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 THE CHRONICLE OF THE PARLIAMENT. 145 truth of one's own. For such I have the greatest pity. There are a few Hindu temples in Southern India where women singers are employed to sing on certain occasions. Some of them are of dubious character, and the Hindu society feels it and is trying its best to remove the evil. These women are never allowed to enter the main body of the temple, and as for their being priestesses, there is not one woman priest from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin. If the present abuses in India have been produced by the Hindu religion, the same religion had the strength of producmg a society which made the Greek historian say, "No Hindu was ever known to tell an untruth, no Hindu woman ever known to be unchaste." And even in the present day, where is the chaster woman or milder man than in India? In the last place, I am very, very sorry for those who criticise the great ones of India, and my only consolation is that all their information about them has come from third-hand, fourth-hand sources, percolating through layers of superstition and bigotry. To those who find in the refusal of the Hindu to criticise the character of Jesus a tacit acceptation of the superi- ority of the fanatical nil-admirari cult they represent, I am tempted to quote the old fable of yEsop and tell them " Not to you I bend the knee but to the image you are carrying on your back " ; and to point out to them one page from the life of the great Emperor Akbar. A certain ship full of Mohammedan pilgrims was going to Mecca. On its way a Portuguese vessel captured it. Amongst the booty were some copies of the Koran. The Portuguese hanged these copies of the Koran round the necks of dogs and paraded these dogs through the streets of Ormuz. It happened that this very Portuguese ship was captured by the Emperor's men, and in it were found some copies of the Bible. The love of Akbar for his mother is well known, and his mother was a zealous Mohammedan. It pained her very much to hear of the treatment of the sacred book of the Mohammedans in the hands of Christians, and she wished that Akbar would do the same with the Bible. But this great man replied : " Mother, these ignorant men do not know the value of the Koran, and they treated it in a manner which is the outcome of ignorance. But I know the glory of the Koran and the Bible both, and I cannot debase myself in the way they did." Mr. Gandhi's remarks were followed by expressions of sympathy from among the audience. The F7^ee Baptist Church; by the Rev. J. A. Howe, Lewis- ton, Maine. The Spii^itual Ideas of the Brahmo-So77iaj ; by Mr. B. B. Nagarkar, Bombay. 10