The Sun.
London, England, 1857-09-02 00:00:00

'Ws' D IN. E S-1) ..(i. .

" SIZAFITSBURY22_,'_prIARACTERISTICS."

(Front the Dispatch )

Sir Harry, the sentimental flunkey in " High Life
Below Stairs, expresses his determination to make'
himself " master of Shikspur some wet afternoon."
The idiots who cackle about India have just some
such notion about the Hindoo religion. They think
it may be put down " some wet afternoon." It is
thousands upon thousands of years old. It is the
base as well as the apex of the body and soul' of
Eastern life. It is the authority of every law and
the source of every custom. It begins with the
sacred dip of the newly born in the holy Ganges.
It fixes the very food and drink, the aliment of the
most clamorous and craving of the appetites.. It
flees from the corrupting corpse at the moment of
the soul's parting in the hot and plague-bearing
atmosphere. It organises and classifies countless
millions who would otherwise be a confused and
ungovernable rabble. It gives grades to Eastern
society, and settled laws to the tenure and inheri-
tance of property. It bas its code and hierarchies.
Thousands of years have waxed and waned and still
found it the soul and breath of Hindoo life. The
fiery Mahomet's sword that conquered India could
not conquer Bramah. Dynasties innumerable have
risen and fallen since the Veds were written and
Sanskrit fell out of popular use ; but still there
stands the religion of India, vital enough to have
convulsed the peninsula from end to end, and to
threaten to give to the listless and hopeless Hindoo
the verve and spirit of the West. That is the re-
ligion that hectoring majors, and speculative lieu-
tenants, and even sergeants that can spell, are al-
lowed in the leaded type or prominent columns of
the Times to recommend for extinction, as if it could
be done " some wet afternoon."
The Earl of Shaftesbury leaves us in no uncer-
tainty as to what the Church, and a certain class of
its lay politicians, are prepared to recommend as a
specific for Hindoo discontent. He spins out a
stale hash of the bungalow rant and leading article
nonsense with which he has crammed himself from
thadaily journals, warmed up with Evangelical in-
tolerance. He actually denounces Sir Henry
Somerset for preferring the respectability of India
to its blackguardism. He calls on the Government
to have nothing to do with Hindoo scholars, gentle-
men, priests, decent members of society. He con-
tends that to keep India, we should encourage its
vagabonds and scoundrels. Insult, he says, mere of
high caste, by chaining them to Pariahs, Sudars,
and Chundals. Give no preference to the good and
respected citizen over the outcast, the vagabond,
or the Atheist. The greater the miscreant the more
loyal the citizen. The worst and vilest man will
make the easiest convert to Christianity. To toler-
ate even the religion of 200,000,000 of human
beings with reasonable souls and the right of free
thought, is called "pandering to their vanities,
and bigotry, and religious prejudices." Indeed, it
is broadly stated by this mouth-piece of the Evan-
gelic d Affiance that to recognise the rights and
privileges of the natives of India, "is wholly incon-
sistent with the position we occupy there ;" and
that our respect for those of them whom their own
countrymen regard with deference, and revere for
their rank, station, and qualifications "is incon-
sistent with our political position, and with our
position as a Christian counzy." There is no mis-
taking this; and we regret to add that it is only
typical, only a representative utterance of what
is in the minds of too many of us. If ever a New
Orleans Fillibuster canted through the nose of Low
Church Methodism it is here. If ever the vilest,
the most unscrupulous self-sufficiency of orthodox
hypocrisy usurped the venerable form of Chris-
tianity, it is in this brazen confession, that to respect
the rights of conscience of our fellow-subjects, and
to accept the institutions of society in the countries
we govern as we find them, is incompatible with
our position, and inconsistent with Christianity !
If that be so, then no right-minded Englishman
will hesitate to say, if British rule cannot be main-
tained by British principles of government, then
let British rule end. It is not necessary that we
should hold Hindostan, but it is necessary if we
do, that we should hold it honestly, rule it justly,
govern it, not for our own glory or emolument, but
for the advantage and happiness of its inhabitants.
Fiat justitia ruat ccelum. Nothing so dishonours
Christianity as to declare it to be incompatible with
the concession of human rights, and to propagate
its doctrines by tyranny and oppression.
We entreat our countrymen to reflect for a mo-
ment on these fashionable propositions of unscrupu-
lous fanaticism. India is as large as Europe, quite
as populous—as diversified in its population—much
longer civilised—thousands of years older in per-
fectly authentic historical traditions. It is delibe-
rately
proposed by those "fools who rush in where
angels fear to.tread" to destroy the whole fabric of
Hindoo society, to elevate its blackguards, encou,
rage its scoundrels, be the patrons of its pariahs
(who are to India what Atheists are to England), to.
degrade all whom the natives look to, and insult
and crush all whom they respect and who resp ct
themselves, to ignore the religion of 200,000,000 of
the most superstitious devotees in the world, to
scorn their priests, scoff at their religious observ-
ances, and " put down" their devotional practices
—this, we say, is, with most self-sstisfied sapience,
very jauntily projected as a scheme of government
for India, and it is actually believed that 100,000
—nay, 50,000 Europeans could rule 4,000 times
their own number of Asiatics in the country of the
simoom, the rainy season, the plague and the jun-
gle, by flying in the face of everything they most
value on this earth ! That is actu illy what we call
government !
We are surprised at the enormities they have
coannitted, and attribute them to their religion.
Do we forget that their acts iu a "muck" of fanati-
cal panic are really as nothingtoth ,se of Christians?
Have we forgotten the Anabaptists of Munster, or
the Mormons of Salt Lake, the horrors of the French
Revolution, the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition,
the Massacres of Glencoe and St. Bartuolonsew,
the Smithfield fires, the enormities of Jeffries, the
wholesale murders of the Scottish Covenanters, the
thuerb-screw, the boot, the drowning of girls, and
the shooting of maidens and their sweethearts, the
Prot .stant persecution of Catholics in Ireland—and
all this in the name of religion, pe,petrated by pro-
fessing Christians, on Christi ens, by Frenchmen, and
Spaniards, and Englishmen, and Scotchmen, and
Irishmen on their own countrymen, not in the
sudden fury of revolt against alien oppression, but
in the name of conscience, by form of law, in the
ordinary exercise of reigning power.
Suppose we suppressed caste in India. Assume
for the sake of argument that we had succeeded in
the inconceivably cruel and sinfuldesign of destroy-
ing the whole mechanism of Hindoo society by the
eradication of Brahminism. What then ? Can any
man put his finger upon a single British mission
that has succeeded in really converting Pagans and
idolaters to Christianity ? We do not mean nominal
Christianity, the mere profession of faith in the
Gospel, but its spirit, its truth, an actual apprehen-
sion and practice of its scope and tenor ? Why, the
reports of all the missionaries among the Kaffirs,
the New Zealanders, the American Indians, the
Turks, Jews, and Arabs, the Chinese, the Hindoos
embraces uniform confession,of utterfailure, of worse
in deed—of this—that the only nominal converts even
were the very greatest scoundrels of every station.
Is it forgotten that the freest, the greatest, the
most civilised, the most virtuous nations in the
world, flourished and became refined, and wise,
and good, even under the vilest superstitions—
worshipping by human sacrifices—sacrificing to
Venus, Priapus, and Bacchus—making a sensual
debsuchee of the " Father of Gods and Man,"
Juno a procuress, Mercury a thief, and Neptune
and Venus adulterers ?

