Enmeshed in vicious traditions and false doctrine, its philosophy and purer teachings known only to a cultured few, the Higher Hinduism "powerless to be born," is only the illusion which it would teach that all else is, while practical Hinduism hangs like a blight over a land whose people are as the sands of the sea for multitude. If all the human race alive to-day were to pass in review before you, every eighth person in the {200} ranks would be a Hindu. And to realize in what manner Hinduism guides its 200,000,000 followers it is only necessary to visit some of their most celebrated temples.
It is an extreme illustration, no doubt, but since it was the first Hindu shrine I visited, we may begin with the Kalighat in Calcutta. This temple is dedicated to Kali, or "Mother Kali," as the English-speaking temple priest who conducted me always said, the bloody goddess of destruction. That terrible society of criminals and assassins, the Thugs (its founder is worshipped as a saint), had Kali as their patron goddess and whetted their knives and planned their murderous crimes before her image: all this in a "temple" of "religion."
The representations of Kali befit her character. Fury is in her countenance and in her three red eyes. Her tongue lolls from her mouth. In one of her four hands is the dripping, bloody head of a slaughtered enemy. Her necklace is of the heads of her slain. Her girdle is the severed hands of the dead men. Tradition says that she constantly drinks blood; and each man who comes to worship her brings a little wet, trembling kid: the warm blood that flows after the priestly ax has done its work is supposed to please the terrible goddess. The morning of my visit there were sacrifices every few minutes, and on the great day of Kali-worship, in October, the place runs ankle-deep in blood.
In the old days--and not so long ago at that--there were human sacrifices at Kalighat, and when I asked the priest concerning them, his significant answer was that the British Government would no longer allow them. He made no claim that Hinduism itself has changed! Their Kaliki Purana says that one human sacrifice delights Kali for a thousand years, and in spite of British alertness a bloody human head bedecked with flowers was found in a Kali temple near Calcutta not many years ago, and at Akrha, also near Calcutta, human sacrifice has been attempted within a decade.
From the Kalighat temple the priest of Mother Kali took me {201} to the edge of the dirty, murky Hoogli (sacred as a part of the Ganges system), where in its consecrated filth scores of miserable pilgrims were washing away their sins or "acquiring merit" with the gods. On the way we passed the image of Juggernaut, the miserable stable-like shelters in which the pilgrims are lodged, and the image of Setola, "the Mother of the Smallpox," as the priest called her, to which smallpox victims come for cure. Back again to the temple, the priest assured me that if I would give the other priests a few annas (an anna is worth 2 cents of our money) they would drive back the shrieking, bloodstained, garlanded crowds of half-naked "worshippers" and give me a view of the Kali idol. The money forthcoming--and the high priest, in expectation of a tip, coming out to lend his assistance--there ensued such a Kilkenny fight between the priests and the dense mob of "worshippers," such knocking, kicking, scrouging, as never any man got for the same amount of money in any prize-fight, until finally I got a swift glimpse of the idol's hideous head.
Then having paid the greedy priest and the high priest (like the daughters of the horseleech they always cry for "more") I went back to my hotel, properly edified, let us believe, by this spectacle of Hindu "religion."
It was Sunday morning.
Could I have been otherwise than impressed when I went that afternoon to another Indian religious service--this time of Christians--and compared it with what I had seen in the morning? Instead of a money-hunting priest sitting beside a butcher's block and exacting a prescribed fee from each pushing, jabbering, suppliant of a bloodthirsty goddess, herself only one of the many jealous gods and goddesses to be favored and propitiated--instead of this there was a converted Indian minister who told his fellows of one God whose characteristic is love, and whose worship is of the spirit. And instead of the piteous bleating of slaughtered beasts there was the fine rhythm of hymns whose English names one could easily {202} recognize from their tunes in spite of the translation of the words into the strange tongue of the Bengali.
At home, I may say just here, I am not accused of being flagrantly and outrageously pious; but no open-minded, observant man, even if he were an infidel, could make a trip through Asia without seeing what a tremendously uplifting influence is the religion to which the majority of Americans adhere as compared with the other faiths, and how tremendously in Christian lands it has bettered and enriched the lives even of those of
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