HINDUISM. 



The ethics of Mohammedanism are of the 

 highest excellence. Suffice it, that injustice, 

 falsehood, pride, revengefulness, calumny, mock- 

 ery, avarice, prodigality, debauchery, mistrust, 

 and suspicion are denounced as ungodly and 

 wicked ; while benevolence, liberality, modesty, 

 forbearance, patience and endurance, frugality, 

 sincerity, straightforwardness, decency, love of 

 peace and truth, are, next to trust in God, and 

 submission to his will, represented as the notes 

 of true piety, and the principal marks of a true 

 believer. 



The Koran (the Reading, that which ought 

 to be read, pronounced Kooraan), which con- 

 tains the revelations of Mohammed, is the basis 

 of all the Mohammedan teaching ; but, among 

 orthodox believers, it is supplemented by the 

 Sunna, a voluminous series of moral and legal 

 traditions, traced to Mohammed, recorded dur- 

 ing the first three centuries of the Moham- 

 medan era, and gradually formed into collec- 

 tions, which are accepted as canonical. As the 

 inspirations which make up the Koran were given 

 forth by Mohammed as circumstances prompted, 

 they were necessarily fragmentary and uncon- 

 nected, and the arrangement adopted when they 

 were brought together was not one to give them 

 continuity and coherence. Beginning with the 

 longest, the several chapters were placed one after 

 another in the order of their length. The book 

 consists of 114 chapters, which have distinctive 

 titles, many of them curious, e.g. the Cow, Con- 

 gealed Blood, the Fig, the Star, the Tower, and each 

 begins with the formula, ' In the name of God, the 

 Merciful, the Compassionate.' The language of 

 the Koran is of surpassing elegance and purity, 

 and Mohammed himself did not disdain to make 

 use of its literary excellence to bear out the proof 

 of his divine mission. The matter is a curious 

 jumble of poetry, narrative, doctrine about all 

 things, human and divine, and pious ejaculations. 

 No other book, however, has ever been held in 

 such reverence among men as the Koran receives 

 among Mohammedans. It is never even touched 

 without previous purification ; its authority is 

 sought in every difficulty ; sentences from it are 

 everywhere displayed. The traditions recorded 

 in the Sunna are given in the form of a dialogue, 

 and are mostly very brief; and they deal with 

 nearly every conceivable subject religious doc- 

 trines and practice, laws civil and criminal, and 

 the usages of common life. The Sunna became a 

 badge of religious dissension soon after Moham- 

 med's death ; but the division of the Mohammedan 

 world into the two conflicting and bitterly hostile 

 camps of the Sunnites (believers in the Sunna, the 

 orthodox party) and the Shiites (sectaries), had 

 its origin in the dispute as to the succession to 

 the headship of Islam, which arose at Mo- 

 Tiammed's death. The Shiites represent those 

 who regarded Ali, Mohammed's son-in-law, as 

 .his rightful heir. This is still their principal 

 peculiar tenet, and Abu-Bekr, Omar, and their 

 successors in the califate are deemed by them 

 to have been unrighteous usurpers. The prin- 

 cipal Shiite people are the Persians; the Turks are 

 Sunnites. 



Were it not known that Mohammed had the 

 -assistance of a Jew in composing his revelation, 

 internal evidence would shew that his obligations 

 to the Jewish Scriptures and traditions were almost 



unbounded. He owed something to Christianity 

 also ; and the amount of what he took over from 

 the ancient heathenism of Arabia can scarcely be 

 under-estimated. Originally, he seems to have had 

 the idea of drawing around him Jews, Christians, 

 and heathens, by borrowing freely from all of 

 them an idea abandoned when it proved unsuc- 

 cessful. To form an estimate of his theology, 

 as he ultimately shaped it, and of its influence on 

 the races which have adopted it, is beyond our 

 province. That its social polity tends to stereo- 

 type a low state of society, is clear enough ; and, 

 in fact, the Mohammedan races have, in general, 

 not been progressive. On the other hand, the 

 flourishing state of arts and learning among the 

 Arabs and Moors during the golden period of 

 Mohammedan history, and many other facts, occur 

 to warn us against forming sweeping conclusions 

 on this subject. 



HINDUISM. 



What we have to attempt under this head is to 

 give some account, not of a single religion and its 

 varieties, but of the most distinctive features of the 

 religious history of a strongly religious and highly 

 speculative people. With religions which are not 

 of native growth in India, and with the beliefs 

 of various small fractions of the population of 

 India, we are not here to concern ourselves. 

 (Buddhism is treated apart.) But when these 

 are put aside, what we find in India now is, not 

 so much a religion as a group of religions, and 

 a rather numerous group, connected by ties ot 

 history, by veneration for the same sacred writ- 

 ings, by powerful religious and social ideas which 

 they have in common, but separated from one 

 another by differences of a very important kind. 

 And it is not only these, but the precursors out of 

 which they have sprung, and from which they 

 differ even more than they do from each other, 

 that should be described under the name of Hin- 

 duism. The description must be defective, for it 

 must be limited to the leading lines which appear 

 in contemporaneous systems. To trace these with 

 a fair approximation to accuracy is the utmost we 

 can hope to do. 



At first sight it seems as if, among the Hindus, 

 religion has shewn itself as mobile, as fluent, as 

 among other races it has been stiff and unchang- 

 ing. But Hinduism has a long history, and its 

 history explains the apparent phenomenon. The 

 mixture of many races in the population of India, 

 of which one, a superior race, came gradually to 

 dominate over the others, imposing upon them its 

 religious and social ideas, is, at anyrate, the key 

 to the most important of the changes which 

 Hinduism underwent in its earlier period. Reli- 

 gions die hard, and the lower religions of the sub- 

 jugated peoples forced important modifications 

 upon the faith of the conquering race, the exposi- 

 tors of which, as a fusion of races made progress, 

 found themselves compelled to accept, and as best 

 they could to account for, numerous beliefs and 

 practices entirely foreign to the religion of their 

 ancestors. Once social change had gone so far 

 that the Sanscrit, the ancient speech of the superior 

 race, the language of their ancient sacred books, had 

 become generally unintelligible, a powerful check 



