Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/190

162 church who live beside them. Have the heathen lamps burning before their images, with the ringing of bells and wavings of censers? so have they. Have the heathen their holy places, their pilgrimages, their miracle-working shrines? so have they. Have the heathen their processions, images, music, fireworks, fans, holidays? so have they. Have the heathen hosts of inferior gods? the Roman Catholics have their saints. And as in Hinduism inferior deities have crowded out the worship of the Supreme Being, so in Roman Catholicism the Virgin and the saints have eclipsed the only true God and the only Mediator, Jesus Christ. When crossing the surf in a Massulah boat one day, a Roman Catholic asked me, “which we ought to worship, the Father or the mother?” adding, “We worship the mother.”

In a little work on the “Identity of Heathenism and Popery,” by a Hindu Christian, the close relationship of the two systems in one respect is illustrated by the following story: “In a certain town, a Hindu and a Roman Catholic, getting into a dispute, began to revile each the other's gods. The abuse ran high on both sides; and upon the Hindu's sneering at the other's St. Anthony as being only a tamby,