Havell, Ernest B.: Benares, the sacred city: Sketches of Hindu life and religion (London, [1912])

226 BENARES, THE SACRED CITY

Whether the Hindu Central College at Benares
will survive the remarkable personality of its leading
spirit, Mrs. Besant, may well be questioned, but there
is no doubt that Hinduism will continue to be pro-
foundly modified by the inflow of Western ideas.
There can be no greater mistake than to consider
Hinduism as so many immutable customs and forms
of ritual and belief, which may be uprooted, but cannot
be trained or adapted.

Just as thousands of years ago the Vedic Rishis,
Vasishtha and Vishwamitra, represented two opposite
schools, one of rigid orthodoxy and exclusiveness, the
other of tolerance and progressive thought, so to-day
there is, on the one side, the Brahmin of the old
school, jealous of his social privileges, and guarding
the ancient forms of his religion from the taint of
innovation; and, on the other side, the Hindu who
seeks to adjust the canons of his faith to social
changes and the progress of human knowledge.

The strength of Hinduism has always lain, not in
its exclusiveness, but in its extraordinary power of
adaptation and assimilation. It is waste of energy
for Christians to inveigh merely against Hindu super-
stition, idolatry, and caste. It is rather by sympathetic
study of Hinduism in all its aspects that we shall learn
to reach the hearts of the people, as our great Teacher
did on the shores of Galilee.

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