and an endless growth of all our powers and capacities; but why should Hinduism urge the cultivation of that whose real destiny is “effacement?” Hinduism finds the explanation of life’s mysteries and inscrutable trials in the theory of sins committed in a previous existence.  Christianity, while recognizing the same trials, relieves them with the hope of solutions in a future life of compensating joy.  The one turns to that which is past, unchangeable and hopeless, and finds only sullen despair; the other anticipates an inheritance richer than eye hath seen, or ear heard, or heart conceived.

Fourth, Hinduism has no Saviour and no salvation.  It is not a religion in the highest sense of rescue and reconciliation.  It avails us of no saving power higher than our own unaided effort.  It implies the ruin of sin, but provides no remedy.  It presents no omnipotent arm stretched forth to save.

Its fatalism places man under endless disabilities, and then bids him to escape from the nexus if he can; but it reveals no divine helper, no sacrifice, no mediator, no regenerating Spirit.  It has no glad tidings to proclaim, no comfort in sorrow, no victory over the sting of death, no resurrection unto Life.  Though at a period subsequent to the preaching of the Gospel in India—­perhaps the seventh or eighth century A.D.—­a doctrine of faith (Bakti) was engrafted upon Hinduism, yet it had no hint of a Saviour from sin and death.[69]

Fifth, in Hinduism there is no liberty for the free action of the human spirit.  Though the life of a Brahman is intensely religious, yet it is cramped with exactions which are not only abortive but positively belittling.  The code of Brahmanism never deals with general principles in the regulation of conduct, but fills the whole course of life with punctilious minutiae of observances.  Instead of prescribing, as Christ did, an all-comprehensive law of supreme love to God and love to our neighbor as ourselves, it loads the mind with petty exactions, puerile precepts, inane prohibitions.  “Unlike Christianity, which is all spirit and life,” says Dr. Duff, “Hinduism is all letter and death.”  Repression takes the place of inspiration and the encouragement of hope.

There are a thousand subtle principles in Hinduism whose influence is felt in society and in the state, and to which the faith and power of the Gospel present the very strongest contrasts.  For example, while Christianity has raised woman to a position of respect and honor, and made her influence felt as something sacred and potential in the family and in all society, Hinduism has brought her down even from the place which she occupied among the primitive Aryans, to an ever-deepening degradation.  It has made her life a burden and a curse.  Pundita Ramabai, in her plea for high-caste Hindu women, quotes a prayer of a child widow in which she asks, “O Father of the world, hast Thou not created us? or has perchance some other God made us?  Dost Thou only care for men?  O Almighty One, hast Thou not power to make us other than we are, that we too may have some part in the blessings of life?” Even in this last decade of the nineteenth century the priesthood of Bengal are defending against all humane legislation those old customs which render the girlhood of Hindu women a living death.[70]