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India's Message to America Where are they to-day? Echo answers, where? Every person has his day. This is the Christian's day, and he is producing the same argument at the point of the bayonet. The so called disciples of the Bible believe in “power" as the supreme manifestation and demonstration of the truth. So do we, but we go one step further and are declaring and have declared for thousands of years to the world that power, indeed, is the test of truth, but goodness is the highest power in the world. If it is powerful to do it is a hundred times more powerful to suffer. Outpourings of cruel savages over the land of Bharata, and 'civilized" scourges of the human race have been let loose upon the plains of beautiful India over and over again, but, like meteors coming out of eternal darkness, flashing for a moment across her horizon of view and plunging back into darkness, all these oppressors and tyrants, with all their claims of truth and power to subdue, civilize and Christianize, must in the long run, melt like morning mist on the river and the Hindu will live on, firm in his faith that goodness is the highest power in the world and not oppression.
I concede my brothers and sisters, that in India, as elsewhere, men may combine together for wrongdoing, and have done so, but when they did so it was in contravention of the sacred truths, ignorantly interpreted and ignorantly applied, and not in accordance with the dogma of religion or the inspiration of philosophy or civilization. Under the highest forms of the Christian religion, you will bear me witness, these things also have been done, but do we hold Christianity rightly responsible for the cruelty, injustice and wrong? Some may, but we do not. No more can you hold our philosophy and our religion responsible for abnormal conceptions and perpetrations.
You know, my brothers and sisters, that we are not an independent nation, we are subjects of her Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria, the "defender of the faith.” but if we were a nation in all that that name implies, with our own government and our
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