Whence came the Christian seed of Chet Ram's vision? His master Mahbub Shah was a Mahomedan, and Jesus Christ is reckoned one of the Mahomedan prophets. But it is the Christ of Christianity, not of Mahomedanism, that Chet Ram saw in his vision of the glorious form showing the face of mercy, at once the dispenser of justice, the revealer of mysteries, and the giver of salvation. Whatever the source of the vision, Chet Ram saw and believed and began to hold up Jesus Christ before other men's eyes, and Chet Ram himself thus became the guru or religious teacher of what may be called an indigenous Christian Church. A moderate estimate reckons the Chet Ramis at about five thousand souls, the religious force of the sect being represented by the Chet Rami ascetics, who go about making their gospel known and living on alms. Chet Ram himself died in 1894, and at the headquarters of the sect at Buchhoke, near Lahore, his ashes and the bones of his master Mahbub Shah are kept in two coffins, which the faithful visit, particularly on certain Chet Rami holy-days, on which fairs are held. In keeping with the command of the vision, several copies of the New Testament and one complete Bible were also on view when the writer of the article in East and West visited the sanctuary in 1903. The Census Report for 1901 sums the Chet Ramis up by saying that "the sect professes a worship of Christ," and that is our present point of view. But we cannot leave them without noticing also how Indian they are in their unwillingness to define their thought, and in their readiness to enthrone a holy man and his relics. Undefined thought we see expressed in symbol. There are four doors to the sanctuary at Buchhoke,—the fakiri [Chet Rami ascetics'] door, the Hindu, Christian, and Mahomedan doors—expressing the openness of the Chet Rami sanctuary to all sects. Their theology is a corresponding conglomeration. It includes a Christian trinity of Jesus Son of Mary [the Mahomedan designation of Christ], the Holy Spirit, and God; and a Hindu triad of the world's three potencies, namely, Allah, Parameswar, and Khuda, a jumble of Hindu and Mahomedan names, but representing the Hindu triad of the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer.

In respect of the phenomenon of the homage shown to Christ over against the hostility shown to His Church, the second, third, and fourth centuries in the history of the Church present a striking parallel to the nineteenth century in India. Steadily in these centuries Christianity was progressing in spite of contempt for its adherents, philosophic repudiation of the doctrines of the superstitio prava, and official persecution unknown in British India at least. Then also, as always, Christ stood out far above His followers, lifted up and drawing all men's eyes. Such in India also, in the nineteenth century, has been the course of Christianity; parts of the record of these centuries read like the record of the religious movements in India in these latter days. Describing the Neo-Platonists of these centuries, historians tell us that at the end of the second century A.D. Ammonius of Alexandria, founder of the sect, "undertook to bring all systems of philosophy and religion into harmony, by which all philosophers and men of all religions, Christianity included, might unite and hold fellowship." There are the four doors of the Chet Rami sanctuary. There also we have the Theosophical Society of India, professing in its constitution to be "the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, representing and excluding no religious creed." Ammonius, founder of the Neo-Platonists, was a pantheist like the present leader of the Theosophical Society, Mrs. Besant, and like her too, curiously, had begun as a Christian.