, an ambitious, a warlike class. The great majority
of the population of India consists of idolaters, blindly attached
to doctrines and rites which, considered merely with reference to the
temporal interests of mankind, are in the highest degree pernicious. In
no part of the world has a religion ever existed more unfavourable to
the moral and intellectual health of our race. The Brahminical mythology
is so absurd that it necessarily debases every mind which receives it
as truth; and with this absurd mythology is bound up an absurd system of
physics, an absurd geography, an absurd astronomy. Nor is this form
of Paganism more favourable to art than to science. Through the whole
Hindoo Pantheon you will look in vain for anything resembling those
beautiful and majestic forms which stood in the shrines of ancient
Greece. All is hideous, and grotesque, and ignoble. As this superstition
is of all superstitions the most irrational, and of all superstitions
the most inelegant, so is it of all superstitions the most immoral.
Emblems of vice are objects of public worship. Acts of vice are acts of
public worship. The courtesans are as much a part of the establishment
of the temple, as much ministers of the god, as the priests. Crimes
against life, crimes against property, are not only permitted but
enjoined by this odious theology. But for our interference human victims
would still be offered to the Ganges, and the widow would still be laid
on the pile with the corpse of her husband, and burned alive by her own
children. It is by the command and under the especial protection of one
of the most powerful goddesses that the Thugs join themselves to the
unsuspecting traveller, make friends with him, slip the noose round his
neck, plunge their knives in his eyes, hide him in the earth, and divide
his money and baggage. I have read many examinations of Thugs; and I
particularly remember an altercation which took place between two
of those wretches in the presence of an English officer. One Thug
reproached the other for having been so irreligious as to spare the life
of a traveller when the omens indicated that their patroness required
a victim. "How could you let him go? How can you expect the goddess
to protect us if you disobey her commands? That is one of your North
country heresies." Now, Sir, it is a difficult matter to determine
in what way Christian rulers ought to deal with such superstitions as
these. We might have acted as the Sp