We are accustomed to assume, from the vague
traditions of the conversion of Europe from Druid-
ism and other superstitions to Christianity, that
St. Augustine and St. Patrick and others, created
a complete revolution .3n the face of its society, and
opened to it the humanising influences of the
Gospel. But the fact is, we were never more
Pagans than when we knelt to the cross, never
more wildly supentitious and idolatrous than
in the times of witAieraft, monkery, crusades,
exorcisms, saint worship, excommunication. anci.
inquisition. Never were such zealous missionaries
pasotrhtuegGueenseoesiehe
D,thueth.
Venetians,elvhere are their converts ?
the Spaniards, the
What good'did they do with all their conversions ?'

Are the South Sea Islanders bitter men now ilia;
they were before ever they saw a Christian ? Are the
Peruvians and Mexicans, under " their most Chris-

tan Majesties," half so good, so virtuous, humane,
just, confiding, and nol)h) as in the days of the In-
cqs, or under the sway Of Montezuma, who pro-
fessed a faith worse than Brahministn ? Trave:lels

have found the Bible, the cross, Christian profession
among whole tribes of Africans, not to be distin-
guished in savagery arid ignorant barbarism from
the grovelling idolaters. who surrounded them. We
do not find that the Jews were either more just,
humane, refined, or cE-vilisel than the Egyptians,
the Babylonians, or other fetish worshippers who
surrounded them. Th ere is nothing on which Christ
so much insists as upon this, that it is not Chris-
tianity that makes people virtuous, so much as
that it is virtuous people that become Christians.
The parable of the so we r has this for its very objet.
"He that knew not his Master's will and did it," Is
a case which assumes the existence of Christianity !
in the heart, without any historical knowledge of
Christ. " I came not to bring the righteous to re-
pentence," is a declaration that implies a similar
truth. In fact, it is irapossiVe to make Hindoos
Cmtula:nits.:,t,ians merely by destroying Brahminism.
Christianity is the "bighest fact in the history of
apprehend I t
rei theli
cige ;i)
v intelligencete theGo srie
l.
Taoncln
kire-
' At'h , •
"Its of Hindoos wi. a not prepare the grOund,