[104] We recall that of Indian Theosophy in general, in 1891, the late Sir Monier Williams declared that it seemed little more than another name for the "Vedanta [or Pantheistic] philosophy." Exactly like the earlier theosophists also, Ammonius, the Neo-Platonist, held that the purified soul could perform physical wonders, by the power of Theurgy. In its constitution the Theosophical Society professed "to investigate the hidden mysteries of nature and the psychical powers latent in man." Many can remember how, in the eighties, Madame Blavatsky took advantage of our curiosity regarding such with air-borne letters from Mahatmas in Thibet. Again Ammonius, we read, "turned the whole history of the pagan gods into allegory." There we have the Neo-Krishnaites of to-day. "He acknowledged that Christ was an extraordinary man, the friend of God, and an admirable Theurgus." There we have the stand point of the educated Indians who have come under Christ's spell. For two centuries the successors of Ammonius followed in these lines. "Individual Neo-Platonists," Harnack tells us, "employed Christian sayings as oracles, and testified very highly of Christ. Porphyry of Syria, chief of the Neo-Platonists of the third century, wrote a work "against Christians"; but again, according to Harnack, the work is not directed against Christ, or what Porphyry regarded as the teaching of Christ. It was directed against the Christians of his day and against the sacred books, which according to Porphyry were written by impostors and ignorant people. There we have the double mind of educated India,—homage to Christ, opposition to His Church. There also we have the standpoint of Sahib Mirza Gholam Ahmad of Qadian. Some, we read, being taught by the Neo-Platonists that there was little difference between the ancient religion, rightly explained and restored to its purity, and the religion which Christ really taught, not that corrupted form of it which His disciples professed, concluded it best for them to remain among those who worshipped the gods. There is the present Indian willingness to discover Christian and modern ideas in the Hindu Scriptures, especially in the original Vedas that the new Ārya sect declare to be "the Scripture of true knowledge." The practical outcome of the Neo-Platonic movement was an attempt to revive the old Græco-Roman religion,—Julian the apostate emperor had many with him. There we have the revival of the worship of Krishna in India, and the apologies for idolatry and caste. The most recent stage of the Theosophical Society in India reveals it as virtually a Hindu revival society. Finally, we read, the old philosopher Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana, and others were represented on the stage dressed in imitation of Christ Himself, and the Emperor Alexander Severus [A.D. 222-235] placed the figure of Christ in his lararium alongside of those of Abraham, Orpheus, and Apollonius. There we have the modern Indians who fully recognise Christ alongside of their own avatars. The whole parallel is complete.[105] In spite of the feebleness and, it may be, unworthiness of His Church, through the force of Christ's personality, the Roman history of the second, third, and fourth centuries has been repeating itself in India in the nineteenth and twentieth, and unless the force of Christ's personality be spent, the parallels will proceed.

