Page:Calcutta Review Vol. II (Oct. - Dec. 1844).pdf/372

Rh only be practised by infants taught to do so by their nurses, or by persons devoid of intellect?” What, we ask, must be the direct and legitimate influence of such a system on the intellect of its enthusiastic votaries, young and old? What can it be, except a resistless influence in depraving the reason and judgment—in crippling and degrading the cognitive powers—in paralysing the energies of original thought—in fettering or even crushing the spirit of inquiry—in contracting, if not wholly annihilating, the capacity of accurate discriminative discernment; in a word, in superinducing and perpetuating a state of hopeless childhood and mental imbecility?

And if such be the inevitable effect of the existing system of things on the intellect, still more disastrous is the influence which it exerts on the moral nature of the Hindu community.

In the existing circumstances of that community, there is not merely the absence of any principles fitted to elevate the moral character, but the positive presence of every principle fitted to destroy it. Think of the mantasmantras [sic] or popular formularies for inflicting damage or mortal injury on enemies. Think of the rites and ceremonies for obtaining success in invading the rights of property, and violating the sanctity of a neighbour’s home. Think of the promiscuousness with which persons of all sexes, with scarcely a covering, perform their ablutions in tanks and sacred streams. Think of the wanton and lascivious dances, constantly exhibited before the idols, with their fitting accompaniments of filthy and abominable songs. Think of the apathy, the hard-heartedness, the unfeeling disregard of human suffering produced by the distinctions of caste, the self-inflicted cruelties, and the brutal exposures of the sick and the dying. Think of the boundless license to all vice and crime afforded by the unseemly characters of the gods—the very objects of devotion and worship—whose unworthy exploits are perpetually rehearsed amid the excitement of festivity, music, and song; how they quarrelled with each other, kicked and abused each other, and, in their various social feuds and domestic scuffles, often bore away the most unmistakeable badges of their folly and shame, in the loss of an eye, a tooth, or a head; how, in their personal bearing and demeanour towards others, they were ever and anon guilty of the worst possible excesses—excesses of dishonesty and fraud, of lying and deceit, of intemperance and licentiousness, of ferocious cruelty and bloody revenge; in a word, how the popular gods of Hinduism, whose lives and actions are constantly imaged before the mental eye of their deluded votaries, are beings who seem to differ from the most depraved of the race of man only by their superiority