While we
were sitting together my wife's under-woman[2] said to some one who
was talking with her outside the tent-door, 'If that were really the
case, should I not be degraded?' 'You see, Mir Sahib',[3] said I,
'that the very lowest members of society among these Hindoos still
feel the pride of caste, and dread exclusion from their own, however
low.'[4]
'Yes', said the Mir, 'they are a very strange kind of people, and I
question whether they ever had a real prophet among them.'
'I question, Mir Sahib, whether they really ever had such a person.
They of course think the incarnations of their three great divinities
were beings infinitely superior to prophets, being in all their
attributes and prerogatives equal to the divinities themselves.[5]
But we are disposed to think that these incarnations were nothing
more than great men whom their flatterers and poets have exalted into
gods--this was the way in which men made their gods in ancient Greece
and Egypt. These great men were generally conquerors whose glory
consisted in the destruction of their fellow creatures; and this is
the glory which their flatterers are most prone to extol.
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