From new reasonings about God, her new monotheism, New India has been brought a stage farther to actual history. From theologies she has come to the first three Gospels. New India has been introduced to Christ as He actually lived on earth before men's eyes; and to India, intensely interested in religious teachers, the personality of the Christ of the Gospels, of the first three Gospels in particular, appeals strongly. To the pessimistic mood of India He appeals as one whose companionship makes this life more worth living; for Christ was not a jogi in the Indian sense of a renouncer of the world. His call to fraternal service has taken firm hold of the best Indians of to-day. Of the future we know not, but we feel that the narrative of the first three Gospels naturally precedes the deeper insight of the fourth.

CHAPTER XVII

Two commonplaces about India are that pessimism is her natural temperament, and that a natural outcome of her pessimism is the Indian doctrine of the transmigration of souls. The second statement will require explanation; but as regards the former, there is no denying the strain of melancholy, the note of hopelessness, that pervades these words we have quoted, or that they are characteristic of India. In them life seems a burden; to be born into it, a punishment; and of the transmigrations of our souls from life to life, seemingly, we should gladly see the end. All the same, as new India is proving, pessimism is not the inherent temperament of India, and the hope of the end of the transmigration, and of the lives of the soul, no more natural in India than in any other land.

Pessimism is natural in India, say such writers as we have in mind, because of the spirit-subduing aspects of nature and life amid which Indians live their lives. Life is of little value to the possessor, they say, where nature makes it a burden, and where its transitoriness is constantly being thrust upon us. And that is so in India. Great rivers keep repeating their contemptuous motto that "men may come and men may go," and by their floods sometimes devastate whole districts. Sailing up the Brahmaputra at one place in Assam, the writer saw a not uncommon occurrence, the great river actually eating off the soft bank in huge slices, five or six feet in breadth at a time. Something higher up, it might have been the grounding of a floating tree, had turned the current towards the bank, and at five-minute intervals, it seemed, these huge slices were falling in. Not fifty yards back from the bank stood a cottage, whose garden was already part gone; a banana tree standing upon one of these slices fell in and was swept down before our eyes. Within an hour the cottage itself would meet the same fate, and the people were already rushing in and out. Or pass to another aspect of nature. For a season every year the unveiled Indian sun in a sky of polished steel glares with cruel pitiless eye. The light is fierce. Then, arbitrarily, as it seems, the rains may be withheld, and the hard-baked, heat-cracked soil never softens to admit the ploughshare, and hundreds of thousands of the cultivators and field hands are overtaken by famine. At one time during the famine of 1899-1900, it will be remembered that six million people were receiving relief. Or, equally arbitrarily, betokening some unknown displeasure of the gods, plague may take hold of a district and literally take its tithe of the population. At any moment, life is liable to be terminated with appalling suddenness by cholera or the bite of a venomous serpent.

With French imagination and grace, in his Introduction to General History, Michelet describes the tyranny of nature—"Natura maligna"—in India. "Man is utterly overpowered by nature there—like a feeble child upon a mother's breast, alternately spoiled and beaten, and intoxicated rather than nourished by a milk too strong and stimulating for it."[106] One cannot help contrasting the supplicating Indian villagers—of whom a University matriculation candidate told in his essay, how, when the rains were withheld, they carried out the village goddess from her temple and bathed the idol in the temple tank—with the English fisher-woman of whom Tennyson tells us, who shook her fist at the cruel sea that had robbed her of two sons. As she looked at it one day with its lines of white breakers, she shook her fist at it and told it her mind—"How I hates you, with your cruel teeth."

Can this Indian aspect of nature, one wonders, be the true explanation of the fierceness of her goddesses as contrasted with her gods, and the offering of bloody sacrifices to goddesses only? Mother Nature is malignant, not benign.

The value of life and the little worth of life in India may be gauged in another way. In the language of the political economist, the value of human life in any country may be estimated by the average wage, which determines the standard of comfort and how far a man is restricted to the bare necessities of bodily life. Again, judged by that standard, life is probably in no civilised country at a lower estimate than in India, where the labourer spends over 90 per. cent of his income upon the bare necessities for the sustenance of the bodies of his household.

All that is true, and yet the conclusion is only partly true. In spite of all such reasoning, and acknowledging that the physical characteristics of India have largely made her what she is, politically, socially, and even religiously, I venture to think that the pessimism of India is exaggerated. Not a pessimistic temperament, but a mood, a mood of helpless submissiveness, a bowing to the powers that be in nature and in the world, seems to me the truer description of the prevailing "pessimism." At least, if it be the case, as I have tried to show, that during the past century in India, human life has been rising in value, the pessimistic mood must be declining. Let us observe some facts again. In a Government or Mission Hospital, there is a European doctor taking part in the offensive work of the dressing of a coolie's sores,—we assume that the doctor's touch is the touch of a true Christian gentleman. To the despised sufferer, life is gaining a new sweetness, and to the high-caste student looking on and ready to imitate his teacher, life is attaining a new dignity. That human life has been rising in value is patent. The wage of the labourer has been steadily rising—in one or two places the workers are become masters of the situation; the rights of woman are being recognised, if only slowly; the middle classes are eager for education and advancement; the individual has been gaining in independence as the tyranny of caste and custom has declined; the sense of personal security and of citizenship and of nationality has come into being. Whatever the merits of the great agitation in 1905 against the partition of the Province of Bengal, and inconceivable as taking place a century ago, it is manifestly the doing of men keenly interested in the conditions under which they live. It is a contradiction of the theory of an inherent Indian pessimism. Self-respect and a sense of the dignity and duties of manhood are surely increasing, and making our earth a place of hope and making life worth living, instead of a burden to be borne. "The Hindus," says Sir Alfred Lyall, "have been rescued by the English out of a chronic state of anarchy, insecurity, lawlessness, and precarious exposure to the caprice of despots."[107]

