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Have Christian Missions to India Been Successful ?
because of its "Godless character”, while the majority sustain this great system of education, because of its secular or neutral character as to religion; and this fact, namely the secular character of the common school system is in the estimation of the wisest people of all religions its chief glory. If you should undertake to teach in your common schools the distinctive dogmatic doctrines of Christianity, would not you put in jeopardy the system itself by inaugurating a revolution? But now, in my country your missionaries insist upon doing that for us as necessary to our civilization and education which you do not dare advocate or defend at home.
I must repeat that we Hindus hail with unfeigned satisfaction any movement looking toward the real advancement and education of the masses but we cannot but protest with all our soul against using the privilege and necessity of education as a means of propagating religious tenets, repulsive to our conscience and to our sense of moral obligations and relationships. I beg that I be not misunderstood. I would plead for tolerance, before you, for my brethren and their religion and in the same breath beg of you secular education and the means of that education. When you suppress and limit your common school curriculum by imposing upon it the catechism, with the approval of the populations of your great country, it would be time enough to make it the shibboleth of your onslaught upon the “benighted Hindus under the white banner of education."
Because I dispute the correctness of the Christian missionary method and deny its value, I must not be understood to dispute the right or to deny the importance of missionary labor along right lines and inspired by the true spirit of universal brotherhood. The possession of truth implies responsibility, for its distribution. Truth is not sectional - I mean essential truth. It belongs to the world, to all mankind. The spirit of truth is the right missionary spirit and carries with it credentials in that language
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