as worthy to know the sacred books of her
own faith. It is a sin in Hinduism to-day for any man to teach a woman
the most sacred truths of the faith. Her mind is not a fit receptacle
for such truths.

While she has nothing to do in choosing for herself a husband, she is
bound in infancy, through holy wedlock, to a child like herself. Her
child husband may die before he attains manhood, when she becomes a
widow. And, because her stars are supposed to have had influence in
his death, she is treated with cruelty and is regarded as the evil
star of the home.

Owing to this evil custom of child marriage, there are to-day
twenty-six million widows in this land, of whom four hundred thousand
are under fifteen years of age. It is not simply that the lot of these
poor women is one of greatest hardship and contempt; they also become
the prey of lustful men and fall into grossest sins. In modern times
the government has tried to lighten the burdens of womanhood in the
land; but the representatives of Hinduism, and its custodians, all
stand in the way of any helpful legislation, and are determined to
keep woman in servitude at all hazards.

8. The religious ascetic represents one of the characteristic features
of modern Hinduism.

Religious asceticism has been the ideal of the Hindu life from time
immemorial. The man who has given up all earthly pursuits and wanders
with beggar's cup in hand from place to place, making pilgrimages to
the holy places of India, or who separates himself entirely from men
and devotes years to the solitude of the wilderness in the cultivation
of piety,--he it is who is the admiration of the whole Hindu
community. And it is for this very reason that so many men in India
to-day don the yellow robe of this profession, and make capital out of
this sentiment of the people.

There are millions of these religious mendicants who are entirely
non-productive and live upon the common people. A few of them,
doubtless, are sincere and are seeking after communion with God. But
the vast majority are lazy and rotten to the core. Their life is known
to be utterly worthless, and they are morally pestiferous in their
influence upon the whole community. And yet the people accept them as
the highest types of piety in the land. Even the poorest among them
would give his last morsel to these worthless men. There are, indeed,
very few in the community who would dare to refuse an offering to
these beggars, because they