the officiating Brahman, surrounded by the members of the family, engages, amid various rites and sprinklings and incantations, to send the divinity back to her native heaven; --concluding with a farewell address, in which he tells the goddess, that he expects her to accept of all his services, and to return again to renew her favours on the following year. All now unite in muttering a sorrowful adieu to the divinity, and many seem affected even to the shedding of tears!

Soon afterwards a crowd assembles, exhibiting habiliments bespotted with divers hues and colours. The image is carried forth to the street. It is planted on a portable stage or platform, and then raised on men's shoulders. As the temporary local abode of the departed goddess, it is still treated with profound honour and respect. As the procession advances along the street, accompanied with music and songs, amid clouds of heated dust, you see human beings,— yes, full grown beings, wearing all the outward prerogatives of the human form, marching on either side, and waving their chouries or long hairy brushes, to wipe away the dust, and ward off the musquitoes or flies that might otherwise desecrate or annoy the senseless image. But whither does the procession tend? To the banks of the Ganges-most sacred of streams. For what purpose? Follow it and you will see. As you approach the river, you every where behold numbers of similar processions, from town and country, before and behind, on the right and on the left. You cast your eyes along the banks. As far as vision can reach, they seem literally covered. It is one living moving mass-dense, vast, interminable. The immediate margin being too confined for the contact of such a teeming throng, hundreds and thousands of boats, of every size and every form, are put in requisition. A processional party steps on board, and each vessel is speedily launched on the broad expanse of the waters. The bosom of the stream seems, for miles, to be converted into the crowd, and the movement, and the harlequin exhibitions of an immense floating fair. When the last rites and ceremonies are terminated, all the companies

of image carriers suddenly fall upon their images; they break them to pieces, and violently dash the shivered fragments into the depths of the passing stream. But who can depict the wondrous spectacle? The numbers without number; the fantastic equipages of every rank and grade;—the variegated costumes of every caste and sect ;the strangely indecorous bodily gestures of deluded worshippers; the wild and phrenzied mental excitement of myriads of spectators intoxicated with the scene;-the breaking, crashing, and sinking of hundreds of dispossessed images, along the margin and over the surface of the mighty stream; amid the loud shrill dissonance of a thousand untuneful instruments; commingled with the still more stunning peals of ten thousand thousand human voices! Here language entirely fails. Imagination itself must sink down with wings collapsed; utterly baffled in the effort to conceive the individualities and the groupings of an assemblage composed of such varied magnitudes.

Towards evening the multitudes return to their homes. Return, you will ask, for the purpose of refreshment and repose? No: but to engage in fresh scenes of boisterous mirth and sensual revelry. But when these are at length brought to a close, is there not a season of respite? No: all hearts, all thoughts, are instantaneously turned towards the next incoming festival, in honour of some other divinity. And the necessary preparations are at once set on foot to provide for its due celebration. And thus it has been for ages past; and thus it may be for ages to come ;-unless the Christian people of these lands awake from the sleep of an ungodly, carnal security; arise from the deep slumber of sottish, selfish, luxurious enjoyment; and come forward, far beyond the standard of any present example, to implement their covenant engagement to advance the Redeemer's cause. Oh, ye who do well to dwell at ease in your ceiled houses, when every where the temple of the Lord lies waste !-ye who do well to eat, and drink, and be merry, when the multitudes of the nations are up in arms against your Sovereign Lord and Redeemer,-up in arms against the true peace and

everlasting happiness of their own souls, those precious souls that will never die !-ye may wholly resist every appeal that is thus addressed to you at a distance, in words:but, frozen-hearted as many of you are, could ye, we would ask, wholly resist the thrilling appeal which the direct exhibition of the terrible reality would address to you?

