knives and forks. They eat with the fingers alone, and generally sleep on a charpoy or mat When you enter a Hindoo home you are at once struck with the naked look of the room—no chair or sofa to sit upon, no pictures on the walls, no piano or musical instrument, no library of books, no maps, no table with the newspaper or periodical or album upon it, and you wonder how they can bear to live such a life; to you it would be a misery and a blank. But you are a Christian, and your holy religion has made you to differ, and taught you the nature and value of a Christian home and its conveniences and joys.
Nothing would more surprise them in visiting our Western world than to see how generally, according to the ability of each, we beautify and adorn our residences, and surround them with flowers and verdure and neatness. They would think this all very artificial, and perhaps unnecessary, and could not enter into the feelings of those whose constant effort seems to be to make their abode on earth, in its purity, companionship, and peace, a type of the home in heaven.
Woman alone in heathenism, even where she has possessed peculiar wealth and power and opportunity for the effort, cannot make this earthly paradise; she requires Christianity to be successful. Cases have occurred where European ladies have been induced—in Delhi, Lucknow, etc.—to enter even royal zenanas as wives. But though knowing the difference, and probably fondly hoping they could by their presence and ability constitute a happy social state, they soon realized that the very atmosphere forbid the development of the home they hoped to cultivate, and the fair experimenters had, in utter despair, to abandon their efforts and their hopes, and not only so, but themselves to sink to the sad level of the heathenish community into which they had ventured!
“Home is the sacred refuge of our life.”
True, but India's sons can never learn the sentiment and experience which Dryden's line thus expresses till the daughters of India receive the Christianity which alone can cultivate their minds and
