1849.] Kocch, Bodo and Dhinidl People. 721 



Priesthood. — The office of the priesthood is not an indefeasible 

 right vested in a caste, nor is the profession at all exclusive. The 

 priests are native Bodo or Dhimal, no way distinguished from the 

 rest of the community, either before or after induction. Occasionally 

 the son will succeed the father iu this office, but rarely ; and who- 

 ever chooses to qualify himself, may become a priest, and may give up 

 the profession whenever he sees fit. More than this, the Elders of the 

 people may and do participate in the functions of the priesthood, and 

 even exercise them alone, so that it is not improbable there was a time 

 when the civil heads of the community were likewise its ecclesiastical 

 directors. This imperfect constitution of the clerical office has, pro- 

 bably, proved upon the whole a great blessing to these people by sav- 

 ing them from the trammels of all refined Paganism, (Egyptian, 

 Classic, Indian,) though it has had the necessary ill effect of keeping 

 their religious ideas in a state of extreme vagueness. I am not inclined 

 to consider " the natural man" as a savage ; and I have no hesitation 

 in calling the religion of the amiable Bodo and Dhimals, the religion 

 of Nature, or rather, the natural religion of man. It consists, clearly 

 enough, of the worship of the most striking and influential of sensible 

 objects — of the " starry host," and of the terrene elements — with a 

 vague but impressive reference of the powers displayed by these sensi- 

 ble objects to an immaterial or moral source, unknown indeed, but still 

 adored as Divine, and even as a divine Unity.* It is true that these 

 latter conceptions are too vague to be denominated, strictly speaking, 

 ideas, proper to these people, much less positive tenets of their creed ; 

 and hence their languages have no word for God, for soul, for heaven, 

 for hell, for sin, for piety, for prayer, for repentance. It is true that 

 their gods are many, and are all void of definite moral attributes 

 (save when their own meaner passions of vanity and anger and 

 grief are occasionally ascribed to them). But still, in the pre-emi- 

 nence assigned, however vaguely, to one (or two) of these gods, we 

 cannot deny to these simple-minded races the germ of a feeling of 

 God's unity ; and when they appeal to Him as the avenger of perjury, 

 the sanctioner of an oath — we must acknowledge that the moral senti- 



* 1 refer the caviller to Pope's universal prayer, and to that famous fane of anti- 

 quity dedicated to the unknown God. 



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