taken; the management of this pagoda, they said, had been in the hands of the ruling power for ages back, the innovation proposed was contrary to established custom, and, if persisted in, religious worship in their temple would cease.' Without doubt the people greatly exaggerated the effects of the change; but their feelings thereupon are illustrated by the foregoing quotations. Nor is it to be forgotten that religious offices and properties in India have very generally yielded to that peculiar tendency which governs the course of all rights and interests throughout the country; they have to a great extent become heritable family possessions on a service tenure; and we cannot attempt to alter the regular succession by inheritance, except on extreme necessity. Even the semi-religious duties of the Kâzi had become usually hereditary, and his appointment by the State a mere form, long before the Act of 1864, long indeed before the English took over from Mahomedans or Marathas their dominion in India. It is quite a mistake to infer that the result of ceasing to appoint Kâzis was to lay our Musalman subjects under some such interdict as in the middle ages disabled Christian priests from giving the "sanction of religion to the marriage tie; "* such a bewildering confusion of ideas cannot be seriously entertained by a writer of ability and high culture. But the form of confirming each succession or election did survive, and to abolish it was not to render the Kâzi independent of infidels, but to cast a slur upon his status, to lower his dignity, and even to render his tenure of office less absolutely incontestable. Undoubtedly these slights are felt; and it is questionable whether the motives were sufficiently grave and urgent which induced the Government to dissolve the natural and traditional tie between Church and State, as we should call it; because this formal act not only involved a loss of power, it also drew attention to the religious anomaly of a Mahomedan community under Christian rulers; it raised

"The Mahomedans . . . accuse us of having brought misery into thousands of families by abolishing their law officers, who gave the sanction of religion to the marriage tie; they accuse us of

imperilling their souls, by denying them the means of performing the duties of their faith."-Our Indian Mussulmans, P. 145.

precisely the points which we ought to smooth down. The very fact that we had succeeded, in some parts of the country, to Musalman sovereigns should have made us more careful to supply their exact place, and to continue their functions as nearly as possible; instead of passing a self-denying ordinance to strip off the prerogative which every Mahomedan king exercises as an attribute of his rulership. "She who doth hold the gorgeous East in fee," the English Queen, rules over more Musalmans than does the Osmanli Sultan; our policy should be to prove that we are proud of this great sovereignty, and to lift up the heads of our Muslim fellow-subjects until they also feel the pride of living under the most powerful monarch in Asia.

But to go further into this complicated discussion would require much more space than is here available. The object of this chapter has been to give some account of the oscillations during the present century of our religious policy in India, and to point out certain misunderstandings which seem to have been at the bottom of our attempts to apply very modern European principles to the adjustment of our relations with Asiatic institutions. At first we were over careful to conciliate native prejudices by showing official respect and deference to rites and ceremonies of a nature largely repugnant to European habits of thought on such matters; and we were far too anxious to prove that we had no notion of giving umbrage to powerful creeds by favouring Christianity, which had no political importance. This overshot the mark, and naturally displeased European opinion; so we gave way to a strong reaction, and at one time we borrowed from the religious politics of Great Britain to an extent which laid us open to complaints that the English Government, in its endeavour to assume an impartial and irresponsible attitude toward all religions, had not sufficiently regarded the material interests of the native creeds and rituals, or their prescriptive claims upon the ruler, whoever he may be, of their country. And if the Indian people, as a body, hold that the Indian Government should not dissociate itself entirely from the superintendence of their religious establishments and endowments, it is

no consolation whatever to them that Parliament should also be prepared to forbid all State provision for Christian Liturgies.

If, as may be suspected, we have occasionally missed, in the course of these transactions, the right meaning and scope of that perfect neutrality in religious matters which is very properly announced as the keynote of our policy, probably the cause may be that we have been influenced by the reminiscences of controversies that have been going on over a very different political situation at home. In England an assurance of neutrality would probably mean that the Government had determined to have nothing whatever to do with the affairs, temporal or spiritual, of any sect or creed; in India the declaration is generally taken to convey a welcome guarantee that the Queen will not favour one religion more than another; but it is not so welcome if it is found to mean the complete renunciation by their governors of all direct authority or headship over the management of the temporal interests of their religions. Such a course of action is foreign to all historic experience of the relations between secular and ecclesiastic authorities throughout Asia. It may be the only course now open to the English in India; nevertheless another might be learned from observing the organisation of all great Asiatic governments, and from the example of every ruler over divers tribes or nationalitiesnamely, that in certain conditions of society the immediate authority and close supervision of a monarch over the powerful religious interests with which he has to reckon at every step, is a matter of political expediency, not an affair of doctrine or opinion, but a recognised duty of the State. To relinquish this position is to let go at least one real political advantage which accrues to us from our attitude of perfect neutrality, that of enabling us to superintend and guarantee the religious administration of all sects with entire impartiality, and with the confidence of our subjects. There is no reason whatever to regret the abolition of the old régime under which public officers were literally agents and managers for religious institutions; that system was rightly condemned. But to cut away all the historic ties between Church and State, to free Asiatic

religions from every kind of direct subordination to the executive power, would be to push the principle further in India, where it is not understood and has no advocates, than has as yet been attempted even in any country of Europe, where it is supported by a large and increasing party.

CHAPTER XI.

THE RELIGIOUS SITUATION IN INDIA.

(Fortnightly Review, 1872.)

The striking appearance presented by the religious aspect of India as a survival of the world of præ-Christian ages-Geographical and historic reasons why India has been thus preserved, whereas all Asia west of India has been levelled by Islam, which only partially established itself in India-Incoherence and confusion of religions in India, to be accounted for mainly by its political history—India has never been organized, as a whole, into one great State; and it has been dilapidated by incessant wars-The multitude of gods and rites recalls the description of polytheism in the Roman empire, given by Eusebius-Analogy between the effect on ancient polytheism of the establishment of the Roman peace, and the possible influence upon Hinduism of the English government in India-Speculation as to the future of Hinduism under civilized influences and an ordinary government-Probable disappearance or complete transformation of existing ideas and worships-The English have only to superintend gradual moral and intellectual progress; their empire the most efficient instrument of civilization among dissociated communities. No one examines attentively the extraordinary religious confusion that still prevails throughout the great continent of India without marking it as one very peculiar characteristic of her social condition. For whereas primitive paganism, with all its incoherency, deficient alike in organic structure and in dominant ideas, has been utterly extinguished many centuries ago in Europe and throughout Western Asia, yet, wherever and whenever we cross the border or land on the shore of India, we may find going on before our eyes the things of which we read in ancient books. We seem to step suddenly out of the modern world of formal definite creeds, back into the disorderly supernaturalism of præ-Christian ages. After making allowance for every difference of manners, creed, and climate, and for innumerable distinctions of detail, we may still fancy that in looking over India we catch a reflection of classic polytheism. There we seem to have the nearest surviving representative of a half-civilised society's religious state, as it existed