Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/25

 India the Land of Religions 1824 that "caste divisions are as destructive of national union as of social enjoyment." The late Svāmī Vive- kānanda, the brilliant representative of Hinduism at the "Parliament of Religions," held in Chicago in con- nection with the Universal Exposition in 1893, passed the last years of his too short life (he died in 1902) in a suburb of Calcutta, doing philanthropic work, denouncing caste and the outcasting of those who had crossed the ocean, and recommending the Hindus to take to the eating of meat. The voices of other reformers are lifting. Especially the two great native religious reform associations, the Brāhma Samāj, or Theistic Association of Bengal, and the Arya Samaj, or Vedic Association of the United Provinces and the Panjab, different as are their aims in other re- spects, are marshalled on the side of opposition to caste, as an anachronism, anomaly, and bar to social and national progress. The dreadful institution of Suttee, or widow-burn- ing abolished in 1829, under the administration of Lord William Bentinck, by decree of government; the car of Juggernaut; the sect of the Thugs; and the practice of self-hypnosis to the point of prolonged trance or apparent death, are evidences of the frenzy- ing quality of Hindu religion, and the way it has of overshadowing individual sanity and public in- terest. There has been, and there still is, too much