and privilege of ruler and
subject is fixed in a code of laws, and a body of jurisprudence older far
than the Christian era, and the object of universal reverence; but the
application of these laws rests (says Rhode) on the arbitrary decisions of
the priests, and their execution on the will of the sovereign. The
constitution of India is therefore like a house without a foundation and
without a roof. It is a principle of Hindoo religion not to kill a worm,
not even to tread on a blade of grass, for fear of injuring life; but the
torments, cruelties, and bloodshed inflicted by Indian tyrants would shock
a Nero or a Borgia. Half the best informed writers on India will tell you
that the Brahmanical religion is pure monotheism; the other half as
confidently assert that they worship a million gods. Some teach us that
the Hindoos are spiritualists and pantheists; others that their idolatry
is more gross than that of any living people.

Is there any way of reconciling these inconsistencies? If we cannot find
such an explanation, there is at least one central point where we may
place ourselves; one elevated position, from which this mighty maze will
not seem wholly without a plan. In India the whole tendency of thought is
ideal, the whole religion a pure spiritualism. An ultra, one-sided
idealism is the central tendency of the Hindoo mind. The God of Brahmanism
is an intelligence, absorbed in the rest of profound contemplation. The
good man of this religion is he who withdraws from an evil world into
abstract thought.

Nothing else explains the Hindoo character as this does. An eminently
religious people, it is their one-sided spiritualism, their extreme
idealism, which gives rise to all their incongruities. They have no
history and no authentic chronology, for history belongs to this world,
and chronology belongs to time. But this world and time are to them wholly
uninteresting; God and eternity are all in all. They torture themselves
with self-inflicted torments; for the body is the great enemy of the
soul's salvation, and they must beat it down by ascetic mortifications.
But asceticism, here as everywhere else, tends to self-indulgence, since
one extreme produces another. In one part of India, therefore, devotees
are swinging on hooks in honor of Siva, hanging themselves by the feet,
head downwards, over a fire, rolling on a bed of prickly thorns, jumping
on a couch filled with sharp knives, boring holes in their tongues, an