[Sidenote: The English in India.] About the year 1000 a Mohammedan conqueror entered India from Afghanistan and gradually all India was brought under Moslem control. There was continual strife, however, between the Moslems and the original Hindus who, here and there, were able to rise against the galling rule of their conquerors. Early in the Seventeenth Century the English came to India first as humble merchants, then as rulers. When in 1857 the India mutiny, fomented by dispossessed native princes, shook the power of the great East India Company, the English government took the place of the company and India became British territory. To-day the fourteen provinces, in which are six hundred and seventy-five native states, are British soil. Whatever we may think the right or wrong of the power by which Great Britain has seized and held her vast possessions, we can feel only admiration for her colonial administration. She has come to feel toward India a sense of duty; she has governed justly; she has established good order and peace. She has taken care of the sick, has educated the young and has fed the starving in time of famine. She has, best of all, made it possible for the Christian Church to do its great work. [Sidenote: The Contrasts of India.] The contrasts of India are described by a writer in the _Missionary Witness_. “This is a land of blazing light, and yet, withal, the land of densest darkness. There is wonderful beauty with repulsive ugliness. A land of plenty, full of penury. Ultra cleanliness and unmentionable filthiness. There is kindness to all creatures, combined with hardest cruelty. All life held sacred in a land of murders. A people of mild speech given to violent language. Proud of learning and sunken in ignorance. Seekers for merit, resigned to fate. Unbelieving and full of cruelty. Belief in one god co-existent with the worship of 330,000,000 deities. Intensely religious, yet destitute of piety. Altogether, India is lost humanity gone to seed; a diseased degenerate herb become a noxious weed. At least this is the condition of her society.” [Sidenote: The Word “heathen”.] It is characteristic of the wider charity and also the wider knowledge of our time, that we speak of unchristianized nations as “non-Christians” rather than as “heathen,” a term which, especially in India, has given offense. The exchange of terms is one greatly to be desired, since it removes a cause of offense and also makes clearer than ever the power of the Gospel to enlighten and to bless. For the darkness and misery of India there is one hope of change--that she may cease to be “non-Christian”. To India Lutherans were, as we have seen, the first of the Protestant Churches to carry the Gospel. Since the landing of Ziegenbalg and Plütschau in Tranquebar, eighty-six years before the Baptist Carey went to Bengal, Lutherans have been preaching and teaching according to the command of their Master. GERMAN SOCIETIES.