The institutes of a religion which form a regular system of
superstitious rites, sanctioned by all that can secure the devotion of
the multitude, are rigidly observed by the followers of Brahma; and
among the many splendid festivals held in honour of their gods, there is
none so picturesque, and none so imposing, as that instituted in honour
of Durga, the goddess of nature, whose festival is ushered in by rural
sounds and rural games. “It is thus,” say the Puranas, or holy text,
“she was awakened by Brahma, during the night of the gods.”
The dawn had yet but faintly silvered the plantain-trees which thatched
the Christian’s hut, when the distant strains of sylvan music stole on
his ear, as he knelt engaged in the exercise of his morning devotions.
The sounds approached: he arose, and observed a religious procession
moving near his tent towards a pagoda, which lay embosomed in the dark
shades of the forest. The band was led by faquirs and pilgrims. The idol
was carried by women, underneath a canopy of flowers. A troop of
officiating priestesses danced before its triumphal car: the splendour
of their ornaments almost concealed their charms, and they moved with
languid grace, to the strains of pastoral instruments, while small
golden bells, fastened round their wrists and ancles, played with the
motion of their feet, and kept time to the melody of their hymns. They
were succeeded by the Guru of Cashmire, reposing on a palanquin, and the
Brahmins of the temple followed. The Prophetess led the band of
tributary votaries; _her_ eyes, with a celestial meekness, threw their
soft and dewy beams on the offerings which she carried in a small golden
vase; and her cheek seemed rather to reflect the tint of the scarlet
berries of the mullaca, which twined her dark hair, than to glow with
the blush of a human emotion. The folds of her pure drapery, soft and
fleecy as it was, but faintly defined the perfect forms of her perfect
figure, of which an exquisite modesty, a mysterious reserve, were the
distinguishing characteristics. Her thought seemed to belong to Heaven,
and her glance to the offering she was about to make at its shrine. A
train of religious women surrounded her, and the procession was filled
up with votaries of every description, and of every class, from the
princely Chittery to the humble Soodar, all laden with their various
offerings of rice and oil, of fruit and flowers, of precious stones and
exquisite odours.
As they proceeded, they reached an altar erected to _Camdeo, the god of
mystic love_. At the sight of this object, every eye turned with
devotion on his consecrated Priestess. The procession stopped. The sibyl
Priestess stood at the foot of the shrine of her tutelar deity, and the
superstitious multitude fell prostrate at the feet of the Prophetess.
They invoked her intercession with the god she served: mothers held up
their infants to her view; fathers inquired from her the fate of their
absent sons; and many addressed her on the future events of their lives;
while she, not more deceiving than deceived, became the victim of her
own imposition, and stood in the midst of her votarists, in all the
imposing charm of holy illusion. Her enthusiasm once kindled, her
imagination became disordered; believing herself inspired, she looked
the immortality she fancied, and uttered rhapsodies in accents so
impressive and so tender, and with emotions so wild, and yet so
touching, that the mind no longer struggled against the imposition of
the senses, and the spirit of fanatical zeal confirmed the influence of
human loveliness.
Hitherto, curiosity had induced the Missionary to follow the procession;
but he now turned back, horror-struck. Too long had the apostle of
Christianity been the witness of those impious rites, offered by the
idolaters to the idolatress; and the indignation he felt at all he had
seen, at all he had heard, produced an irritability of feeling, new to a
mind so tranquil, and but little consonant to a character so regulated,
so subdued, so far above even the laudable weakness of human nature. He
considered the false Prophetess as the most fatal opponent to his
intentions, and he looked to her conversion as the most effectual means
to accomplish the success of his enterprise. He shuddered to reflect on
the weakness and frailty of man, who is so often led to truth by the
allurements which belong to error; and he devoted the remainder of the
day to the consideration of those pious plans, by which he hoped, one
day, to shade the brow of the Heathen Priestess with the sacred veil of
the Christian Nun.
