Page:Sketches of some distinguished Indian women.djvu/45

 sorrow came to her, in the death of her beloved brother, her only near relative. As he lay dying his thoughts were all for her, and he was grieved and troubled to think how unprotected she would be when he was gone. Most English brothers would have felt the same under similar circumstances; but for a Hindu it must indeed have seemed terrible to think of leaving a young unmarried sister alone, and almost friendless, in the country where women are entirely dependent upon their male relations. Happily, however, Ramabai was not left long unprotected; six months after her brother's death she married an educated Bengali gentleman named Bipin Bihari Medhavi. Like herself, he had thrown aside the old Hindu beliefs, without having embraced the purer truths of Christianity. This is the case with a very large proportion of the educated natives of India, especially among the Hindus. As they learn more and more, they get to see the folly, the absurdity, and the falseness of their old religion, and they become ashamed of the senseless, degrading teaching of the Brahmans. But as their education is purely secular there is nothing in it to lead them to adopt Christianity, and they drift either into a cloudy, undefined Theism, or into avowed and absolute unbelief. The former is, perhaps, the most common, and it seems to have been the state of mind of Ramabai and her husband. They believed in