[Illustration: CHAPEL OF LEPER ASYLUM, KODUR, INDIA. (JOINT SYNOD OF OHIO)]
[Sidenote: The Moral Condition of India.] [5]“The moral condition of the people should be described as one of apathy or even deadness rather than as one of violent and malignant opposition to virtue. Their lives are destitute of stimulus and incentive. Their religion furnishes no motive for the present and incites no aspiration for the future. The thought of bettering their own condition or of doing aught to benefit another’s is foreign to their minds. The Oriental doctrine of fate is ever present to quench all upward endeavor. It is their destiny to be what and as they are, and who are they to contend with destiny? Their chief faults are licentiousness and lack of truthfulness. Intemperance is not usually a vice of the Hindu people, though in recent years the introduction of cheap foreign liquors, and the course of the government in licensing drinking-places, has stimulated the use of intoxicating liquor among all classes. The disposition of the people is mild, and crimes are no more common among them than among the people of other races.”
Of the evils of child marriage and the wrongs of widowhood we need take no space to tell. To him who does not believe in missions, who holds that for India its native religions are best, its own thought sufficient, it is only necessary to point to the two million wives under ten years of age or to the evils of the temple system. India still requires help from without and from above.
[Sidenote: The English in India.] About the year 1000 a Mohammedan conqueror entered India from Afghanistan and gradually all India was brought under Moslem control. There was continual strife, however, between the Moslems and the original Hindus who, here and there, were able to rise against the galling rule of their conquerors. Early in the Seventeenth Century the English came to India first as humble merchants, then as rulers. When in 1857 the India mutiny, fomented by dispossessed native princes, shook the power of the great East India Company, the English government took the place of the company and India became British territory.
To-day the fourteen provinces, in which are six hundred and seventy-five native states, are British soil. Whatever we may think the right or wrong of the power by which Great Britain has seized and held her vast possessions, we can feel only admiration for her colonial administration. She has come to feel toward India a sense of duty; she has governed justly; she has established good order and peace. She has taken care of the sick, has educated the young and has fed the starving in time of famine. She has, best of all, made it possible for the Christian Church to do its great work.