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blazing torches, others with musical instruments; and ai twisting their frames into the most wanton attitudes, and vociferating the most indecent songs, rush to and fro, reeling, shouting, and raving, more wildly than the troops of "iron-speared " and "ivy-leaved" Amazons, that were wont, in times of old, to cause the woods and the mountains of Greece to resound with the frantic orgies of Bacchus.

For two days and two nights more, there is a renewal of the same round of worship, and rites, and ceremonies, and dances, and sacrifices, and Bacchanalian fury.

As the morning of the first day was devoted to the consecration of the images, so the morning of the fourth is occupied with the grand ceremony of unconsecrating them. He, who had the divine power of bringing down the goddess to inhabit each tabernacle of wood or clay, has also the power of dispossessing it of her animating presence. Accordingly, 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 favors 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 colors. 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 honor 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 mosquitoes 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,

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A Palankeen Bearer of the Rowaney caste dancing about the streets in celebration of the

Durga Festival. See page 217.

they seem literally covered. It is one living, moving massdense, 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 frenzied 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 honor 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 advance the Redeemer's cause. O 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? Forever? 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 portrayed 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.

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