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" " My dear friend," here re- sumed Blancombe, " I wish you would then, so far as your own intelligence permits, return in such things to the Vedas. For, I suppose, after speaking of that clear Spirit, which foresees and governs all things, you would hardly worship the winds and the PRESENT INCONSISTENCIES. 299 flame, or the dawn. But will you persuade your countrymen to rise above the use of idols? They are not authorised by the Vedas. Are you prepared to give up caste ? That is not origi- nally Vedic. Still less is any such limitation of priesthood, as would confine it to a clan. I will not ask as to the Sati, or burning of widows by fire, for it is happily abolished ; but how many lives might have been sooner saved, if your Pandits had dealt frankly with our Government, and confessed that in the Vedas no such thing is enjoined; and that even in Manu* the only Sat( spoken of is a widowhood spent in pious austerity. Since also incarnation is not in the Vedas, will you reconsider its principle so far as to beware of deifying any unworthy object? The idea may somewhere have its fulfilment; but yet your reasoning presentiment of it should not be rashly applied to inadequate representatives of the Divinest Thought. The A'chArya will not readily allow that the distinctness of immortal souls is taught in the Vedas, though some have thought so; but if it should be found there, will he accept it? In short, will you all start from the Vedas, so far as to discard any evil in your later religion, which they are found not to sanction, and yet superadd those deeper thoughts of eternal and spiritual things, which perhaps by some inward development are being revealed to you from time to time ? Then, I almost hope, you would not be far from the kingdom of God. " Now consider this. There are chiefly two kinds of proof possible for a religion as Divine. One is external authority ; the other, inward excellence. This latter may perhaps have a spiritual authority of its own in the form of persuasion. But the first, as regards Hindtiism, has been found utterly to break down. For obviously it requires history as its vehicle ; but in history, native India eminently fails. You can hardly fix any early date or person, without help from more accurate observers. But where there is no sure history, still less can there be argu- ment from prophecy, in the sense of prediction, which very • ManUf V. i6o. 300 INHERENT PERSUASIVENESS. many persons consider also necessary to the external authority of a religion, and which, I think, you seem rather to claim. Just as little can miracles (or such wonderful displays of Divine power as confer authority) be brought into argument, where facts have not been carefully observed, and habitually recorded without exaggeration. All gi-ound therefore for that positive belief of yours in the external authority of Hinddism, as being revealed with sufficient sanctions to overbear all human reason- ing, has vanished from under your feet. Nor has it merely vanished, but its very opposite has come up in our critical proofs of Ilindiiism having gone through many stages, and been subject to all the accidents of human development. If your re- ligion is to be defended, it must be on very diffijrent ground from that of its external guarantees, or the immutable authority of the Sutras. " But there may remain the second possibility of inherent goodness. Indeed, I think, God has made it so natural for men to pray to Him, and the manifold pleadings of His Providence, or of His Holy Spirit, so encompass us on every side, that any mode of approaching Him must be better than none. But yet He may in His unsearchable wisdom have taught mankind a more excellent way. Suppose now, that I wished to become a Hindu, or, which is more nearly the case, that I wish you to help me in lifting up that mass of your simple countrymen, whom we see whelmed in ignorance, what would you recom- mend out of your religion, as means of improvement ? We have in England books of all sorts and sizes, which we give to the children of all ranks, after teaching them to read. Which of your Sdstras should we distribute in that manner ? Would the history of B^ma be improving ? Not, if my impression of it, with its legends of monkeys and Biicshasas be correct. Still less would that of Crishna, with the stories of his playing vdih the Gopis, and holding up the mountain as an umbrella. Nor even out of the Vedas do I think that many hymns could be extracted, which would awaken men's moral nature, and teach INTERNAL FAILURE OP HINDUISM. 301 them to lead a righteous and sober life. There are certainly pretty hymns enough about Ushas, and about the liberation of the rain ; and I remember some to Brahmanaspati, whose title as the hearer of prayer, pleases me. But how little a way would these things go towards building up the inner stature of the spiritual man ! As to the invocations of the natural elements in general, I fear they would injure rather than improve. They would increase that tendency to a sensuous worship, and that forgetfulness of moral government, which some of your country- men are prone enough to. Nor probably, would you, more than myself, wish to hear them invoking again Agni and the Maruts, any more than to see them bowing down to idols. The most hopeful part of your literature would be the laws of Manu. But these are not the most directly religious books ; and although wholesome precepts might be extracted from them, a very large part of the code is now impracticable, and not even attempted. Nor would such portions of it as we could use go far in the way we wish for education. Again, in some of the Purdnas, I grant that very grand descriptions may be found of the spiritual nature of the highest Deity, and that metaphysical thought may be quickened by them. But all these are so mixed up with trans- parent fable, so confused in their own associations, if even they have not the graver fault of a pantheistic mysticism which effects the opposite of what it intended, that I fear little use coidd be made of them. Nor should I know which of the rival Purdnas to recommend. Nor is it so little a thing as you suppose, for contending deities to be thus brought forward. Surely, if the true and only wise God has given us in any way a revelation of Himself, He cannot have left it doubtful, whether the strange legends of Siva, or Vishnu, or Crishna, give the truest picture of Him. Rather, I think that when the holiest truth comes forth among men, all imperfect forms of it will droop their heads to our mind's eye by the Divine original, even as Nala in the poem appeared faint and earthly by the side of the deities uncovering themselves. If we saw God as most worthily He 302 SHORTCOMINGS. might shew Himself, we should no longer think patiently of Him as incarnate in boar or dwarf, nor readily involve doc- trines in such guise of parable, lest men be degraded by taking it literally. Least of all can such strange passages as you quoted me out of the Linga Pur^a be put forth wholesomely as lessons for the young, or lights to the simple. " Now if I am right in believing that Hindd literature has a dearth of things we could use to improve men, and if this literary dearth be but an index to a want in the religion ; and if, as we have already seen, education, morality, and spiritual religion require training throughout India, while your subtle metaphysics are impotent as means of moral restoration, what conclusion, my dear friend, must we arrive at? Surely this religion of yours cannot, in its present form at least, be destined to fulfil the prediction of the Sri Bhdgavat, which speaks of all nations coming to one faith ; but there must remain something better, which God has yet in store for you. The older way may in His manifold providence have been permitted as a sort of training ; it may have many fragments of truth ; it may have disciplined your minds into that contemplative wisdom, which should enable you to apprehend something at once higher and simpler. Nor would I blame you for following such light as you have been brought up in, until something kindred, but better, shall have been given you. But yet I would willingly shew you a more excellent way." NOTE ON CHAPTER VIII. Most of the data in this and the preceding Chapter are due to Englishmen; but the application of philosophical criticism to them is, I am sorry to say, chiefly German.