tian men have mastered the ancient Sanscrit, and have read the Vedas, and demanded from the Brahmins the proof of a statement under which millions of women have been foully murdered during the past twenty-five hundred years. The depth of their villainy has been revealed by the appeal made to the highest authority of their own religion. The honor of demolishing the last Brahminical pretext for regarding suttee as an orthodox Hindoo practice belongs to Horace Hayman Wilson. In a paper read by the learned professor before the Royal Asiatic Society on February 4, 1854, he proved that the passage—and it was the solitary text from all the Vedas that the Brahmins could bring forward in its defense—the passage quoted had actually been corrupted by the substitution of a single letter, which changed the whole sense, agneh for agreh, the meaning being thereby perverted from, “let them [the widows] go up into the dwelling,” to “let them go up into the fire”—the r changed to n made this difference; and these cruel men were responsible for the flagrant corruption! Professor Wilson added, that he was supported in his opinion by Dr. Max Müller, and that Aswalayana, the author of the Grihya Sutras—a work little inferior in authority to the Vedas themselves—actually designates the proper person to lead the widow away at the conclusion of the funeral rites; so that so far from demanding her immolation, the text inferentially enjoins the widow's preservation. Suttee, therefore, with all its antiquity, is proved by the Vedas to be, like female infanticide, an accursed invention of modern Hindooism.
Next to the Vedas, the “Institutes of Menu” are the highest authority to a Hindoo conscience. I have carefully read this entire code of laws; but not one obligation to such a rite as suttee is to be found in it. The Brahmins have not dared to reply to the learned professor. They assert, of course, that it is recommended in the Shasters and Puranas; but these are all of more recent origin, and are far below the paramount authority of the Vedas, and no serious doctrine can be built on them alone; so that they stand convicted of teaching for doctrines novelties which are only “the commandments of men,” like the Jews of old, or the Romanists
