Avocations.—The races following Hinduism, an the converts from amongst them to Mahornedanisi and the Sikh faith, are, almost exclusively, a owners and tillers of the soil of India ; and t agriculturists in Northern India are in villag proprietory communities, those of Central Indi are village proprietors, and those of Wester and Southern India are joint holders undo Government. The entire banking interests i India, moneyed men and capitalist class, small( merchants, traders, and carriers, are Hindus ; an Hindus are settled for merchandise in Arabia, i Afghanistan, all through Persia and Turkestan they are in Astracan, in the southern province of Russia, even as far as Moscow ; also in Furthe India, throughout Burma, Tenasserim, southward to Singapore ; and, from unknown antiquity, on Hindu tribe of the north-west of the Peninsul have been located on the east coast of Afric southwards to Mozambique, and have been th willing agents of slave-dealers.
The more famous amongst their writers :— Religious Libel-Q.—From the oldest times, suc ceeding rulers of Travancore and Cochin, and seemingly those of Gujerat, have ruled their dominions with the most entire religious liberty ; and Arab races, Jews, Parsecs, Romans, Africans, Egyptians, Portuguese, Dutch, and British have traded and settled there. At Patna, the little Christian church; or as it is inserted in the dufturs, was . endowed its portion of land exactly as any other religious establishment.
In the changes between Buddhism and Hindu ism, and with the occasional forcible proselytizing by the Mahomedans to their faith and by the Portuguese at Goa to their views, there has been much cruelty; and, generally speaking, Hindu and Mahomedan sovereigns favoured those of their subjects who were of the rulers' faiths. But, by an Act passed in 1840, a discontinuance was put to all interference on the part of British functionaries in the interior management of native temples ; in the customs, habits, and religious proceedings of their priests and attendants; in the arrange ment of their ceremonies, rites, and festivals ; and generally in the conduct of their interior economy ; the tax on pilgrims was abolished ; and in 1841, salutes and the attendance of troops or military bands were forbidden at such festivals. 1 liudu Morality.—Major Moor remarks that it is some comparative, though negative, praise to the Hindus, that the emblems under which they everywhere exhibit the elements and operations of nature arc not externally indecorous. Unlike the abominable realities of Egypt and Greece, we see the phallic emblem in the Hindu pantheon without offence, and know not, until the infor mation be furnished, that we are contemplating a symbol whose prototype is indelicate. The external decency of the symbols, and the diffi culty with which their recondite allusions are dis covered, both offer evidence favourable to the moral delicacy of the Hindu character. Temples are nevertheless commonly to be seen, on which arc represented, in statues even of life size, figures which only the mind of man in all its corruptness and wickedness could conceive. However recently erected, these are perhaps hut remnants of the period succeeding the asceticism and austerities of Buddhism. Books then came to be written about heroes whom they deified, some of whose lives, as painted, are a continuous outrage of decency. But the people generally never followed such licence. To have done so, society must have ended. At the present day, undoubtedly, the morality of the Hindus is far above the stories in their books, the statues on their shrines, or the licence which prevails amongst the few who associate with the Deva daa at their temples; and it is only their patience under such grossness, their not rising iu wrath to reform it, their worship of fire and the elements, of the sun and moon, of the litigant and yoni, of the saligrama, the binlang, the tulsi, and the pea; their reverence for, almost worship of, the cow, the kite, and the cobra ; their worship of Nandi, of idols with unnatural or forms, of shapeless blocks of wood or stone, in which the educated have no faith, and which are often treated with irreverence by all ; their respect for books of the contents of which they are ignorant, and which are not worthy of their present civilisa tion,—it is their adherence to all these confused amalgamations of the coarse Vedic creed, Scythic worship, fetishism, the austerities and sacredness of life of Buddhism, and the licence of Vishnu as Krishna, which excites the wonder and the con tempt of all educated men. And their indifference
is the more remarkable, because two thousand years ago they had a religion less disgraced by idolatrous worship than most of those which pre vailed in early tunes. They had a copious and cultivated language, and an extensive and diversi fied literature ; they had made great progress in the mathematical sciences, they speculated pro foundly in the mysteries of man and nature, and they had acquired remarkable proficiency in many of the ornamental and useful arts of life. In short, whatever defects may be justly attributed to their religion, their government, their laws, their literature, their sciences, their arts, as con trasted with the same proofs of civilisation in modern Europe, the Aryan Hindus were in all these respects quite as civilised as any of the most civilised nations of the ancient world, and in as early times as any of which records or tradition remain.' In the re-ascendency of Brahmanism after the overthrow of Buddhism, the prime defect A knowledge of reading and writing is _very widely diffused, but those who cannot write use trade-marks as their sign-manual, of which the following may be mentioned :— of which was a want of knowledge of the true God, and to which was subsequently added a relic worship, and an over-fondness for asceticism, the writers who are now regarded by the Hindus as authorities, introduced the outrageous matters which at the present day are the shame and degradation of the followers of this extraordinary faith. Major Moor observes that, with a little alteration, the first part of Juvenal's fifteenth satire, beginning Quis nescit,' might be applied to the teachers of Hinduism as now seen, as happily as to the Egyptians, the objects of Juvenal's severity. It is a picture of the Hinduism of the present day ; Who knows not that there's nothing vile nor odd, Which brain-sick Brahmans turn not to a god ? Some of those blockheads hulls and cows adore ; Fish, reptiles, birds, and snakes, as many more ; A long-tail'd ape some suppliants admire, Or man-like elephant, a god the sire ; One race a god, half-man half-fish, revere, Others to unsightly moieties adhere ; Hosts to a stone's high deity bend down, While others sticks with adoration crown ; Nay, vegetables here hold rank divine,— On leeks or mushrooms 'tie profane to dine. O holy nation, where the gardens bear A crop of gods throughout the tedious year !' It has been remarked that the characters of niany of the Hindu deities are faintly indicated by the term immoral. Everything that is gross and sensual and wrong is to be found as ordinary acts of their deities ; and the followers of these faiths present the extraordinary spectacle of a people with purer lives than is to be found in the idolatrous or demonolatrous systems of religion which they follow. They have a proverb amongst themselves,— Yatha devas, Tatha bhaktah,' i.e. As is the god, so is the worshipper,—happily not applicable to their own conduct. For in their domestic lives they are gentle, not aggressive ; modest, reverent, respecters of authority, temporal and spiritual ; desirous of knowledge, seekers of the truth, patient under mental or bodily labour ; diligent in their callings, frugal, temperate, and chaste ; living with one wife, though Hindu law permits a plurality ; amongst the entire Hindu races offences against the person are rare, and it is only amidst the licence of the temples that gross polygamy is common, and is even there confined to the habitues of the shrines.