Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India | Page 3

are the strongest factor in the development of a Better India.
(6) for definitely distributing the ideals of Christian womanhood to all
parts of Southern Asia from which the College draws its students.

Personal witness to the value of Christian education for women is a real
Kingdom message.
(7) for training women to take their part in the new national life of
awakened India. This training must be by contact with lives already
devoted to Christ, more than by precept, for 'character is caught, not
taught.'
(8) for meeting the needs of the more educated classes of India, as the
evangelistic and other parts of mission work minister specifically to the
needs of the masses."
(9) In furnishing pre-medical training for the hundreds of women who
must be educated to follow in the footsteps of the Great Physician.

INTRODUCTION
To say that the world is one is to-day's commonplace. What causes its
new solidarity? What but the countless hands that reach across its
shores and its Seven Seas, hands that devastate and hands that heal!
There are the long fingers of the cable and telegraph that pry through
earth's hidden places, gathering choice bits of international gossip and
handing them out to all the breakfast tables of the Great Neighborhood.
There are the swift fingers of transcontinental train and ocean liner,
pushing the dweller from the West into the Far East, the man from the
prairie into the desert. There are the devastating fingers of war that first
fashion and then carry infernal machines and spread them broadcast
over towns and ships and fertile fields. Thank God, there are also hands
of kindness that dispense healing medicines, that scatter schoolbooks
among untaught children and the Word of God in all parts of earth's
neighborhood. And, lastly, there are hands that seem never to leave the
house roof and the village street, yet gain the power of the long reach
and set thousands of candles alight across the world.
"Why don't you let them alone? Their religion is good enough for
them," was the classic comment of the armchair critic of a generation
ago. Time has answered it. Nothing in to-day's world ever lets anything
else alone. We read the morning paper in terms of continents. To the
League of Nations China and Chile are concerns as intimate as Upper
Silesia. To the Third Internationale the obscure passes of Afghanistan
are a near frontier. Suffrage and prohibition are echoed in the streets of
Poona and in the councils of Delhi. Labor strikes in West Virginia and

Wales produce reactions in the cotton mills of Madras. And the
American girl in high school, in college, in business, in society, in a
profession, is producing her double under tropic suns, in far-off streets
where speech and dress and manners are strange, but the heart of life is
one. That time is past; we cannot let them alone; we can only choose
what shall be the shape and fashioning done by hands that reach across
the sea.

CHAPTER ONE
YESTERDAY AND TO-DAY
"Once upon a Time."
"Once upon a time,"[1] men and women dwelt in caves and cliffs and
fashioned curious implements from the stones of the earth and painted
crude pictures upon the walls of their rock dwellings. Archaeologists
find such traces in England and along the river valleys of France,
among the sands of Egyptian deserts and in India, where armor heads,
ancient pottery, and cromlechs mark the passing of a long forgotten
race. Thus India claims her place in the universal childhood of the
world.
The Brown-skinned Tribes.
"Once upon a time,"[2] when the Stone Men had passed, a strange, new
civilization is thought to have girdled the earth, passing probably in a
"brown belt" from Mediterranean lands across India to the Pacific
world and the Americas. Its sign was the curious symbol of the
Swastika; its passwords certain primitive customs common to all these
lands. Its probable Indian representatives are known to-day as
Dravidians--the brown-skinned people still dominating South Indian
life, whose exact place in the family of races puzzles every
anthropologist. It was then that civilization was first walking up and
down the great river valleys of the Old World. While the first
pyramids[3] were a-building beside the long green ribbon of the Nile
and the star-gazers[4] of Mesopotamia were reading future events from

her towers of sun-dried bricks, Dravidian tribes were cultivating the
rich mud of the Ganges valley, a slow-changing race. Did the lonely
traveler, I wonder, troll the same air then as now to ward away evil
spirits from the star-lit road? Did the Dravidian maiden do her sleek
hair in the same knot at the nape of her brown neck, and poise the
earthen pot with the same grace on her daily pilgrimage to the river?