Persians, . . 7,653,000 Turkornan, . 450,000 Arabs, . . . 5,000,000 Afghans, . . 4,000,000 Turkey in Asia, 16,357,000 Sindi, . . . 1,887,204 Khiva . 700,000 Baluch, . . . 409,200 Bokhariots, . 2,100,000 In India, the British Government, a Christian power, is ruling over a population of 253,891,821 souls, in diverse religious communities. A census taken in 1881 has shoNvn their respective numbers to be as under :— Hindus, . . 187,937,450 Kabir Panthi, . 347,994 Nuhammadans, 50,121,585 Nat worship, . 143,581 Aboriginals, Non- Parsee,. . . . 85,397 Aryans, . . 6,426,511 Jews, . . . . 12,009 Buddhist, . . 3,418,884 Brahmo, . . . 1,147 Christian, . . 1,862,634 Kumbhi Patin, . . 913 Sikh, . . . 1,853,426 Others and un Jain, . . . 1,221,896 specified, . . .59,985 Satnami, . . . 398,409 The non-Aryan races of India have not advanced beyond the idea of demons who scourge the human race. Many of them have totems; others are Shtunanistic, anti are continually finding new objects of worship in the spirits of men and women who have died a violent death, or have lived lives of turmoil. Mari Amman, or death mother, of the Tamil race, is a recently acknoNv ledged divinity who sends smallpox. She is a compound of their Amman or village goddess and of Kali, the consort of Siva. Since cholera has swept through the land, the peoplo of Ujjain have formed a new goddess, Matta Kala, whom they believe sends that dread disease. A great number of the non-Aryan races are recognised to be of Turanian descent. Many of thorn are in a servile condition, and until the present day aro almoit in a state of predial slavery, in some parta bought and aold with tho lands. Nfany are illiterate, have no sacred hooka, and worship apirint, ancestors, idols, anti ahapelem stonen from the river beds. I3ut even amongst the followers of the 13rahmanical Hindu faith and the Jaina sect, all of whom possess sacred books, there is found every con ceivable kind of worship, from the grossest sen sualism to the moat exalted spiritualism, and from the worship of atocks and stones to the most sublime conceptions of tho omnipresent God.
The Mnhammadans are descetulanta of Arab, Turk, Mogliul, and Persian invaders, and of con verts from Hindus and aboriginal races. They are Largely of the Sunni sect, but the unity of their creed and the firmness of 13ritish rule have done much to make them one body. With Brah manism it isclifferent. Of very varied origin, largely from a nature-worship, with a belief in mytho logical personages, and some of their chief gods deified princes, their beliefs arc g,reatly diversified. Great minds are constantly arising and forming new sects or are pondering over problems, moral, social, and political. The Sikh, the Satnami, the Kabir Panthi are all recent, and the Brahmo is of the 19th century. Brahmanism is proselytizing by millions among the aboriginal races, but is loosening its grasp on many of the educated classes. The tendency is to adopt some form of philosophy as a. substitute for their old traditional religions, and this seems likely to embrace the majority of the educated classes throughout India.
The most recent philosophy was originated by Ram Mohan Roy, a Brahman, and its best expounder at present (1883) is Keshab Chander Sen. The name assumed by the most prominent among them is that of Brehm°, and ramifications of this sect have spread throughout the presidencies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay. They renounce superstition, paganism, and absurdities of all sorts. They abjure atheism and materialism; they repudiate Buddh ism, Hinduism, and 31uhammadanism. They re gard Christianity, not as a religion to be adopted, but as one of several paths leading towards pure and abstract truth, and they look towards the Vedas and Puranas, handed down from the Aryan Hindus, as constituting another of these ways.
Theirs is a theism, including faith in a Supreme Being, in the immortality of tho soul, and in a future state of rewards and punis,hments.
Sir Alfred C. Lya11 thinks that in India there will, in two or three generations, be a wide and rapid transformation of its religion ; that the old gods of Hinduism will die in their new elements of intellectual light and air. Some, lie says, may think that Christianity will, a second time in the world's history, step into the vacancy created, and occupy tho tracts laid open by the upheaval of a whole continent to a new intellectual level. But, ho says, the state of thought in Western Europo hardly encourages conjecture that India will ree,eive from that quarter any such decisive impulse as that which overturned the decaying paganism of Greece and Rome. Christianity has not yet apread sufficiently to hare become an actual power in the country, but the Brahmoists admire Christianity in the main, as supplying A pattern for human conduct.
Under Hindu law, until 1850, a change of religion by any Hindu involved loss of property ; but an Act passed in that year by the Legislative Council of British India declared that change of religion did not involve loss of property.
East of British India, Buddhism has been favourably received by great nationalities. Tribes on the Assam borders, the people of Manipur, many broken tribes amongst the hills and the valleys of the Irawadi, the Mei-kong, and_ other great rivers, are following spirit and nature wor ship. The Malays of the Archipelago are now mostly Multammadans, and the Spanish Indies in the Philippines almost all Christian ; but Ceylon is partly Buddhist, partly Hindu; and Burma, Siam, Annam, Cochin-China, Cambodia, China, and Corea are chiefly Buddhist, though China largely follows the philosophy of Confucius or the corrupted Taoist philosophy of Meng-tze.
Iu the temples of Confucius in China, the only object of reverence is the monumental tablet be fore which the devout burn incense and pray. At the entrance of their Buddhist temples are colossal figures, supposed to be warders of the place ; in all other temples are numerous idols, not only of Buddha in his three attitudes of contemplation, exhortation, and repose, but of many other deities, as the god of war, the god of agriculture, and the queen of heaven.
A prominent feature of Japan society is the variety of religious beliefs. The State cult is the Sintu (Sin, the gods, and Tu, faith), an apotheosis of all great heroes and saints. The Buddhists are there the more numerous sect, but their priests had become so singularly unacquainted with the tenets of their religion, that some inquirers recently visited England to study its doctrines in the books of the public libraries. The populations dwelling in these south-east regions of Further Asia have been estimated as under :— Assam tribes, . 200,000 Sunda Islands and Manipur, . . 126,000 Moluccas, . 28,867,000 Burma, . . 4,000,000 Netherland India Siam, . . . 5,750,000 and part of N.
Annam, . . 21,000,000 Guinea, . . '27,962,000 French Cochin- N. Guinea and China, . . 1,597,013 neighbouring Cambodia, . . 890,000 Islands, . 500,000 Malacca tribes, 300,000 Philippines, . 6,300,000 China proper, 350,000,000 Corea, . . . 8,500,000 Eastern Turke- Japan, with the stan, . . Kuriles, Loo Tibet, Manchuria, • Choo, and Bo Mongolia, . 21,180,000 nin Islands, 36,357,212Ceylon, . . 2,609,930 —Census Report ; Sir John Lubbock's Darwinism in Morals, p. 250 ; Frere's Antipodes, p. 229 ; Max Muller, Chips from a German Workshop, p. 12 ; Sir Alfred C. Lyall, K.C.B., Asiatic Studies ; Sir Richard Temple in Fortnightly Review, Jany. 1883 ; Albrecht TVeber's Indian Literature. See Sacred Books.