this fatal superstition, or rather conglomerate of superstitions, which seems to suffer no more from attack than a shadow? We have begun the revolution by marrying widows just as girls are married, and by showing that the loss of caste--which indeed we have quite abolished among ourselves--entails necessarily none of those miserable consequences which the priests have denounced; and we strike still more deeply at the root of the trouble by instituting schools where our own daughters, and all others whom we can prevail upon to send, are educated with the utmost care. In our religion we retain Brahma--by whom we mean the one supreme God of all--and abolish all notions of the saving efficacy of merely ceremonial observances, holding that God has given to man the choice of right and wrong, and the dignity of exercising his powers in such accordance with his convictions as shall secure his eternal happiness. To these cardinal principles we subjoin the most unlimited toleration for other religions, recognizing in its fullest extent the law of the adaptation of the forms of relief to the varying moulds of character resulting from race, climate and all those great conditions of existence which differentiate men one from another." [Illustration: CHARIOT OF THE PROCESSION OF THE RATTJATTRA, AT JAGHERNÂTH.] "How," I asked, "do the efforts of the Christian missionaries comport with your own sect's?" "Substantially, we work together. With the sincerest good wishes for their success--for every sensible man must hail any influence which instills a single new idea into the wretched Bengalee of low condition--I am yet free to acknowledge that I do not expect the missionaries to make many converts satisfactory to themselves, for I am inclined to think them not fully aware of the fact that in importing Christianity among the Hindus they have not only brought the doctrine, but they have brought the _Western form_ of it, and I fear that they do not recognize how much of the nature of substance this matter of form becomes when one is attempting to put new wine into old bottles. Nevertheless, God speed them! I say. We are all full of hope. Signs of the day meet us everywhere. It is true that still, if you put yourself on the route to Orissa, you will meet thousands of pilgrims who are going to the temple at Jaghernâth (what your Sunday-school books call Juggernaut) for the purpose of worshiping the hideous idols which it contains; and although the English policemen accompany the procession of the Rattjattra--when the idol is drawn on the monstrous car by the frenzied crowd of fanatics--and enforce the law which now forbids the poor insane devotees from casting themselves beneath the fatal wheels, still, it cannot be denied that the devotees are _there_, nor that Jaghernâth is still the Mecca of millions of debased worshipers. It is also true that the pretended exhibitions of the tooth of Buddha can still inspire an ignorant multitude of people to