The Apostle of the East and West

Find a section

This guide is a single page, so search jumps you straight to a section below. For a word-by-word search of the original book's full text, use Internet Archive's own "Search inside" tool on the source item.

Table of Contents

As printed in the original 1931 pamphlet, with the page on which each section begins.

A Reader's Guide to the Book

The original pamphlet is short — a single continuous essay divided into the twelve sections listed above, rather than long numbered chapters. Because UECF.NET presents this title as a reference and companion edition rather than a re-typeset copy of the running text (see Source & Rights), the summaries below describe what each section covers so that a reader can go straight to the right place in the original scan. They are UECF.NET's own description of the book's contents, not quotations from it, except where marked with quotation marks and a page reference.

Foreword — p. 5

Kelso opens by recalling the arrival of the first Presbyterian missionary to the Punjab frontier — "The fifth day of November, 1834, saw a lonely American arrive in Lodiana, a frontier post of the British Army" (p. 5) — and frames the whole pamphlet as a centennial tribute: a century after that beginning, the Western Foreign Missionary Society's work in the Punjab had, in Kelso's telling, borne its most remarkable fruit in a single convert — Sundar Singh — whose life the rest of the booklet goes on to trace.

Sadhu Sundar Singh — p. 6

An introduction to Sundar Singh's birth in 1889 at Rampur in the Punjab, into a well-to-do Sikh family, and his upbringing steeped in the Sikh scriptures and the wider religious life of northern India before his encounter with Christianity.

Conversion — p. 9

The account of the crisis that turned Sundar Singh from a bitter opponent of Christianity — by his own later account he had burned a Bible in anger as a boy — into a believer, following what he described as a vision of Christ that resolved his spiritual searching.

Persecutions — p. 11

The cost of that conversion: rejection by his own family and community, and the hostility he met in the years immediately following his baptism.

Baptism and Early Ministry — p. 12

His baptism into the Christian church and the beginning of his public work as an evangelist in north India.

The Sadhu — p. 13

Why and how, in 1905, Sundar Singh took up the saffron robe and begging bowl of the traditional Indian holy man — the "sadhu" — choosing to present the Christian gospel through a recognizably Indian form of itinerant, ascetic religious life rather than through Western missionary dress and methods.

The Achievement of Maturity — p. 17

Kelso's account of Sundar Singh's growth as a preacher and spiritual figure through his twenties, as his travels and his reputation both widened.

Missionary Journey to Southern India and the Far East — p. 18

His travels beyond the Punjab and the Himalayan frontier — including his repeated, dangerous journeys into closed Tibet — and southward and eastward into other parts of Asia, preaching as he went.

"The Apostle of the West" — p. 20

The section that gives the book half its title: Sundar Singh's tours through Britain, continental Europe, the United States and Australia in the early 1920s, where — still in his sadhu's robe — he preached to and was studied by Western audiences, including university and church circles that had rarely encountered an Indian Christian teacher on his own terms.

His Prayer Life — p. 25

The longest single section of the pamphlet, describing Sundar Singh's own understanding and practice of prayer as sustained communion with God rather than mere petition, and the place of contemplative prayer in his daily life as a wandering preacher.

Some Religious Conceptions — p. 32

Kelso surveys several of Sundar Singh's characteristic ideas — among them his understanding of sin, suffering and divine judgment, shaped by the Indian religious concepts he grew up with but reinterpreted through Christian faith, including a view of suffering as loving correction rather than mere punishment.

The Significance of Sundar Singh — p. 39

A closing assessment of why Sundar Singh mattered to Kelso's contemporaries: the book notes that Western scholars of religion — among them Archbishop Nathan Söderblom, Canon B. H. Streeter and Professor Friedrich Heiler — took his life and teaching seriously as evidence that authentic Christian faith could be lived out through genuinely Indian forms, opening a path for an indigenous Christianity in Asia rather than an imported one.

Bibliography — p. 41

A short list, closing the pamphlet, of other studies of Sundar Singh available to readers in 1931. UECF.NET has not retyped this list here; it can be read on the last page of the scan at Internet Archive, linked above and below.

About Sadhu Sundar Singh

Sadhu Sundar Singh (born 1889, Rampur, Punjab — last seen 1929) was an Indian Christian evangelist raised in a devout Sikh household who, after a dramatic conversion experience as a teenager, was baptized into the Christian church and disowned by his family. In 1905 he adopted the yellow robe of a Hindu sadhu and spent the rest of his life as a barefoot, itinerant preacher, walking through the Himalayan foothills, Tibet, and much of South and East Asia, and later touring Britain, Europe, North America and Australia. He set out on what became his final journey into Tibet in 1929 and was never confirmed to have arrived; he is generally presumed to have died on that journey. He is remembered as one of the most widely discussed Indian Christian figures of the early twentieth century, studied by Western theologians for showing that Christian discipleship could take a fully Indian form.

This paragraph draws on standard biographical reference sources on Sundar Singh in addition to Kelso's book, and is UECF.NET editorial background rather than a quotation from either.

About James A. Kelso

James A. Kelso was a Presbyterian Old Testament and Hebrew scholar associated with Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh (a predecessor institution of today's Pittsburgh Theological Seminary), where he later served as professor emeritus of Hebrew and Old Testament. Pittsburgh Theological Seminary's Kelso Museum of Near Eastern Archaeology is named in his honor. In 1931 he chaired the Centennial Committee of Pittsburgh Presbytery for the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Western Foreign Missionary Society, the Presbyterian body whose missionaries had first reached the Punjab in 1834 — and wrote The Apostle of the East and West as that committee's tribute, holding up Sundar Singh as the centennial's most striking fruit.

Source & Rights

Source: Internet Archive, item Sadhu Sundar Singh - The Apostle of the East and West, by James A. Kelso (uploaded 2012, Folkscanomy Religion collection). Every bibliographic fact on this page — title, author, publisher, date, table of contents and page numbers — comes from that scan's title page, contents page and foreword, cross-checked against the item's own metadata.

Rights: the uploader has marked this item CC0 1.0 Universal, and a short 1931 denominational centennial booklet of this kind is consistent with that public-domain status. UECF.NET presents this page as a bibliographic and reference guide rather than a re-typeset copy of the pamphlet's running text, so that every reader is pointed to the authoritative scanned original — with its exact pagination, footnotes and wording intact — for the full text itself. Use the Read the full book online and Download the source PDF links above to read every word exactly as printed.

Corrections: if you find an error of fact on this page, please write to info@uecf.net.

Related Resources