pilgrimages, holy days, and shrines, sacred waters with supposed powers to purify, innumerable temples imposing in architecture and ornate in furnishing, uncounted idols at every turn in the daily life-all give to the religious life of India a depressing influence disastrous to social weal. Indian Mohammedanism has certain features which deeply compromise its helpfulness, and, although it is far cleaner and more loyal to higher religious truth than Hinduism, its social benefits are sadly neutralized by its moral concessions. The fatal idea that sins against society can be condoned, or atoned for by religious ceremonialism, and even that merit may be accumulated in spite of moral laxity, pervades more or less all the religious systems of India.1 As in China so in

performs a number of acts prescribed in the Shastras, or goes through the ordinances of the current faith, or spends some hours of the day in sentimental ecstacies, he consoles himself with the belief that he has fulfilled the best conditions of religious life."- The Indian Messenger, November 27, 1892.

1 Raja Rammohun Roy, a noted Indian reformer at the beginning of the present century, in the introduction to his translation of the Isopanishad, remarks upon this feature of Hinduism as follows:

"The chief part of the theory and practice of Hinduism, I am sorry to say, is made to consist in the adoption of a peculiar mode of diet, the least aberration from which (even though the conduct of the offender may in other respects be pure and blameless) is not only visited with the severest censure, but actually punished by exclusion from the society of his family and friends. In a word, he is doomed to undergo what is commonly called loss of caste.

"On the contrary, the rigid observance of this grand article of Hindu faith is considered in so high a light as to compensate for every moral defect. Even the most atrocious crimes weigh little or nothing in the balance against the supposed guilt of its violation.

"Murder, theft, or perjury, though brought home to the party by a judicial sentence, so far from inducing loss of caste, is visited in their society with no peculiar mark of infamy or disgrace.

"A trifling present to the Brahman, commonly called prayaschit, with the performance of a few idle ceremonies, is held as a sufficient atonement for all these crimes; and the delinquent is at once freed from all temporal inconveniences, as well as all dread of future retribution."

In an article on "Social and Religious Reform," published in The Hindu of June 24, 1887, is found substantially the same verdict, as follows:

"The Hindu mythology has to be purged of the absurdities that have overgrown it during centuries of ignorance and of superstitious and timid isolation. In the same manner, the moral ideas of our common people have to be improved. An orthodox Hindu would tolerate falsehood, cowardice, and self-abasement, but would damn to perdition his neighbour who swerves the least from accepted conventions even in the details of personal habits. Such moral perversity does not indicate a healthy social condition. Similarly, our ideas of charity, of social distinction, education, and social well-being in general, have to be drawn out of the influence of an obsolete and backward civilization, and brought in harmony with the fresh spirit of the time."

India the religious atmosphere is deeply pessimistic. Fear is a controlling influence in religious life. The anger of the gods hangs like a brooding curse over life. The dread of evil spirits dwarfs the mind and chills the heart. Religion is an aggressive struggle to ward off perils and propitiate angry gods or malicious demons. The disadvantages of a religious faith and practice so burdensome, so depressing, so misleading can be fully understood only by one who is familiar with the social condition of the Indian people.

Islam and its relation
to social morality.

In Mohammedan lands there are strange and crude conceptions of what religion is and what it requires. The influence of Islam, so far as it relates to the cultivation of liberty, purity, justice, and kindliness, is revealed in its own history. It has ever taken an attitude towards humanity which is marked by relentless spiritual and social despotism. True to its historic demand that all unbelievers shall choose between Islam, tribute, and the sword, it offers to humanity its own rigid matrix, into which social life must flow and be cast after the old Islamic model, or accept humiliation and ostracism as the only alternatives. When the fanatical passions of Islam are stirred all guarantees of public order are worthless. Mohammedan feasts and festivals, where the population is not constituted exclusively of Moslems, often involve grave dangers. When the processions of the Muharram Passion Play are in progress no Christian in Persia can venture upon the streets, except at his peril. Wherever Islam is aggressively to the 7 front human society cannot count upon its safeguards, nor the State upon its liberties. It has already smitten some of the fairest lands of the earth with the blight of social disorder and decay.1 Islam carries into the family polygamy, unrestricted divorce, and slavery, the latter, as a rule, being simply an indefinite and unrestrained expansion of the first, under the guise of concubinage.2 In the name of the Moslem's reli1 Cf. article entitled "Turkey for the Turks," in The Independent, November 12, 1896, p. 15.

244 As a social system," writes Stanley Lane-Poole, "Islam is a complete failure: it has misunderstood the relation of the sexes, upon which the whole character of a nation's life hangs, and, by degrading women, has degraded each successive generation of their children down an increasing scale of infamy and corruption, until it seems almost impossible to reach a lower level of vice.

"The fatal spot in Islam is the degradation of women. The true test of a nation's place in the ranks of civilisation is the position of its women. When they are held in reverence, when it is considered the most infamous of crimes to subject a woman to dishonour, and the highest distinction to protect her from wrong; when the family life is real and strong, of which the mother-wife is the heart; when each man's pulse beats loyal to womanhood, then is a nation great. When women are

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gion there is all the scope to desire which an Oriental wishes. Is not female slavery, with all that it practically means, down in the code? He therefore believes in it and practises it, so far as he is able, with a religious as well as a fleshly zest. The Moslem soldier for centuries has marched to his victories, not alone over the dead bodies of men, but over the dishonored forms of women. He even departs for his Paradise with the gleam of expectant passion in his glazing eyes. The family life of Islam is a nursery of ideas which are necessarily fatal to social purity. Its political spirit gives no place to liberty and civilized statecraft. The Moslem creed, in its attitude to both the State and the family, in its spirit of ostracism, in its despotic assumptions, in its narrow bigotry, its rigid limitations to progress, its triumphant adjustment of God's law to man's natural desire, and its failure to generate moral character, is a striking illustration of the social blight which is sure to result from a degrading conception of the nature and requirements of religion.

The difficulties of social reconstruction in an environment of religious degeneracy.

The same difficulties which attended the reconstruction of social morality among heathen converts in the apostolic age still hinder the progress of Christianity in modern mission fields. It was not easy to banish pagan laxity from the new life of Christians in the great cities of the Roman Empire. Some of the most searching and vigorous passages in the apostolic epistles are directed to the emphasis and elucidation of morality as an essential of Christian living. History is repeating itself as Christianity enters the pagan environment of to-day. Hundreds, even thousands, of natives in different mission fields in Polynesia and Africa, and even in more enlightened Oriental lands, have been, and are still, seeking admission to the Christian Church without quite understanding why their inconsistent morality presents any serious obstacle to their enrolment. Their old religions put little or no restriction upon individual conduct or traditional social customs; why, therefore, should the new faith introduce such troublesome innovations into the realm of every-day life? No student of the religious condition of the world, however, will recognize this state of things as pertaining to a heathen environment alone. In Mexico and the entire

treated as playthings, toys, drudges, worth anything only if they have beauty to be enjoyed or strength to labour; when sex is considered the chief thing in a woman, and heart and mind are forgotten; when a man buys women for his pleasure, and dismisses them when his appetite is glutted, then is a nation despicable."—" Studies in a Mosque," pp. 101, 102.

1 Lane, “Arabian Society in the Middle Ages," chap. ix., on "Women."