of our own day. Exactly as the present Pope has done, when, eighteen hundred years after the canon of Scripture was closed, he dared to invent a new doctrine—that of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary—and would fain make its belief binding on the consciences of Catholics, even so have these Brahmins acted at distances almost as great from the date of their own Vedas.
Every suttee, therefore, has been without what even they regard as the divine sanction, which alone could ordain it. Christian Orientalists and missionaries have pressed this position, to the utter discomfiture and confusion of these guilty Brahmins.
But while the Vedas and the Code are thus entirely silent, and even lay down the laws by which a widow's life is to be guided, the inferior authority of modern Hindooism—and any thing is “modern” in their view which dates within two thousand years of this time—are particular and definite enough, in prescribing the barbarous rites under which she is urged to yield her delicate body to the devouring flames; so that upon this fraud on the faith of India has been built up the greatest victory that priestcraft has ever achieved over the natural feelings and instincts of mankind in any age or nation.
The words of the Puranas, which commend this dreadful rite, are as follows: “The wife who commits herself to the flames with her husband's corpse shall equal Arundhoti, [the exalted wife of Vashista,] and dwell in Swarga, [heavenly bliss.] As many hairs as are on the human body, multiplied by threescore and fifty lakhs [each lakh, 100,000] of years, so many years shall she live with him in Swarga. As the snake-catcher forcibly draws the serpent from his hole in the earth, so, bearing her husband from hell, she shall with him enjoy happiness. Dying with her husband, she purifies three generations—her father and mother's side and husband's side. Such a wife, adoring her husband, enters into celestial felicity with him—greatest and most admired; lauded by the choirs of heaven, with him she shall enjoy the delights of heaven while fourteen Indras reign.”
