hereafter; but the whole teaching and spirit of the “Code” rests as an iron yoke upon womanhood, and it is largely a result of this high authority that the female sex has for ages been subjected to the most cruel tyranny and degradation.  It might well be said that, in spite of the horrors of infanticide, the most merciful element of Hinduism with respect to woman is the custom by which so large a proportion of female children have been destroyed at birth.  The same fatalistic principles affect all ranks and conditions of Hindu society.  The poor Sudra is not only low-born and degraded, but he is immovably fixed in his degradation.  He is cut off from all hope or aspiration; he cannot rise from the thraldom of his fate.  In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna declares to Arjuna that it is

   “Better to do the duty of one’s caste
    Though bad or ill performed, and fraught with evil,
    Than undertake the business of another,
    However good it be.”

Thus even the laws of right and wrong are subordinate to the fatality of caste, and all aspiration is paralyzed.

On the other hand, it has been acknowledged repeatedly that the sternest type of Puritan theology, as a moral and political force, is full of inspiration; it does not deaden the soul; it stimulates the action of free-will; its moral earnestness has been a great power in molding national destinies.  Mr. Bancroft has not hesitated to declare that the great charters of human liberty are largely due to its strong conception of a divine and all-controlling purpose.  Even Matthew Arnold admitted that its stern “Hebraic” culture, as he called it, had wrought some of the grandest achievements of history.  But Hindu fatalists, noble Aryans as they were at first, have been conquered by every race of invaders that has chosen to assail them.  And no better result could have been expected from a philosophy whose summum bonum is the renunciation of life as not worth living, and the loss of all personality by absorption into the One supreme existence.

Buddhism does not present the same fatalistic theory of creation as Brahminism, but it introduces even a more aggravated fatalism into human life.  Both alike load down the newly-born with burdens of guilt and consequent suffering transmitted from previous existences.  But in the case of Buddhism there is no identity between the sinner, who incurred the guilt, and the recipient of the evil kharma, which demands punishment.  Every man comes into the world entangled in the moral bankruptcy of some one who has gone before, he knows not who nor where.  There is no consciousness of identity, no remembrance, no possible sense of guilt, or notion of responsibility.  It is not the same soul that suffers, for in either case there is no soul; there is only a bundle of so-called skandhas—­certain faculties of mind and body newly combined whose interaction produces thought and emotion.  Yet there is conscious suffering.