It is the ancient temple of Juggernath, “Lord of the World,” to which they have come. Yes, our old friend Juggernath, of childhood’s stories and journalistic tags—the God in the Car, before whose bloodstained wheels the benighted heathen were driven by deceiving priests to fling themselves shrieking down, before the days when enlightened missionaries and British rulers combined to clean up India’s coral strand. Since then, as is well known, such extremity of devotion has been prosecuted as the law directs, and the guide-book tells us that “of recent years much has been done to improve the sanitation of the place.” Both signs of progress are good. But, after all, it is only an Englishman whose first thought is of sanitation when he approaches the divine presence, and the British missionaries who first told that weary old tale of the car were as incapable of understanding the divine passion that, even at the cost of life, yearns for union with eternal powers, as they would have been of understanding the passion of a woman whose grandson described to me how, with proud bearing and joyful face, she walked from her chamber and sat down in the midst of the flames beside her husband’s body till their ashes lay indistinguishably commingled. Sanitary appliances and the “Merry Widow” appeal more successfully to our Western minds. The fame of Juggernath may be due, as scholars say, to some ancient attempt to conciliate under his symbol the new Buddhistic reformers with the primeval Hindu worship. It seems to be certain that his temple as it stands shows the trace of Buddhistic influence—the teaching of Buddha who made the great renunciation, Buddha who received the poor and all mankind beneath his blessing. It is a shrine of peace and conciliation, perhaps the one place in India where former generations saw some hope of acquiring the new purity and kindliness of life, without rejecting the sacred traditions of immemorial wisdom brought by unknown ancestors from lands of bitter cold. And it may have been this bright hope of peace that first established the unaltering rule of Juggernath’s worship, that before his sight all castes and ranks and riches are equal, and the woman is equal with the man.