India is generally credited with having known and practised altruism
long before Christ came to preach it. Kalidasa anticipates a modern
idea when he remarks, in _Sakuntala_, that "Among persons who are very
fond of each other, grief shared is grief halved." India, too, is
famed for its monks or penitents, who were bidden to be compassionate
to all living things, to treat strangers hospitably, to bless those
that cursed them (Mann, VI., 48). But in reality the penitents were
actuated by the most selfish of motives; they believed that by obeying
those precepts and undergoing various ascetic practices, they would
get such power that even the gods would dread them; and the Sanscrit
dramas are full of illustrations of the detestably selfish use they
made of the power thus acquired. In _Sakuntala_ we read how a poor
girl's whole life was ruined by the curse hurled at her by one of
these "saints," for the trivial reason that, being absorbed in
thoughts of love, she did not hear his voice and attend to his
personal comforts at once; while _Kausika's Rage_ illustrates the
diabolical cruelty with which another of these saints persecutes a
king and queen because he had been disturbed in his incantations. It
is possible that some of these penitents, living in the forest and
having no other companions, learned to love the animals that came to
see them; but the much-vaunted kindness to animals of the Hindoos in
general is merely a matter of superstition and not an outcome of
sympathy. He has not even a fellow-feeling for suffering human beings.
How far he was from realizing Christ's "blessed are the merciful," may
be inferred from what the Abbé Dubois says:
"The feelings of commiseration and pity, as far as
respects the sufferings of others, never enter into his
heart. He will see an unhappy being perish on the road,
or even at his own gate, if belonging to another caste;
and will not stir to help him to a drop of water,
though it were to save his life."
"To kill a cow," says the same writer (I., 176), "is a crime which the
Hindoo laws punish with death;" and these same Hindoos treat women,
especially widows, with fiendish cruelty. It would be absurd to
suppose that a people who are so pitiless to human beings could be
actuated by sympathy in their devout attitude toward some animals.
Superstition is the spring of their actions. In Dahomey any person who
kills a sacred (non-poisonous) snake is condemned to be buried alive.
In Egypt it was a capital offence to kill an ibis, even accidentally.
What we call lynching seems to have arisen in connection with such
superstitions:
"The enraged multitude did not wait for the slow
process of law, but put the offender to death with
their own hands." At the same time some animals "which
were deemed divinities in one home, were treated as
nuisances and destroyed in others." (Kendrick, II.,
I-21.)