Best proof probably that pessimism is declining is the fact that asceticism is declining. The times are no longer those in which the life of a brahman is supposed to culminate in the Sannyasi or ascetic "who has laid down everything," who, in the words of the Bhagabat Gita, "does not hate and does not love anything."[108] The pro-Hindu writer often quoted also acknowledges the new pleasure in life and the religious corollary of it when she says that the recent rise in the standard of comfort in India is opposed to the idea of asceticism. Desire, indeed, is not gone, and the cords of the heart are not breaking. Says the old brahman, in the guise of whom Sir Alfred Lyall speaks: "I own that you [Britons] are doing a great deal to soften and enliven material existence in this melancholy, sunburnt country of ours, and certainly you are so far successful that you are bringing the ascetic idea into discouragement and, with the younger folk, into contempt."[109] Welcome to the new joy of living, all honour to the old ascetics, and may a still nobler self-sacrifice take their place!

To the pessimistic Indian accepting the Indian view of transmigration, it is therefore no gospel to preach the continuation of life, either here or hereafter. "To be born again" sounds like a penance to be endured. Mukti, commonly rendered salvation, is not regeneration Here and eternal life Hereafter; it is deliverance from further lives altogether. If, however, we accept the statement that the value of human life in India is rising, that life is becoming worth living, and that the pessimistic mood is no ingrained fundamental trait, we are prepared to believe that the hopeful Christian conception of the Here and the Hereafter is finding acceptance. Rightly understood, the Christian conception is at bottom the antithesis of pessimism and its corollary, transmigration. To deny the one is almost to assert the other. The decay of the one is the growth of the other. For the Christian conception of the Here and the Hereafter—what is it? Life, eternal, in and through the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. "God gave unto us eternal life, and the life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath the life."[110] Says Harnack in his volume What is Christianity? "The Christian religion means one thing, and one thing only—eternal life in the midst of time by the strength and under the eyes of God." Not that the new idea in India is to be wholly ascribed to Christian influence. A marked change in Christian thought itself during the nineteenth century has been the higher value of this present life. Christianity has become a vitalising gospel for the life Here even more than for the Hereafter. But assuming the truth of what we have sought to show, namely, that within the past century the winning personality of Christ has come to New India, a new incentive to noble life and service, we have at least a further reason for believing that pessimism and transmigration are fading out of Indian minds. The new Advent, as that at Bethlehem, is a turning-point of time; the gloomy winter of pessimism is turning to a hopeful spring.

CHAPTER XVIII

To appreciate the impact of the Christian idea of the Here and Hereafter upon the Hindu idea of Transmigration and Absorption, the two ideas must be more fully examined. Stated briefly, the Christian idea is that after this life on earth comes an Eternity, whose character has been determined by the life on earth. The crisis of death terminates our bodily activities and renders impossible any further action, either virtuous or sinful, and ushers the soul, its ledger closed, its earthy limitations cast off, into some more immediate presence of God. If in communion with God, through its faith in Jesus Christ, the soul is in a state of blessedness; if still alien from God, the soul is in a state of utter misery, for its spiritual perception and its recollection of itself are now clear. That, at all events, seems a fair statement of the belief of many Protestants, so far as their belief is definite at all. But over against transmigration, what are the essential and distinctive features of that Christian belief? Its essentially distinctive feature, both in the case of the blessed and of the miserable, is a continuity of the consciousness in the life that now is with that which is to come. The soul in bliss or misery is able to associate its existing state with its past. Even on earth, as the modern preacher tells us, heaven and hell are already begun. Over against the Hindu idea of transmigration, accordingly, we define the Christian idea of immortality as the continuity of our consciousness, or the immortality of the individual consciousness.

Per contra, the distinguishing feature of the Hindu doctrine of transmigration or rebirth is the interruption of consciousness, the dissolution of memory, at the close of the present existence. In the next existence there is no memory of the present.

