ous rites of the Thugs, might be
revived by the fanatical, if foreign influence were withdrawn; but,
taking India as a whole, these things are coming to be discarded. The
people are ashamed of them; they dare not undertake to defend them in
the open day of the present civilization. All intelligent Hindus are
persuaded to accept the situation, and look to the future instead of the
past. The country is full of new influences which must be counted as
factors. British rule is there, and is there to stay. Education has
come--good, bad, and indifferent. English University training is
bringing forward a host of acute thinkers of native blood. But the
forces of Western infidelity are also there, grappling with Western
Christianity on Indian soil, and before the eyes of the conquered and
still sullen people. The vilest of English books and the worst of French
novels in English translations are in the markets. All the worst phases
of European commerce are exhibited. The opium monopoly, the liquor
traffic, and all the means and methods of unscrupulous money-getting,
with the wide-spread example of drinking habits, and unbounded luxury
and extravagance.

And, in opinions, the war of aggression is no longer on one side only.
While the foreigner speaks and writes of superstition, of heathenism, of
abominable rites now passing away, the native Hindu press is equally
emphatic in its condemnation of what it calls the swinish indulgence of
the Anglo-Saxon, his beer-drinking and his gluttony, his craze for money
and material power, his disgust at philosophy and all intellectual
aspiration, his half-savage love for the chase and the destruction of
animal life. Educated Hindus throw back against the charge of idolatry
our idolatry of pelf, which, as they claim, eclipses every other thought
and aspiration, leads to dishonesty, over-reaching, and manifold crime,
and sinks noble ethics to the low level of expediency or self-interest;
the conquest is not yet won.

A hundred varieties of creed have sprung up beneath this banyan-tree
which I have called Hinduism. There are worshippers of Vishnu, of Siva,
of Kali, of Krishna as Bacchus, and of Krishna as the supreme and
adorable God. There are Sikhs, and Jains, and Buddhists; Theosophists,
Vedantic Philosophers, Mohammedans, Brahmos, Parsees, Evolutionists, and
Agnostics; Devil-worshippers, and worshippers of ghosts and serpents;
but in considering these as forces to be met by Christian influence