It is only by contact with the crowds of eager pilgrims and devotees which throng the streets and temples of Benares that one may realize the vital force which Brahminism exercises in India.  Next to Mohammedanism it is the livest and most influential and practical of all religions.  The devotee lives and breathes and feels his faith.  It enters every experience of his career, it governs every act, and compared with Brahminism, Christianity is perfunctory and exercises practically little control over its believers.  Yet Christianity has come here, as it has entered all the other sacred cities of India, and under the very shadow of the Hindu holy of holies, within the circle that bounds the favored gate of heaven, it has set up and maintained several of the most prosperous and well attended schools in India.  The government has established a college of high standard in a handsome gothic building, which many consider the best in India.  And all agree that it is an admirable institution.  It has about seven hundred students and teaches modern sciences which contradict every principle that the Brahmins propose.  There is also a school there for the higher education of women with about 600 students, maintained by the Maharaja of Vizianagram, a learned and progressive Hindu prince, who has large estates in the neighborhood, and there are several other distinctly modern institutions in whose light Brahminism cannot live.  They are growing and it is slowly decaying.  The number of devotees and pilgrims who come there is still enormous, but those who have the best means of knowing declare that it is smaller every year.  But while the decrease is comparatively small, its significance is great, and so great that prominent Brahmins have recently held a conference to consider what shall be done to protect the faith and defend it against the vigorous assaults of the school teachers, the missionaries and the materialists.

It does not take Hindus long to learn that the teachings of their priests do not conform to the conditions of modern civilization, and that their practices are not approved by those who believe in modern standards of morals.  It is difficult for an educated man to adhere to or accept the teachings of the Hindu priests while their practices are absolutely repugnant to him.  The church, therefore, if it may be called a church, must be reformed, and its practices must be revised, if the decay which is now going on is ever arrested.

Several religions have been born and bred and have died in Benares.  Vedic, Moslem, Buddhist, Brahmin have been nursed and flourished and have decayed within the same walls.  It is impossible to ascertain when the Ganges was first worshiped, or when people began to build temples upon its banks, or when Benares first became sacred.  Water was one of the first objects worshiped; the fertilizing and life giving influence of a stream was one of the first phenomena of nature recognized.  Ganga, the beautiful heroine of a Hindu legend, is supposed to have lived at the source of the water to which her name is given, and the river is often represented as flowing from the head of Siva, the chief deity of the Brahmins, the most repulsive, the most cruel, the most vicious of all the gods.