refore, if it may be called a church, must be reformed, and
its practices must be revised, if the decay which is now going
on is ever arrested.

Several religions have been born and bred and have died in Benares.
Vedic, Moslem, Buddhist, Brahmin have been nursed and flourished and
have decayed within the same walls. It is impossible to ascertain
when the Ganges was first worshiped, or when people began to build
temples upon its banks, or when Benares first became sacred.
Water was one of the first objects worshiped; the fertilizing and
life giving influence of a stream was one of the first phenomena
of nature recognized. Ganga, the beautiful heroine of a Hindu
legend, is supposed to have lived at the source of the water to
which her name is given, and the river is often represented as
flowing from the head of Siva, the chief deity of the Brahmins,
the most repulsive, the most cruel, the most vicious of all the
gods.

Siva is at once the generator and the destroyer. He represents
time, the sun, water, fire and practically all the mysteries of
nature, and Benares is the center of his influence and worship.
The temple which attracts the most pilgrims is dedicated to him.
The "Well of Knowledge," which is in the courtyard of the Golden
Temple, is his chosen residence, and is resorted to by every pilgrim
who drinks the putrid water from a ladle with which it is dipped
up by the attendant priest. All around the Golden Temple are other
temples and shrines dedicated to other gods, but Siva is supreme,
and before his image is the kneeling bull, the common symbol of
Phallic worship as represented in the legend of Europe. Siva's
hair is a bunch of snakes, serpents wind around his neck, arms,
waist and legs; a crescent is stamped upon his forehead, which
was the chief symbol of the ancient cult of Arabia destroyed by
Mohamet Aurangzeb, one of the Mogul emperors, who was a Mohammedan
fanatic. He came here in the middle of his reign, destroyed half
the Hindu temples and upon the ruins of the oldest and the finest
shrine of Siva erected a mosque which still stands and its slender
minarets almost pierce the sky. This mosque was thrust into the
most sacred place of Hindu worship as an insult to the Brahmins,
but the latter are more tolerant, and though they are very largely
in the majority and control everything there, they permit it
to stand untouched, but the worshipers of Islam are compelled
to enter it through a side door. This,