When we have stood on the banks of the Ganges, surrounded by deluded multitudes engaged in ablutions, in order to cancel the guilt and wipe away the stains of transgressions ;-here, assailed by the groans of the sick and the dying, stretched on the wet banks beneath "a hot and copper sky;" and there, stunned by loud vociferations in the name of worship, addressed to innumerable gods;—on the one hand, the flames of many a funeral pile blazing in view; and on the other, the loathsome spectacle of human carcasses floating unheeded and unknown, amid the dash of the oar, and the merry songs of the boatmen :-and when we felt our own solitude in the midst of the teeming throng,—a cold sensation of horror has crept through the soul; and the heart has well-nigh sunk and failed, through the overbearing impressions of sense, and the desponding weakness of faith. Gracious God! have we exclaimed, how marvellous is the extent of thy long-suffering and forbearance! What earthly monarch could, for a single hour, endure the thousand thousandth part of the indignities that are here daily offered to thy throne and Majesty, O thou King of kings! And yet, thus it has been for ages! Lord, how long will it continue to be !-For ever? No; no! When we look at the apparently unchanged past, and survey the apparently unchangeable present, the review and contemplation seem to sound the death-knell of hope, that would cradle us in black despair. But when we glance at the future, as pourtrayed in the "sure word of prophecy," we there learn to realize the mystery of "hoping against hope." From these polluted waters of a turbid earthly stream, we turn the eye of faith to the waters of Gospel grace, which are seen, in the prophetic vision, to issue from under the threshold of the temple of Zion eastward. They swell and deepen into a

river. It is the river of life. Wherever it rolls, disease barrenness and death disappear. Within it every thing moves and is healed. Its banks also are shaded with trees, -they are trees of life, whose leaf shall not fade, neither shall the fruit thereof ever be consumed. Roll on, thou life-giving river! In Judah's land, on Calvary's mount, where the great Redeemer suffered, bled, and died, was thy fountain first opened. Roll on, thou life-giving river! Long hast thou been in reaching this dreary moral waste. But the time appointed, even the set time, is come. Now, roll on and overflow the sterile wilderness with thy refreshing waters. Let life and health, verdure and beauty spring forth from thy gladdening presence-earnests of millenial gloryharbingers of celestial bliss!

Next to the annual festival of Durga, one of the most popular in Eastern India, is that of the Charak Pujah.

Strictly and properly, this festival is held in honour of Shiva, in his character of Maha Kala; or time the great destroyer of all things. In this character, his personified energy or consort is Parvati, under the distinction and appropriate form of Maha Kali. In the annual festival held in honour of the former, the worship of the latter appears at all times to have been blended. And, in the lapse of ages, the female form of Kali has become a far more important and formidable personage, in the eyes of the multitude, than the male form of Maha Kala; and often engrosses more than a proportionate share of the homage and adoration of deluded worshippers. To save, therefore, the tediousness of circumlocution, and the intricacy of a perpetual double reference, we must confine ourselves to a brief notice of the goddess Kali, as connected with the celebration of the Charak Pujah.

It is proper, however, to state, that Brahmans, Kshattryas, and Vaishyas, take no active part in the actual celebration of the rites peculiar to this festival. Most of them, however, contribute largely towards the expense of it, and

countenance the whole of the proceedings as applauding spectators; though some of them, in words, profess to disapprove of many of the practices.

Of all the Hindu divinities, this goddess is the most cruel and revengeful. Such, according to some of the sacred legends, is her thirst for blood, that,-being unable, in one of her forms, on a particular occasion, to procure any of the giants for her prey,-in order to quench her savage appetite, she "actually cut her own throat, that the blood issuing thence, might spout into her mouth." Of the goddess,represented in the monstrous attitude of supporting her own half-severed head in the left hand, with streams of blood gushing from the throat into the mouth,-images may this day be seen in some districts of Bengal. The supreme delight of this divinity, therefore, consists in cruelty and torture; her ambrosia is the flesh of living votaries and sacrificed victims; and her sweetest nectar, the copious effusion of their blood.

The Kalika Purana, one of the divine writings, is chiefly devoted to a recital of the different modes of worshipping and appeasing this ferocious divinity. If, for example, a devotee should scorch some member of his body, by the application of a burning lamp, the act would prove most acceptable to the goddess. If he should draw some blood from himself, and present it, the libation would be still more delectable. If he should cut off a portion of his own flesh, and present it as a burnt sacrifice, the offering would be most grateful of all. If the devotee should present whole burnt-offerings upon the altar, saying,—“ Hrang, hring, Kali, Kali !—Oh! horrid toothed goddess, eat, eat; destroy all the malignant; cut with this axe; bind, bind; seize, seize; drink this blood; spheng, spheng; secure, secure !-Salutation to Kali!"— these will prove acceptable in proportion to the supposed importance of the animated beings sacrificed. By the blood drawn from fishes and tortoises the goddess is pleased one month;-a crocodile's blood will please her three; that of certain wild animals nine; that of a bull or a guana, a year :—an antelope's or wild boar's, twelve years;

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