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Updated: June 10, 2025
Benares, the first large city on the united Ganges and Jumna, may be called the citadel of Hindooism, containing about one hundred and fifty thousand fixed inhabitants, and nearly as many more of floating population, composed of pilgrims, constantly coming and going. What Jerusalem is to the Jew, Rome to the Latin, Mecca to the Mohammedan, Benares is to the Hindoo.
This able man, who lacked the courage to profess Christ in the end, wrote the first tract, the Gospel Messenger, and the first pamphlet exposing Hindooism, both of which had an enormous sale and caused much excitement. On the historical side Carey induced him to publish in 1801 the Life of Raja Pratapaditya, the last king of Sagar Island.
The whole body of law-pundits wrote of Sati as only "permitted." Mritunjaya, described as the head jurist of the College of Fort William and the Supreme Court, decided that, according to Hindooism, a life of mortification is the law for a widow. At best burning is only an alternative for mortification, and no alternative can have the force of direct law.
The Sikh soldiers are quartered all over India. They are fraternising with the natives of the South adopting their customs and even their faith. Half the soldiers in a regiment lately stationed at Benares were converted to Hindooism before they left that holy place.
As, on the Oriental side, Carey chose for his weapon the vernacular, on the other he drew from Western sources the principles and the thoughts which he clothed in a Bengali dress. We have already seen how Carey at the end of the eighteenth century found Hindooism at its worst. Steadily had the Pooranic corruption and the Brahmanical oppression gone on demoralising the whole of Hindoo society.
Except for the philosophy of Hindooism, the second edition of A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos, including a Minute Description of their Manners and Customs, and Translations from their Principal Works, published in 1818 in two quarto volumes, stands unrivalled as the best authority on the character and daily life and beliefs of the 200,000,000 to whom Great Britain had been made a terrestrial providence, till Christianity teaches them to govern themselves and to become to the rest of Asia missionaries of nobler truth than that wherewith their Buddhist fathers covered China and the farther East.
Although Charles Grant's son, Lord Glenelg, when President of the Board of Control in 1833, ordered, as Theodosius had done on the fall of pagan idolatry in A.D. 390, that "in all matters relating to their temples, their worship, their festivals, their religious practices, their ceremonial observances, our native subjects be left entirely to themselves," the identification of Government with Hindooism was not completely severed till a recent period.
Bengal Carey and Thomas appointed missionaries to Bengal The farewell at Leicester John Thomas, first medical missionary Carey's letter to his father The Company's "abominable monopoly" The voyage Carey's aspirations for world-wide missions Lands at Calcutta His description of Bengal in 1793 Contrast presented by Carey to Clive, Hastings, and Cornwallis The spiritual founder of an Indian Empire of Christian Britain Bengal and the famine of 1769-70 The Decennial Settlement declared permanent Effects on the landed classes Obstacles to Carey's work East India Company at its worst Hindooism and the Bengalees in 1793 Position of Hindoo women Missionary attempts before Carey's Ziegenbalg and Schwartz Kiernander and the chaplains Hindooised state of Anglo-Indian society and its reaction on England Guneshan Dass, the first caste Hindoo to visit England William Carey had no predecessor.
At this early period Carey saw the weakness of Hindooism as a pretended revelation, from its identification with false physics, just as Duff was to see and use it afterwards with tremendous effect, and wrote: "There is a necessity of explaining to them several circumstances relative to geography and chronology, as they have many superstitious opinions on those subjects which are closely connected with their systems of idolatry."
First-class fares, with such sleeping-car luxuries as I have before described included, are just about our rates with sleeping-cars not included viz., three cents per mile. While Hindooism is thus passing away, but little progress is made with Islam.
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