any now practised in the West. It is not a religion at all in our modern sense of being a strict code of morals based upon any revealed or written law; but, like the popular beliefs of ancient Greece and Rome, is rather a mythology resting on traditional reverence for certain objects in certain places. It is essentially national and local. It does not seek to embrace humanity, but is a privilege of the Indian races only; and it cannot be practised in its purity elsewhere than in India. India, according to Brahminical teaching, is a sacred land, and there alone can be the shrines of its gods. There alone man can lead a perfect life, or worship with spiritual profit. Certain localities are specially holy--not, as with the Christians or the Mohammedans, on account of the tombs of holy men, but in themselves as being the chosen homes of the divine powers. All rivers in India thus are sacred, precisely as were groves in ancient Italy, and on their banks the temples of the gods are built and spiritual influences felt.