Life and light for woman . plea that anation should be civilized before it is Christianized. India belongs to anancient civilization. I once heard Narayan Sheshadri tell a cultured Londonaudience that his people were acute metaphysicians and famous scholars atthe time the ancestors of those wliom he was addressing were savages. ButChristianity, and not cultiue, is the salt that saves a nation from moralputrefaction. i8gg.^ HEATHEN CONDITIONS IN iSoO. 483 In iSo3 the crime of infanticide was prohibited by British law, but withinthe last fifteen years twelve thousand five hundred and forty-two c
Life and light for woman . plea that anation should be civilized before it is Christianized. India belongs to anancient civilization. I once heard Narayan Sheshadri tell a cultured Londonaudience that his people were acute metaphysicians and famous scholars atthe time the ancestors of those wliom he was addressing were savages. ButChristianity, and not cultiue, is the salt that saves a nation from moralputrefaction. i8gg.^ HEATHEN CONDITIONS IN iSoO. 483 In iSo3 the crime of infanticide was prohibited by British law, but withinthe last fifteen years twelve thousand five hundred and forty-two cases wereofficially reported, and this number represents only a small proportion of thetotal. While polygamy is not very common among the Hindus, yet the codeof Manu gives abundant license to a husband in these words : A barrenwife may be superseded by another in the eighth year ; slie wliose .chil-dren are all dead in the tenth ; she who brings forth only daughters in theeleventh ; she who speaks unkindlj-, without Types of Indian Devotees. From Christian Missions Social Progress, Vol. I. Copyright, 1S99, byFleming H. Revell Company. Suttee, the burning of the widow on her husbands funeral pyre, waspracticed at the opening of the century and many years after. Within aperiod of four months in the year 1S34 one hundred and fifteen widowswere burned alive in the neighborhood of Calcutta. The British Govern-ment abolished suttee in 1829, but an intelligent young Hindu said to mein Bombay that, in view of the sufferings of a widow in India, he thought the practice of suttee more merciful than its prohibition. Human sacrifices to the Hindu Pantheon of gods was practiced in read of an annual offering of one liundred and fifty lunnan sacrifices 484 LIFE AND LIGHT. \_N0ve7nber, in a single province. The country was scoured b} emissaries of a certainHindu queen to seize girls to be offered as sacrifices on the altars of theo-oddess Kali. In two provinces three thous
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