The effect of religion (for all nations worship something) upon the people affords overwhelming evidence of its origin. In all heathen lands the people are exceedingly religious. In India alone they worship 360,000,000 gods, but they know nothing about morality. Their religion offers no light in life and no hope in death. The condition of women in India is indescribable. If a man speaks of his wife he never says “wife,” but “family”; and if away, he never speaks of going home, but he is going to his house. There is no home life, as we look upon it, in all that heathen land. Women are considered by the Hindus as a thing that exists solely for their use. She is given away like a lifeless thing to the man who is to be her husband, but who does not consider her his equal. He is commanded by his religion to “enjoy her without attachment,” and never to love her or put his confidence in her. Some women are set apart religiously for the use of the men of all classes and castes. They are consecrated and “married” to the idols in the temples, and are brought up from their girlhood to live as prostitutes. Hindoo sacred law reaches its climax of cruelty and degradation in the rules it lays down for the control of a woman after her husband has died. She may be young and beautiful, she may belong to a wealthy and powerful family; it matters not; custom is as relentless as death in its weight of woe to crush her completely down.
One of the Hindoo sacred books says: “It is unlawful for any man to take a jewelless woman,” whose eyes are like the weeping cavi-flower; being deprived of her beloved husband, she is like a body deprived of the spirit. She may have only been a betrothed infant or a child of a few years. It makes no difference. The Shasters teach that if a widow burns herself alive on the funeral pile of her husband, even though he had killed a Brahmin, that most heinous of deeds, she expiates the crime. For long centuries widows have been a literal burnt offering for the redemption of husbands.
Another law is laid down after the following fashion: “On the death of their attached husbands, women must eat but once a day, must eschew betel and a spread mattress, must sleep on the ground, and continue to practice rigid mortification. Women who have put off glittering jewels of gold must discharge with alacrity the duties of devotion, and neglecting their persons, must feed on herbs and roots, so as barely to sustain life within the body. Let not a widow ever pronounce the name of another man.”
There are, in India, twenty-three millions of widows, of these fourteen thousand are baby widows under four years of age, and sixty thousand girl widows between five and nine years of age. Nearly one-fourth of the whole number of widows are young. Besides, there are many millions of deserted wives, whose condition is as bad, and in some cases worse, than that of the widows. The lives of many millions of these poor women are made so miserable that they prefer death to life, and thousands commit suicide yearly.
And all these helpless women have never heard the message of salvation from God’s Holy Word.
It so happens in these days of missionary work among the heathen that now and then the light of the Gospel finds its way into these benighted hearts. Such was the case of a Brahmin widow, who had lived in the home of her uncle, but, for a fancied offence, was beaten and turned into the street naked. She was a woman of commanding manner and appearance, such as few suffering widows possess. She was tall, elegant of bearing, and attractive. Her story, in short, is this: “I was married when only five years of age. I soon became a widow, and then my father and mother took care of me, though I was kept secure in their home. My father and mother died, and since I was fifteen years of age I have been with their relatives, who let me work in the fields and earn an honorable living. Then my mother’s own brother came along, and persuaded me to come to his house. I hoped for kindness, but I have been their slave from that day.”
When asked whether she had been led astray, she replied, “I might have been, and sat with jewels on my neck and arms, with a frontlet on my brow, and gems would have bedecked my ears had I yielded to the machinations of my uncle and the desires of his friends to betray me into a life of glittering slavery! Because I would not, I am in rags, and now turned homeless into the streets.”
Such is the suffering of women in India. And the saddest of all is, the only heaven they look for after this world, is a place where they can be their husband’s servants. Sad and terrible is their state!
The condition of womanhood in China is but little better. In fact she is unwelcome at her birth. If she is suffered to live, she is subjected to inhuman foot-binding. The feet are supposed to merit the poetical name of “golden lilies.” But how sad it is to discover that such a result is produced by indescribable torture, and that the part of the foot that is not seen is nothing but a mass of distorted or broken bones!
This binding process commences when the girl is about six years old. There is a Chinese proverb that says, “For every pair of bound feet has been shed a kong full of tears.” And yet, the most important part of a Chinese girl’s dress is her tiny shoe of colored silk or satin, most tastefully embroidered, with bright painted heels just peeping beneath the neat pantalets. Missionary ladies tell us how they themselves have seen three strong women holding a little girl by force to compel her to submit to this awful torture. It is not an uncommon thing for a mother to get up in the night and beat a poor child of seven or eight for keeping her awake by her stifled sobs from the terrible pain produced by the bandages. Through the weary summer days, instead of romping and enjoying the fresh air and sports with brothers, the poor little girl will lie, restless with fever, upon her little couch, and when the cold nights of winter come, she is afraid to wrap her limbs in any covering, else they grow warm and the suffering becomes more intense.