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and colleges were founded to impart religious instruction to the young. For a time the movement succeeded: colleges have grown into Universities, but the spirit of religion, in the usual sense of the term, has been on the decline; and today, in a Hindu College the young students do not hesitate to hold that “when Man lives God dies.".
What is the remedy? The orthodox schools failed, not because the young men were indifferent, but because the Pandits could not convince. Is Religion really op. posed to reason ? and does it wholly depend on faith? Is faith an enemy to reason ? and is it impossible to reconcile the two ? These questions press for an answer and therein lies the solution of the problem.
Faith is generally regarded as belief in the existence of a person, idea or a thing, which we cannot, on strict grounds of known facts, easily explain. It is thus conceived to be more a matter of the heart than the head – of emotion more than the intellect. It would indeed be idle to discount the importance of emotion in life; and even so an element of faith must enter into all human action. No one can know or understand all the forces, manifest or unmanifest, past or present, which enter into a single action, however small; nor is it possible to forecast all the effects of a certain cause, however slight. We must take many things on trust - from the authority of a teacher or a book to the friendliness of a neighbour or the sanity of a cook. Indeed, all action must come to an end if we eliminate faith-conceived in its widest signi
