Is there in the whole of our Christian Creed a more simple, more beautifully expressed prayer to the Almighty power?
This hymn, as I said before, was the common prayer of a people 3000 years ago.
The Vedic conception of immortality is not less beautiful in its simplicity:—
“Do thou conduct us to heaven, where our friends dwell in bliss, having left on earth the infirmities of the body—free from lameness, free from blindness, free from crookedness of body—there let us behold our fathers, forefathers, and our children. May the water-shedding spirits bear us upwards, cooling us with their swift motion through the air, and sprinkling us with dew. Bear us, carry us, with all our faculties complete, to the world of the righteous. Crossing the dark valley which spreadeth boundless around him, let the unborn soul ascend to heaven. Wash the feet of him who is stained with sin; let him go upwards with cleansed feet. Crossing the gloom, gazing with wonder in many directions, let the unborn soul go up to heaven.”
From the Vedas has arisen the great sacred Brahmin caste, which even now ranks highest throughout India. It is regarded as pure, stainless, divine, as well as human, worthy of unbounded admiration and worship. The Brahmin is the general preceptor, the guide of many millions of Hindus, residing in the vast country lying between the Himalayas and Cape Comarin.
The Brahmin is not merely the thinking, but he alone is the reading, man. He possesses and reads the holy books—Vedas, Shastras, and Puranas—he knows the Sanskrit and the Hindu literature—he interprets its secrets to his countrymen.
Of course the Brahminical tribes are now numerous all through India, and education is fast stripping them of their divine assumptions, and reducing them gradually to the condition of ordinary humanity. Still, as they become imbued with our modern ideas and bend to European influence, the Brahmins adhere to their studious habits. They find their way to the “professions,” which are gradually introduced into the Indian empire.
One of the best pleaders in the courts of Calcutta, my friend Jokonanda Mookerjea, is a Brahmin of the highest caste, but like many of his ancient tribe, he has of late years forfeited the good opinion of his people, owing to his having modified somewhat, or rather relaxed, the strict rules of that caste.
One who has not had much communion with Indians can hardly conceive how strictly, even after a century of close contact with Europeans, the natives keep in its integrity the observance of the caste law. A case is on record of a Brahmin felon, confined in the Calcutta gaol in 1864, who tried to starve himself to death, and submitted to most severe flogging rather than eat food, on account of his scruples as to whether the man who had cooked it was equal in sanctity to his own caste.
Trades of all kinds are classified according to caste. The goldsmiths rank highest, and claim to be the nearest to the Brahmins; the Dattas, or writers, come next; then follow the bankers, merchants, &c., &c., down to the very lowest grade of menial work—barber, man-servant, cook, cook’s mate, sweeper, and, last of all, meter and dome—this last is the only one which will remove the dead, whether man or beast.