Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/414

362 folly, are no strangers to the realms in which Brahma, Siva, Vishnu, and Indra (king of the inferior gods) preside. And when we learn the characters ascribed by their own shasters, (sacred books) to the beings whom the Hindus worship as their gods, we are made to blush for our common humanity. Oh! how little do infidels, prating of natural religion, the dignity of human nature, and the powers of human reason, know of the debt they owe to Christianity! But for the light of Christian morality in which they live, the atmosphere of Christian principles which they breathe, and the restraining influence of Christian public opinion by which they are surrounded and kept in check, with all their boasted virtue, intelligence, and perfectibility, they would sink to the level of degraded idolaters. Nor, in the eyes of a holy God, are such rejecters of his sovereignty and of his Son less guilty or less hateful than the vilest of the vile upon the benighted soil of heathen India.

It is not necessary here to enumerate even the chief of the deities of Hindustan. The names and history of many of them may be found elsewhere; to repeat them would be to defile our pages with a dark tissue of crimes