with their knives cut the flesh piece-meal from his bones, avoiding the head and bowels, till the living skeleton, dying from loss of blood, is relieved from torture, when its remains are burnt and the ashes mixed with the new grain to preserve it from insects.’”

In some respect, the civilized Hindoos are even worse than the wild tribes of India.  Nothing is more sternly condemned and utterly abhorred by modern religion than licentiousness and obscenity, but a well-informed and eminently trustworthy missionary, the Abbe Dubois, declares that sensuality and licentiousness are among the elements of Hindoo religious life: 

“Whatever their religion sets before them, tends to encourage these vices; and, consequently, all their senses, passions, and interests are leagued in its favor” (II., 113, etc.).

Their religious festivals “are nothing but sports; and on no occasion of life are modesty and decorum more carefully excluded than during the celebration of their religious mysteries.”

More immoral even than their own religious practices are the doings of their deities.  The Bhagavata is a book which deals with the adventures of the god Krishna, of whom Dubois says (II., 205): 

“It was his chief pleasure to go every morning to the place where the women bathe, and, in concealment, to take advantage of their unguarded exposure.  Then he rushed amongst them, took possession of their clothes, and gave a loose to the indecencies of language and of gesture.  He maintained sixteen wives, who had the title of queens, and sixteen thousand concubines....  In obscenity there is nothing that can be compared with the Bhagavata.  It is, nevertheless, the delight of the Hindu, and the first book they put into the hands of their children, when learning to read.”

Brahmin temples are little more than brothels, in each of which a dozen or more young Bayaderes are kept for the purpose of increasing the revenues of the gods and their priests.  Religious prostitution and theological licentiousness prevailed also in Persia, Babylonia, Egypt, and other ancient civilized countries.  Commenting on a series of obscene pictures found in an Egyptian tomb, Erman says (154):  “We are shocked at the morality of a nation which could supply the deceased with such literature for the eternal journey.”  Professor Robertson Smith says that “in Arabia and elsewhere unrestricted prostitution was practised at the temples and defended on the analogy of the license allowed to herself by the unmarried mother goddess.”  Nor were the early Greeks much better.  Some of their religious festivals were sensual orgies, some of their gods nearly as licentious as those of the Hindoos.  Their supreme god, Zeus, is an Olympian Don Juan, and the legend of the birth of Aphrodite, their goddess of love, is in its original form unutterably obscene.