nected with splendid and fascinating ceremonies, including music and dancing, and gratifying every voluptuous passion, should captivate the heart, and overpower the judgment of youth.

But this superstition maintains a still stronger power over him, by taking advantage of his fears and anxieties in reference to a future state. Thus, while sitting before his own door by the side of the Ganges, he observes crowds passing daily to this river coming in sight of it, each one lifts up his hands to it, in the posture of adoration; they descend into it, and, mixing therewith a variety of minute ceremonies, perform their ablutions, and seek there the removal of stains which would otherwise accompany the worshipper into the next birth. On particular occasions, with one glance of his eye, he sees thousands at the same moment in the midst of the sacred stream, in the act of profound adoration, waiting for the propitious moment, the bramhinical signal, for immersion. He frequently sees there others attending, with the deepest solicitude, a dying relation, and, using the water and the clay of this sacred river, performing offices which acquire in his mind the deepest interest, as the last preparations for the next state of existence. After the death of the individual, he watches these relatives, who, having burnt the body, make a channel from the funeral

1

pile to the river, into which they wash the ashes of the body just consumed, that they may mix in the purifying stream. At another time, he sees

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person bearing a bone, part of the body of a relation, who has had the misfortune to die at a distance from the Ganges, and casting it into the river for the benefit of the deceased. Others pass him, carrying on their shoulders, in pans, the water of the deified Ganges, to the distance of hundreds of miles, that therewith they may perform rites connected, as the worshippers suppose, with their highest interests. The stories to which he listens in his own family, or amongst the boys and men where he resorts, contain constant allusions to the miraculous powers of this river; he, therefore, falls down with the rest of his countrymen, and adores a goddess whose waters refresh the living, and bear the dying to a state of bliss.

He who advances to the highest order in the discharge of the duties connected with the popular superstition will rise a step in the following birth; he who neglects these duties, sinks lower, and per. haps loses human existence; in which case he passes through 60,000,000 of births before he can return to the human state. He who wholly neglects religion, sinks into some dreadful place of punishment.

་:

From hence it appears, that the greater part of the rewards and punishments connected with this system, are visible in this world, and every appearance of happiness and of misery in men, animals, or trees, is associated in the mind of a Hindoo with the actions of the past birth. It

་་་,

might be supposed that such a system of visible rewards and visible punishments would produce a powerful effect on society; but, alas! this is far from being the case; these visible effects of the virtuous or vicious actions of the preceding state of existence are too paltry and too familiar to produce any excitement to virtue, or any repression to vice. They merely serve now and then to whet a joke at the expense of individuals supposed to be suffering for the actions of the past birth.

Such then is this system of idolatry as operating upon the present hopes, the moral condition, and future prospects, of nine-tenths of the pagan population of India. There is nothing in the ceremonies of this system of a moral nature, or which can produce moral effects, and it is plain, that all the influential effects which might have arisen from an exhibition of the joys or terrors of the future state are lost, by removing from these joys and terrors the very attributes which have

VOL. III.

ever made them so impressive, their being invisible, and never-ending in their duration.

These then are the results which have followed the speculations of some of the wisest of the human race, and of a system of religious practice which has been tried for three thousand years upon more than one half of the human race. Not one moral result now-not one hope for the future; all terminating in an endless series of transmigrating through every form of animated matter.

We have, in the preceding remarks, given a rapid view of the Hindoo sacred code, as a grand system, regular in all its parts, and proposing a defined and magnificent object, nothing less than to the yogee absorption into the divine nature, and, to the common people, a gradual advance towards the same state. But it may be proper now to refer to the actual condition of One Hundred Millions of beings, upon whom this system has been operating with full force for so-many ages.

That system must be essentially vicious which dooms the great mass of society to ignorance, and treats rational beings as though they possessed no powers, except those of the animal. This is

the state to which the Hindoo nation has been doomed by its bramhinical legislators. The education of all, except the bramhůns, is confined to a few rudiments, qualifying them to write a letter on business, and initiating them into the first rules of arithmetic. A Hindoo school is a mere shop, in which, by a certain process, the human being is prepared to act as a copying machine, or as a lythographic press. The culture of the mind is never contemplated in these seminaries. Hence Hindoo youths, though of a capacity exceedingly quick, never find the means of enlarging and strengthening the faculties. The bud withers

as soon as it is ready to expand.

Destitute, therefore, of all that is reclaiming in his education, of all that contributes to the formation of good dispositions and habits, these youths herd together for mutual corruption. Destitute of knowledge themselves, the parents, the tutors, cannot impart to others that which they themselves have never received; human nature takes its unrestrained course, and whatever is in the human heart receives an unbounded gratifieation.

The youth next enters into the married state'; but the laws under which he lives do not allow him to choose his own wife: the parents make