The present life is a member of a series of lives; there are said to be 8,400,000 of them, each member of which is as unconscious of the preceding as you are of being I. As a seed develops into plant and flower and seed again, so the soul in each new member of the series develops a conscious life, lapses from consciousness, and hands on a germinal soul for a new beginning again. As the seed transmits the type, and also some variation from the type, so is the germinal soul transmitted through unconsciousness, ennobled or degraded by each conscious existence it has lived. At each stage the germinal soul represents the totality, the net outcome of its existences, as in each generation of a plant the seed may be said to do. So far, the doctrine of transmigration is a doctrine of the evolution of a soul, a declaration that in a sense we are all that we have been, that virtue and vice will have their reward, that in a sense "men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves." It does not leave hard cases of heathen or of reprobates to the discernment and mercy of God; it offers them, instead, other chances in subsequent lives. A not unattractive doctrine it is, even although the attractive analogy of the evolution of a plant breaks down. For in the scientific doctrine of evolution, individuals have no immortality at all; it is only the species that lives and moves on. But in Hinduism, as in Christianity, we are thinking of the continuity of the individual souls.

To proceed with the statement of the doctrine of transmigration. The climax of the transmigrations is Nirvana or extinction of the individual soul, according to the Buddhist, and union with or absorption into Deity, according to the Hindu.[111] Buddhism has gone from the land of its birth, as Christianity and even Judaism from Palestine, and I pass from the Buddhist doctrine. The Hindu climax, of absorption into Deity, is reached when by self-mastery personal desire is gone, and by profound contemplation upon Deity a pure-bred soul has lost the consciousness of separation from Deity. The distinction between I and the great Thou has vanished; the One is present in the mind not as an objective thought, but by a transformation of the consciousness itself. The words of Hindus themselves in the Advanced Text-book of Hindu Religion are: The human soul (the Jivatmic seed) "grows into self-conscious Deity." Listen also to the words of Swami Vivekananda, in the Parliament of Religions, Chicago, about his master, Ramkrishna Paramhansa's growing into self-conscious Deity: "Every now and then strange fits of God-consciousness came upon him.... He then spoke of himself as being able to do and know everything.... He would speak of himself as the same soul that had been born before as Rama, as Krishna, as Jesus, or as Buddha, born again as Ramkrishna.... He would say he was ... an incarnation of God Himself." Again Swami Vivekananda tells us: "From time to time Ramkrishna would entirely lose his own identity, so much so as to appropriate to himself the offerings brought for the goddess" (to the temple in which he officiated). "Sometimes forgetting to adorn the image, he would adorn himself with the flowers."[112] Transmigration is not necessarily bound up with the pantheistic view of the world, but in Hinduism, transmigration is only a ladder towards the realisation of the One.

Radical differences from Christian thought emerge. In the Hindu conception, the acme is reached only by a spiritual aristocracy of long spiritual descent; for the common multitude there is no gospel of being born again in Christ, no guiding hand like that of Our Lord towards the Father's presence. The upward path, according to the Hindu idea, is the path of philosophical knowledge and of meditation, not the power of union with Jesus Christ to make us sons of God. Most striking difference perhaps of all—in the Hindu philosophical system there is no place for even the conceptions of heaven and hell except as temporary halting-places between two incarnations of the soul, which practical necessity requires. For the soul, this world is the plane of existence; union with omnipresent Deity is the climax of existence that the Hindu devotee seeks to attain; yet not in a Hereafter, but as he sits on the ground no longer conscious of his self. "The beatific vision of Hinduism," says a recent pro-Hindu writer, "is to be relegated to no distant future."[113] Heaven and Hell are mocked at as absurdities by the new sect of the Āryas in the United Provinces and the Punjab, who retain the doctrine of transmigration.[114]

We have observed the pessimistic mood of India yielding before the improved conditions of life, and the brahmanical pantheism before the thought of God the Father. Bound up as the idea of transmigration has been with the pessimism and pantheism of India, we are prepared to find that it too is yielding. Of that we now ask what evidence there is in the ordinary speech and writings of educated India, apart from controversy or professedly Hindu writings, in which the accepted Indian orthodoxy would probably appear.

