Page:The World's Parliament of Religions Vol 1.djvu/134

I06 HISTORY OF THE PARLIAMENT. I3ut, sir, the only one indispensable condition of success is that we recognize the cause of our failure, that we confess it with humble, lowly, penitent and obedient minds, and that with quenchless western courage and faith we now go forth and do otherwise. A young lady from Bombay, Miss Jeanne Sorabji, being introduced as a representative of the Parsees, hastened to explain that it was only in point of race that she could claim to belong to that stock. Her father, at the age of eighteen, had been brought to the knowledge and faith of Jesus Christ, to which she herself most earnestly adhered. She brought a message of love and salutation from her Christian fellow- countrymen to the women of America. Another citizen of Bombay, Mr. B. B. Nagarkar, of the Brahmo-Somaj, followed Miss Sorabji. He spoke as follows: SPEECH OF MR. NAGARKAR. Brothers and Sisters in the Western Home, — It is a great privilege to be able to stand on this noble platform. As the President has already announced to you, I represent the Theistic movement in India, known in my native country as the religion of the Brahmo-Somaj. I come from the city of Bombay, the first city of the British Empire. It was only five months ago that I left my native land, and to you, the Americans, who are so much accustomed to fly, as it were, on wings of the atmosphere, it would be a hard task to imagine the difficulties and the troubles that an Oriental meets when he has to bring himself over fourteen thousand miles. The Hindus have been all along confining themselves to the narrow pre- cincts of the Indian Continent, and it is only during the last hundred years or so that we have been brought into close contact with Western thought, with English civilization, and by English civilization I mean the civilization of English-speaking nations. The Brahmo-Somaj is the result, as you know, of the influence of vari- ous religions, and the fundamental principle of the Theistic Church in India is universal love, harmony of faiths, unity of prophets, or rather unity of prophets and harmony of faiths. The reverence that we pay the other prophets and faiths is not mere lip-loyalty, but it is the universal love for all the prophets and for all the forms and shades of truth by their own inhe- rent merit. We try not only to learn in an intellectual way what those prophets have to teach, but to assimilate and imbibe these truths that are very near our spiritual being. It was the grandest and noblest aspiration of the late Mr. Sen to establish such a religion in the land of India, which has been well known as the birthplace of a number of religious faiths. This is a marked characteristic of the East, and especially India, so that