Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/167

 This last provision strikes me the more from its contrast with what I have observed in another country of Asia, which boasts of a religion derived from the remotest antiquity, and inspired with a Divine wisdom. Only six years since I was in India, where, among other things that opened my eyes, I learned that the condition of widows had been made hardly more tolerable by the abolition of the suttee; that when a husband died, his widow was looked upon as one accursed, whose only act of dignity was to throw herself upon his funeral pile, and let her ashes mingle with his. If she dared to live, she was subjected to sufferings and humiliations, even from her own nearest kindred, from which death itself were a relief. From that inhumanity of the Hindoo, which extinguishes even the promptings of nature, I turn to the Hebrew lawgiver, and find him looking after the poorest and the weakest, the loneliest and the most suffering, of the daughters of Israel, that he may protect those who had lost their natural protectors; and that, speaking in the name of the Highest, he warned any who would do them wrong, that their wives should be doomed to widowhood and their children to orphanage! Thus the Hebrew Law took the poor and the weak under its special protection. If a man had any physical infirmity; if he were blind or deaf, that, instead of exposing him to be mocked at, furnished the strongest claim to sympathy and tenderness. "Thou shalt not curse the deaf" [even though he cannot hear it,] "nor put a stumbling-block before the blind" [even though he cannot see it]. It is a beautiful trait of some savage tribes that they regard as sacred the persons of the insane. They do not dare to irritate the mind that has been troubled by a mysterious visitation of God. So under the Hebrew Law, death, sorrow, widowhood,