The effect of religion (for all nations worship something) upon the people affords overwhelming evidence of its origin. In all heathen lands the people are exceedingly religious. In India alone they worship 360,000,000 gods, but they know nothing about morality. Their religion offers no light in life and no hope in death. The condition of women in India is indescribable. If a man speaks of his wife he never says “wife,” but “family”; and if away, he never speaks of going home, but he is going to his house. There is no home life, as we look upon it, in all that heathen land. Women are considered by the Hindus as a thing that exists solely for their use. She is given away like a lifeless thing to the man who is to be her husband, but who does not consider her his equal. He is commanded by his religion to “enjoy her without attachment,” and never to love her or put his confidence in her. Some women are set apart religiously for the use of the men of all classes and castes. They are consecrated and “married” to the idols in the temples, and are brought up from their girlhood to live as prostitutes. Hindoo sacred law reaches its climax of cruelty and degradation in the rules it lays down for the control of a woman after her husband has died. She may be young and beautiful, she may belong to a wealthy and powerful family; it matters not; custom is as relentless as death in its weight of woe to crush her completely down. One of the Hindoo sacred books says: “It is unlawful for any man to take a jewelless woman,” whose eyes are like the weeping cavi-flower; being deprived of her beloved husband, she is like a body deprived of the spirit. She may have only been a betrothed infant or a child of a few years. It makes no difference. The Shasters teach that if a widow burns herself alive on the funeral pile of her husband, even though he had killed a Brahmin, that most heinous of deeds, she expiates the crime. For long centuries widows have been a literal burnt offering for the redemption of husbands. Another law is laid down after the following fashion: “On the death of their attached husbands, women must eat but once a day, must eschew betel and a spread mattress, must sleep on the ground, and continue to practice rigid mortification. Women who have put off glittering jewels of gold must discharge with alacrity the duties of devotion, and neglecting their persons, must feed on herbs and roots, so as barely to sustain life within the body. Let not a widow ever pronounce the name of another man.”