Such, indeed, is the exuberance and flexibility of this language and its power of compounding words, that when it has been, so to speak, baptised and thoroughly penetrated with the spirit of Christianity, it will probably be found, next to Hebrew and Greek, the most expressive vehicle of Christian truth.
By Sanskrit is meant the learned language of India — the language of its cultured inhabitants, the language of its religion, its literature and science — not by any means a dead language, but one still spoken and written by educated men by all parts of the country, from Kashmir to Cape Comorin, from Bombay to Calcutta and Madras.
Sir Monier Williams, a Sanskritist with deep Missionary concerns, speculated in the same vein: "If only the self-deluded but fervent-spirited Muhammad, whose soul was stirred within him when he saw his fellow town-men wholly given to idolatry, had been brought into association with the purer form of Christianity … he might have died a martyr for the truth, Asia might have numbered her millions of Christians, and the name of Saint Muhammad might have been in the calendar of our Book of Common Prayer … Think, then, of the difference in the present condition of the Asiatic world, if the fire of Muhammad's eloquence had been kindled, and the force of his personal influence exerted on the side of veritable Christianity"