have long cherished and honoured this city as the cradle of modern Indian Theism — a place ever dear and ever sacred as the home and the field of the life-work of the immortal saints and patriarchs of the Brahma Samaj. When we remember that it is chiefly here that a rare succession of Heaven-inspired souls has, so prayerfully and disinterestedly, toiled through three generations to realise and reveal a God-vision of surpassing glory, we feel that we stand on holy ground. If to this be added the significant fact that hither, to this hall, now converge from all parts of a vast country, with its divergent contents of race and language, creed and custom— from Sindh and Quetta to the Khasi Hills and Sylhet, from Lahore and Simla to Tinnevelly and Calicut — thousands of hearts that one Faith fills, one Hope sustains and one Love binds together, surely the Theistic Church justifies itself as an organisation of national import. How the Theistic spirit has pervaded the whole nation in holier faith and purer worship, in loftier moral ideals and wider sympathies, in higher conceptions of