The complexional springs of passion in the character of the Missionary
had been regulated and restrained by the habits of his temperate and
solitary life; the natural impetuosity and ardour of his feelings had
been tranquillized and subdued, by the principles of his pure and
spiritual religion; and though his perceptions were quick and rapid in
their exercise, yet he had so accustomed his mind to distrust its first
impulse, that, all enthusiast as he was, he was yet less so from the
vivacity of a first impression than from the mental operation which
succeeded to it. The idea which was coolly admitted into his mind,
gradually possessed itself of his imagination, and there gave birth to a
series of impressions and emotions, which, in their combined force,
finally mastered every thought and act of his life. Thus he became
zealous in any pursuit, not because it had, in the first instance,
struck him powerfully, nor that he had suffered himself to be borne away
by its immediate impression, but because that, suspicious of himself, he
had examined it, in all its points of view, considered it in all its
references, and studied it in all its relations, till it exclusively
occupied his reveries, received the glow of his powerful fancy, and
engaged all the force of his intellectual being. It was thus that he
frequently meditated himself into passion, and that the habits of his
artificial character produced an effect on his conduct similar to that
which the indulgence of his natural impulses would eventually have given
birth to.
When the description of the Priestess of Cashmire first met his ear, it
made no impression on his mind: when he beheld her receiving the homage
of a deity, all lovely as she was, she awakened no other sentiment in
his breast than a pious indignation, natural to his religious zeal, at
beholding human reason so subdued by human imposition. When her story
had been related to him, and her influence described, he then considered
her as the powerful rival of his influence, and the most fatal obstacle
to the success of the enterprise he had engaged in; but when the Pundit
had awakened the hope of her conversion, and asserted the possibility of
her influence becoming the instrument of divine grace to her nation,
then the Indian gradually became the sole and incessant subject of his
thoughts; and her idea was so mingled with his religious hopes, so
blended with his sacred mission, so intimately connected with all his
best, his brightest views and purest feelings, that, even in prayer, she
crossed his imagination; and when he sued from Heaven a blessing on his
enterprise, the name of the idolatress of Cashmire was included in the
orison.
The Guru and his train had left Lahore, on the evening of the festival
of the goddess Durga, for his native province; and, a few weeks after
his departure, the Missionary commenced his pilgrimage towards Upper
India. He was now equal to his undertaking; for he spoke the pure Hindu
with the fluency of an educated native, and read the Shanscrit with ease
and even with facility. He had made himself master of the topography of
the country--the valley of Cashmire, its villages, its capital, its
pagodas, and the temple and Brahminical college, in which the Guru
presided; and already furnished with the means of providing for the few
contingencies of his pilgrimage, the most necessary luxury of which is
afforded by the numerous tanks and springs, whose construction is
considered a religious duty, the apostolic Nuncio left Lahore, and
commenced his journey towards Cashmire.
The black robe of his order flung over his lighter Indian vestment, his
brow shaded by the monastic cowl, his hand grasping the pastoral
crosier, wearing on his breast the sacred crucifix, and nourished only
by the fruits and nutritious grains, with which a bounteous nature
supplied him. His, resembled the saintly progress of the Apostles of
old; a fine image of that pure, tender, and self-denying faith, whose
divine doctrines he best illustrated by the example of his own sinless
life; but he observed, with an acute feeling of disappointment, that the
harvest bore no proportion to the exertions of the labourer. In whatever
direction he turned his steps, the zeal of Hindu devotion met his view,
while every where the religion of the Hindus gave him the strongest idea
of the wild extravagance which superstition is capable of producing, or
the acute sufferings which religious fortitude is equal to sustain.
Every where he found new reason to observe, how perfectly the human mind
could bend its plastic powers to those restraints, which the law of
society, the prejudices of country, or the institutes of religion,
imposed. He felt, how arbitrary was the law of human opinion; how little
resorted to were the principles of human nature; how difficult to
eradicate those principles impressed on the character without any
operation of the reason, received in the first era of existence,
expanding with the years, and associating with all the feelings, the
passions, and the habits of life. But these reflections, equally
applicable to human character in the West and in the East, were now
first made under the new impressions formed by the observation of novel
prejudices in others, not stronger, perhaps, but different from his own;
and he whose life had been governed by a dream, was struck by the
imbecility of those who submitted their reason to the tyranny of a
baseless illusion.
Amidst the tissue of prejudices, however, which disfigure the faith of
the Hindus, he sometimes perceived the force of their mild and
benevolent natures bearing away the barriers of artificial distinctions;
and though it is deemed infamous, and hazards loss of cast, for a
follower of Brahma to partake of the same meal with the professor of
any other faith, yet the Missionary found in India the true region of
hospitality; choulteries, or public asylums for travellers, frequently
occurred in the course of his route; while the master of every simple
hut was ready to spread the mat beneath the stranger’s feet, and to
weave the branches of his plantain-tree above the stranger’s head; to
present to the parched lip of the wanderer the milk of his cocoa-nut,
and to his aching brow the shade of his humble roof. Happy are they who
preserve, amidst the wreck of human reason, the dear and precious
vestiges of human tenderness!