From the ordinary speeches and writings of educated Hindus regarding the dead, no one would infer that their doctrinal standpoint was other than that of the ordinary religious Briton, namely, that the dead friend has returned to God or has been called away by God, or the like. A native judge in Bengal, one of the most distinguished leaders of the Hindu Revival, writes as follows: The beatitude which the new Radha-Krishnaites aspire to "is not the Nirvana of the Vedantists, the quiescence of Rationalism. Nirvana and quiescence are merely negatives. The beatitude [of the new Radha-Krishnaites] is a positive something. They do not aspire to unification with the divine essence. They prefer hell with its torments to such unification."[115] A few years ago, at a public meeting in Calcutta, the acknowledged leader of Hinduism, speaking of a Hindu gentleman whose death we were lamenting, said: "God has taken him to himself"—certainly not a Hindu statement of the passing of a soul. Similarly, in 1882 we find one nobleman in Bengal writing to another regarding his mother's death: "It is my prayer to God that she may abide in eternal happiness in heaven."[116] Generations of Hindu students I have known to find pleasure in identifying themselves with Wordsworth's views of immortality:

and

Somewhat dreamlike Wordsworth's views may be, but his belief is clearly not in transmigration. To the educated Hindu, who may not consciously have rejected the idea of transmigration, the doctrine is really now no more than a current and convenient explanation of any misfortune that has befallen a person. "Why has it befallen him? He must have earned it in some previous existence. It is in the debit balance of the transactions in his lives." Such are the vague ideas floating in the air. Upon any individual's acts or plans for the future, the idea of transmigration seems to have no bearing whatever beyond a numbing of the will.[117] For in theory, the Hindu's fate is just. In strict logic no doubt the same numbing effect might be alleged about the Christian doctrine of predestination. Even when misfortune has overtaken an educated Hindu, I think I am justified in saying that the more frequent thought with him is now in keeping with the new theistic belief; the misfortune is referred to the will of God. As already said, it is a commonplace of the unfortunate student who has failed, to ascribe his failure to God's will.

There is room for the Christian thought of the Hereafter, because in reality, as theologians know, the doctrine of transmigration stands over against the Christian doctrine of predestination rather than over against the Christian doctrine of the Here and Hereafter. Transmigration is a doctrine of what has gone before the present life rather than of what will follow. Every educated Anglo-Indian whom I have consulted agrees that in a modern Hindu's mouth transmigration is only a theory of the incidence of actual suffering. Here is the doctrine of karma (works), that is of transmigration or merited rebirth, in the actual life of India—transmigration and the pessimistic helplessness of which I have spoken? In the last great famine of 1899-1900, in a village in South-western India, a missionary found a victim of famine lying on one side of the village street, and not far off, upon the other side, two or three men of the middle class. The missionary reproached them for their callousness. What might be answered for them is not here to the point; their answer for themselves was, "It is his karma." The missionary did what he could for the famine sufferer, and then when repassing the group could not forbear remarking to them, "You see you were wrong about his karma." "Yes, we were wrong," they replied. "It was his karma to be helped by you." The same views of karma and of transmigration, as referring to the past, not the future, are apparent in a recent number of The Inquirer, a paper conducted in Calcutta for the benefit of Hindu students and others. I take the following from the question column: "Do Christians believe in the doctrine of reincarnation? If not, how do you account for blindness at birth?" The questioner's idea is plain, and the coincidence with the question put to Christ in St. John's Gospel, chapter ix, is striking. Hindus thus have room for an idea of the future of the soul, as Christians, on their side, have for a theory of the soul's origin.

