Book Title: Jaina Philosophy
Author(s): Virchand R Gandhi, Kumarpal Desai
Publisher: World Jain Confederation

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Page 113
________________ The Jaina Philosophy there was not one drinking saloon in that city, but now there are more than a hundred. My brothers and sisters of America, there is not a shadow of hope of Christianizing India. You send the missionary to my country to make converts but every convert he makes he transmits an industrious tiller of soil into an idle worthless loafer and frequently a drunkard and he becomes a charge on the contributions which are yearly sent by English and American societies to convert the heathens to Christianity. After two hundred years of spending millions of dollars, with the prestige of a conquering religion and with the British bayonet to back, with a conquered nation forced to support it even when they are starving themselves. Christianity in India is not supported by the converts themselves. Every bit of Protestant Christianity in India is maintained by the money flowing from England or America. If you mean that three hundred millions of our people are going to be converted, that is to say, to be bought off by American or English money, I gladly wish for that day : only I would beg of American men and women to send agents in different parts in India so that they may advertise and buy poor needy Hindus at a thousand dollars per head, so that the Americans would have more Christians and the Hindus would have more money and there would be an end to the present horrible system under which the greater part of the money you send to buy the people is swallowed by the machinery. In one word, send more money and fewer men. I do not think that the missionary has a realization of the enormity of his stupendous undertaking when he attempts to Christianize the teeming multitudes of India. There are many factors which stand in his way. The people of India as a whole are saturated in religious and spiritual thought; they think and contemplate on spiritual matters from childhood to death; even - 104 - Jain Education International For Personal & Private Use Only www.jainelibrary.org

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