Another phase of life which furnishes to the people an ideal is the _ceremonial_. Among the myriad gods of the Hindu pantheon and all the sages of its history and legend, there is not one who is worthy to be exalted as an ideal of character. The reason is not far to find. With this, however, we are not at present concerned. It is enough if we remember that this absence of an incarnate ideal in the religion has led to the exaltation of rules and ceremonies as the safeguards of--yea, more, as the very essence of--a worthy and noble life. There is no sadder fact in India at present than that of this great religion, of two hundred and thirty million souls, being largely emptied of moral content as related to the common life, and built up of numberless petty external ceremonies which harass the individual, and grip the life with a dead hand at all points. The ceremonialism of the Scribes and Pharisees in the days of our Lord and which excited His supreme wrath, was not a consequence as compared to that of Hinduism to-day. From conception even to the burning-ground, every detail of life, individual and communal, religious and social (there is no social as apart from religious life in Hinduism), is cast into a mould of ceremony or ritual which robs it of ethical content, and makes it into what an indignant Brahman writer recently called "a huge sham." To the ordinary Hindu, all of life's values are measured in the coin of external rites. Let one be an atheist if he please, or even a libertine or a murderer, and his status in Hinduism is not impaired. But let him eat beef, even unwittingly, or let him ignorantly drink water which has been touched by a man of lower caste than himself, and his doom is irrevocably sealed! Through this whole system the Hindu conscience is perverted, and the true distinction between right and wrong is buried deep under this greatest and most elaborate mass of ceremonial that the world has ever known. To a people who have thus inherited the ceremonial instinct, who are Pharisees by a hundred-fold heritage and by sweet choice, it is not an easy thing for the man of the West, with his natural distrust of all that is formal and outward in life, to present effectively his Lord, whose bitterest woes were pronounced against the formalists of His time, and whose commands are always ethical, and whose life is, first of all, and last of all, spiritual.