From Egypt to Japan

by Henry M. Field

This Maharajah of Benares is well known all over India. He is a member of the Viceroy's Council at Calcutta, and held in universal respect by the English community. Sir William Muir, who is one of the most pronounced Christian men in India, whom some would even call a Puritan for his strictness, told me that the Maharajah was one of the best of men. And yet he is of the straitest sect of the Hindoos, who bathes in the Ganges every morning, and "does his pooja." In all religious observances he is most exemplary, often spending hours in prayer. The secretary, in excusing his master's absence, said that he had been up nearly all night engaged in his devotions. How this earnest faith in a religion so vile can consist with a life so pure and so good, is one of the mysteries of this Asiatic world which I leave to those wiser than I am to explain.

We had lingered so long that it was near the hour of our departure for Calcutta, and we were three miles up the river. The secretary accompanied us to the boat of the Maharajah, which was waiting for us, and bade us farewell, with many kind wishes that we might have a prosperous journey. Lying against the bank was the gilded barge in which the Maharajah had received and escorted the Prince of Wales. Waving our adieu, we gave the signal, and the boatmen pushed off into the stream. It was now a race against time. We had a long stretch to make in a very few minutes. I offered the men a reward if they should reach the place in time. The stalwart rowers bent to their oars, their swarthy limbs making swift strokes, and the boat shot like an arrow down the stream. I stood up in the eagerness and excitement of the chase, taking a last look at the sacred temples as we shot swiftly by. It wanted but two or three minutes of the hour as our little pinnace struck against the goal by the bridge of boats, and throwing the rupees to the boatmen, we hurried up the bank, and had just time to get fairly bestowed in the roomy first-class carriage, which we had all to ourselves, when the train started for Calcutta, and the towers and domes and minarets of the holy city of India faded from our sight.

Thinking! Still thinking! What does it all mean? Who can understand Hindooism—where it begins and where it ends? It is like the fabled tree that had its roots down in the Kingdom of Death, and spread its branches over the world. Behind it, or beneath it, is a deep philosophy, which goes down to the very beginnings of existence, and touches the most vital problems of life and death, of endless dying and living. Out of millions of ages, after a million births, following each other in long succession, at last man is cast upon the earth, but only as a bird of passage, darting swiftly through life, and then, in an endless transmigration of souls, passing through other stages of being, till he is absorbed in the Eternal All. Thus does man find his way at last back to God, as the drop of water, caught up by the sun, lifted into the cloud, descends in the rain, trickles in streams down the mountain side, and finds its way back to the ocean. So does the human soul complete the endless cycle of existence, coming from God and returning to God, to be swallowed up and lost in that Boundless Sea.

Much might be said, by way of argument, in support of this pantheistic philosophy. But whatever may be urged in favor of Hindooism in the abstract, its practical results are terrible. By a logic as close and irresistible as it is fatal, it takes away the foundation of all morality, and strikes down all goodness and virtue—all that is the glory of man, and all that is the beauty of woman. It is nothing to the purpose to quote the example of such a man as the Maharajah of Benares, for there is a strange alchemy in virtue, by which a pure nature, a high intelligence, and right moral instincts, will convert even the most pernicious doctrines to the purpose of a spiritual life. But with the mass of Hindoos it is only a system of abject superstition and terror. As we rolled along the banks of the Ganges, I thought what tales that stream could tell. Could we but listen in the dead of night, what sounds we might hear! Hush! hark! There is a footstep on the shore. The rushes on the bank are parted, and a Hindoo mother comes to the water's edge. Look! she holds a child in her arms. She starts back, and with a shriek casts it to the river monsters. Such scenes are not frequent now, because the government has repressed them by law, though infanticide is fearfully common in other ways. But even yet in secret—"darkly at dead of night"—does fanaticism sometimes pay its offering to the river which is worshipped as a god. This is what Hindooism does for the mother and for her child. Thus it wrongs at once childhood and motherhood and womanhood. Who that thinks of such scenes can but pray that a better faith may be given to the women of India, that the mother may no longer look with anguish into the face of her own child, as one doomed to destruction, but like any Christian mother, clasp her baby to her breast, thanking God who has given it to her, and bidden her keep it, and train it up for life, for virtue and for happiness.

But is there any hope of seeing Hindooism destroyed? I fear not very soon. When I think how many ages it has stood, and what mighty forces it has resisted, the task seems almost hopeless. For centuries it fought with Buddhism for the conquest of India, and remained master of the field. Then came Mohammedanism in the days of the Mogul Empire. It gained a foothold, and reared its mosques even in the Holy City of the Hindoos. To this day the most splendid structure in Benares is the great Mosque of Aurungzebe. As I climbed its tall minaret, and looked over the city, I saw here and there the gilded domes and slender spires that mark the temples of Islam. But these fierce iconoclasts, who set out from Arabia to break the idols in pieces, could not destroy them here. The fanatical Aurungzebe could build his mosque, with its minaret so lofty as to overtop all the temples of Paganism; but he could not convert the idolaters. With such tenacity did they cling to their faith, that even the religion of the Prophet could make little impression, though armed with all the power of the sword.

And now come modern civilization and Christianity. The work of "tearing down" is not left to Missions alone. There is in India a vast system of National Education. In Benares there is an University whose stately halls would not look out of place among the piles of Oxford. In the teaching there is a rigid—I had almost said a religious—abstinence from religion. But science is taught, and science confutes the Hindoo cosmogony. When it is written in the Purânas that the world rests on the back of an elephant, and that the elephant stands on the back of a tortoise, and the tortoise on the back of the great serpent Nâga, it needs but a very little learning to convince the young Hindoo that his sacred books are a mass of fables. But this does not make him a Christian. It lands him in infidelity, and leaves him there. And this is the state of the educated mind of India, of what is sometimes designated as Young India, or Young Bengal. Here they stand—deep in the mire of unbelief, as if they had tried to plant their feet on the low-lying Delta of the Ganges, and found it sink beneath them, with danger of being buried in Gangetic ooze and slime. But even this is better than calling to gods that cannot help them; for at least it may give them a sense of their weakness and danger. It may be that the educated mind of India has to go through this stage of infidelity before it can come into the light of a clearer faith. At present they believe nothing, yet conform to Hindoo customs for social reasons, for fear of losing caste. This is all-powerful. It is hard for men to break away from it in detail. But once that a breach is made in their ranks, the same social tyranny may carry them over en masse, so that a nation shall be born in a day. At present the work that is going on is that of sapping and mining, of boring holes into the foundation of Hindooism; and this is done as industriously, and perhaps as effectively, by Government schools and colleges as by Missions.

At Benares we observed, in sailing up and down the Ganges, that the river had undermined a number of temples built upon its banks, and that they had fallen with their huge columns and massive architecture, and were lying in broken and shapeless masses, half covered by the water. What a spectacle of ruin and decay in the Holy City of the Hindoos! This is a fit illustration of the process which has been going on for the last half century in regard to Hindooism. The waters are washing it away, and by and by the whole colossal fabric, built up in ages of ignorance and superstition, will come crashing to the earth. Hindooism will fall, and great will be the fall of it.

CHAPTER XXI.

CALCUTTA-FAREWELL TO INDIA.