As the Missionary proceeded towards the north, he was still hailed with
the pensive welcome of the Indian smile. Some few of the simple and
patriarchal people, who had heard of Europe, knew him by his complexion
for a native of the West; but the greater number believed him to be a
wandering Arab, from the lofty dignity of his stature, from the
brilliant expression of his countenance; and then they would ask him to
speak of the Genii of his religion, or to relate to them those splendid
tales for which his nation is so celebrated: but when he sought to
undeceive them, when he declared that he came, not to amuse by fiction,
but to enlighten by truth; when he openly avowed to them the nature and
object of his sacred mission, they fled him in fear, or heard him with
incredulity.
It was in vain that he invoked from Heaven some part of that miraculous
power granted to those who had preceded him; that he might be able, with
Francis Xavier, to cure the sick by a touch, or raise the dead by a
look[15]. He could, indeed, watch with the saint, pray with the saint,
and suffer with the saint, perhaps even far beyond those who had
succeeded him: he could overwhelm by his eloquence, command by his
dignity, attach by his address, and awe by his example; but he could
not subvert a single law of nature, nor, by any miraculous power, change
the immutable decree of the First Will:--for, to him it was still denied
to convert those from error, through the medium of astonishment, whom he
could not subdue by the influence of truth.
In less than a fortnight from his departure from Lahore, he reached the
upper region, those dreadful and desolate plains, which stretch towards
the base of the great and black rock of Bimbhar. Alone in the dreary
waste, the Missionary felt all the value of an enterprise, marked by
perils so terrific; but he felt it unsubdued. The dry and hot air[16]
parched his lip; his feet trod in the channel of a torrent, dried up,
whose bed seemed strewed with burning lava; a fever preyed upon the
springs of being, and a parching thirst consumed his vitals; death, in
the most dreadful form, met his view, but found him unappalled; and the
tide of life was almost exhausted in his veins, when, worn out and
feeble, he reached the foot of the rock of the pass of Bimbhar,
denominated _The Mouth of the Vale of Cashmire_. High, sharp, and rude,
it held a menacing aspect. Weak and enfeebled, the Missionary with
difficulty ascended its savage acclivities. Nature seemed almost to have
made her last effort when he reached its summit: his strength was wholly
exhausted. Supported by his crosier, he paused, and cast one look behind
him. He beheld the terrific wastes he had passed, and shuddered: he
turned round, and flung his glance on the scene which opened at his
feet; and the heaven which receives the soul of the blessed, met his
view[17].
Confined within the majestic girdle of the Indian Caucasus, Cashmire,
the birth-place of Brahma, the scene of his avatars, came at once under
his observation. The brilliant scene, the balmy atmosphere, renovated
his spirits and his frame. He rapidly descended the rock, now no longer
bleak, no longer rude, but embossed with odoriferous plants, and shaded
by lofty shrubs. His vital powers, his mental faculties, seemed to
dilate to the influence of the pure and subtil air, which circulated
with a genial softness through his frame, and gave to his whole being a
sense of vague but pure felicity, which made even life itself enjoyment.
The cusa-grass, which shrunk elastically beneath his steps, emitted a
delicious odour; the golden fruit of the assoca-tree offered a luscious
refreshment to his parched lip, and countless streams of liquid silver
meeting, in natural basons, under the shade of the seringata, whose
beauty has given it a place in the lunar constellations, offered to his
weary frame the most necessary luxury that he could now enjoy.
It was evening when he reached the vale of Cashmire[18]. Purple mists
hung upon the lustre of its enchanting scenes, and gave them, in fairy
forms, to the stranger’s eye. The fluttering plumage of the peacocks and
lories fanned the air, as they sought repose among the luxuriant foliage
of the trees: the silence of the delicious hour knew no interruption,
but from the soothing murmurs of innumerable cascades. All breathed a
tranquil but luxurious enjoyment; all invited to a repose which
resembled a waking dream. The Missionary had no power to resist the soft
and new emotions which possessed themselves of his whole being; it
seemed as if sensation had survived all power of perception; and,
throwing himself on the odorous moss, which was shaded by the
magnificent branches of the pamelo, the oak of the East, he slept.