BENGAL.
287
SenteJice continued front p. 284.]
an idiot on the top of a mountain to obtain a favourable decision in a Privy Council Appeal. A large section of the people belongs to the august Aryan race, from which we ourselves descend. Its classical language, Sanskrit,
is
We
Highlanders.
as near to our
own
as that of the
Welsh or Scottish
address the Deity and his earthly representatives,
common
our father and mother, by words derived from roots
and Hindu.
Christian
Nor does
the
religious
instinct
to the
assume a
wider variety of manifestations, or exhibit a more striking series of metamorphoses, among the European than among the Indian branches
Theodore Parker and Comte are more read by the Hindus, known as ‘Young Bengal,’ than any Sanskrit
of the race.
advanced theologian.
up
On
the
same bench of a Calcutta
college
sit
youths trained
in the strictest theism, others indoctrinated in the mysteries of the
Hindu
trinity
and pantheon, with representatives of every
chain of superstition
—-from
the
whom
the family god, to the cruel rites of Kali, to
was offered
in
Hugh
District, twenty-five miles
indeterminate meaning.
The Census
officers
a
human
victim
from Calcutta, as
Indeed, the very word Hindu
as the famine of 1866.
link in the
harmless offering of flowers before
is
employ
lately
one of absolutely
it
as a convenient
generic term to include 45^ millions of the population of Bengal, comprising elements of transparently distinct ethnical origin, separated from
each other by language, customs, and religious
rites.
But Hinduism, understood even in this wide sense, represents only one of many creeds and races found within Bengal. The other great historical cultus, which, during the last twelve centuries, did for the
among the European whole population of Bengal. The Muhammadans amount to nearly 22 millions; and the LieutenantGovernor of Bengal is, so far as numbers go, as great a Musalman power as the Sultan of Turkey himself. The remaining 2 millions
Semitic peoples what Christianity accomplished
Aryans, has
won
to itself one-third of the
of the population are
composed
chiefly of half savage tribes professing
aboriginal religions, but include 128,000 converts to Christianity.
Amid
the stupendous catastrophes of river inundations, famines, tidal
waves, and cyclones of the Lower Provinces of Bengal, the religious
works with a vitality unknown in European countries, where the forces of Nature have long yielded to the control of man. Until the British Government stepped in with its police, and canals, and railroads, between the people and what they were accustomed
instinct
to consider as the dealings of Providence, scarcely a year passed with-
some terrible manifestation of the power and the wrath of God. Maratha invasions from Central India, piratical devastations on the seaboard, banditti who marched about the interior in bodies of 50,000 men, floods which drowned the harvests of many Districts, and droughts out