The Christian idea of the Hereafter cannot, as yet, be called a strongly dynamical doctrine of Christianity in the sense that the Person of Our Lord has proved dynamical. Not that interest in the subject is lacking. I have referred to questions put by educated Hindus in The Inquirer. Out of fifty-seven questions I find eight bearing on the Christian doctrine of the Hereafter or the Hindu doctrine of Transmigration. In the Magazine of the Hindu College, Benares, out of fourteen questions I find four bearing on the same subject. The want of force in the Christian doctrine no doubt reflects its want of force for Christians themselves in this present positive age. For even Tennyson himself was vague:

Of the sects of recent origin, only the Brāhma Samāj or Theistic Association rejects the doctrine of transmigration avowedly. We have already said that the Ārya Samāj or Vedic Theists of the United Provinces and the Punjab hold strongly to the doctrine. It is noteworthy that they should do so, the Vedas being their standards wherewith to test Modern Hinduism, for the doctrine of transmigration is scarcely hinted at in the Vedas, and in the oldest, the Rigveda, there is said to be no trace of the doctrine.[118] It appears in the later writings, the Upanishads, and is manifest throughout the Code of Manu (c. A.D. 200). Mrs. Besant, chief figure among the Indian Theosophists, now virtually a Hindu Revival Association, preaches the doctrine, and, in fact, lectured on it in Britain in 1904. At the same time, transmigration is no part of the Theosophist's creed. As might be expected, the Text-book of Hindu Religion, of the Hindu College, Benares, gives the doctrine of transmigration a prominent place, although the explicitness with which it is set forth is very surprising to one acquainted with the way the doctrine is generally ignored by the educated. I quote from the Hindu Text-book, published in 1903, that Westerns may realise that in dealing with transmigration we are not dealing simply with some old-world doctrine deciphered from some palm-leaf written in some ancient character. After describing—here following the ancient philosophical writings, the Upanishads—how the Jivatma or Soul comes up through the various existences of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms until it reaches the human stage, the Text-book proceeds to describe the further upward or downward process. It is declared that the downward movement (from man to animal) is now much rarer than formerly—that concession is made to modern ideas—but the law of the downward process is as follows: "When a man has so degraded himself below the human level that many of his qualities can only express themselves through the form of a lower creature, he cannot, when his time for rebirth comes, pass into a human form. He is delayed, therefore, and is attached to the body of one of the lower creatures as a co-tenant with the animal, vegetable, or mineral Jiva [life], until he has worn out the bonds of these non-human qualities and is fit to take birth again in the world of men. A very strong and excessive attachment to an animal may have similar results." Where modern ideas reach in India, one can understand such ideas as those melting away. A second passage from the Text-book is interesting, as showing the compiler's idea of the place of a life in Europe in the chain of existences, although in this case also the statement is made only about "ancient days." "The Jivatma [soul] was prepared for entrance into each [Indian] caste through a long preliminary stage outside India; then he was born into India and passed into each caste to receive its definite lessons; then was born away from India to practise these lessons; usually returning to India to the highest of them, in the final stages of his evolution." In other words, people of the outer world, say Europeans, are rewarded for virtue by being born into the lowest Indian caste, and then, after rising to be brahmans in India, they go back to Europe to give it the benefit of their acquirements; and finally crown their career by reappearing in India as a brahman philosopher or jogi. Surely we may laugh at this without being thought unsympathetic or narrow-minded. We recall Mrs. Besant's assertion that she had a dim recollection of an existence as a brahman pandit in India. According to the spiritual genealogy of the Hindu Text-book, she may hope to be born next in an Indian child, and become a jogi possessed of saving knowledge of the identity of self with Deity.

I asked a lady who had been a missionary in Calcutta for many years, how far a belief in transmigration was apparent among the women of the middle class. She could recall only two instances in which it had come to her notice in her talks with the wives and daughters of educated India. Once a reason was given for being kind to a cat, that the speaker's grandmother might then be in it as her abode, although the observation was accompanied with a laugh. On the second occasion, when the lady was having trouble with a slow pupil, one of the women present, sympathising with the teacher, said, "Do not trouble with her; perhaps next time when she comes back she will be cleverer." The general conclusion, therefore, I repeat: Transmigration is no longer a living part of the belief of educated India; the Christian conception of the Hereafter is as yet only partially taking its place.

CHAPTER XIX