HINDU LIFE AND CHARACTER.
WRITING on this subject to the Missionary Review, Rev. Henry Rice, of Madras, says:— “The national life of the Hindus presents an almost perfect contrast to that of Europeans. They differ in social usages, in religious feelings, and in almost every particular affecting the habits and inner condition of a people. For ages the Hindu has been unprogressive, and it is only in modern times that he has experienced the quickening influences of the civilization and Christianity brought to him from Western countries. But even now the institutions of the past still retain a powerful hold on the affections of all classes of the community. In the fields you see the same kind of plow scratching the soil as was employed two thousand years ago; oxen tread out the corn as they did when David was king over Israel; and all the methods pursued in agriculture are much the same as those which existed in the patriarchal period of the world. You enter a village, and on either side of the narrow streets you see women sitting on the floors of their houses grinding small stone hand-mills, as was the fashion in Judea in the time of Christ. “The Hindu is an ancient personage, stereotyped in all his ways. He can direct you to a distant past when sages filled the land, whose words of wisdom have become the rule of life to all succeeding generations. He can point you to the sacred books which they wrote on philosophy, poetry, astrology, and religion, and which are read by multitudes, and consequently he says: ‘Why should I change my ways? I prefer the old ones.’”