On another day J.W. came to a temple, not a great towering shrine, but a third-rate sort of place, a sacred cow temple.  Here was a family which had journeyed four hundred miles to worship before the idols of this temple.  They offered rice to one idol, flowers to another, holy water from the river to a third.  No one might know what inner urge had driven them here.  The priest, slow to heed them, at length deigned to dip his finger in a little paint and with it he smeared the caste mark on the foreheads of the worshipers.  It was heartless, empty formality.

J.W. watched the woman particularly.  Her face was an unrelieved sadness; she had fulfilled the prescribed rites, in the appointed place, but there was no surcease from the endless round of dull misery which she knew was her ordained lot.  Thought J.W.:  “I suppose this is a sort of joining the church, an initiation or something of that sort.  Not much like what happened when I joined the church in Delafield.  Everybody was glad there; here nobody is glad, not even the priest.”

At Cawnpore J.W. was able to combine business with his missionary inquiries.  Here he found great woollen and cotton mills, not unlike those of America, except that in these mills women and children were working long hours, seven days a week, for a miserable wage.  It was heathenism plus commercialism; that is to say, a double heathenism.  For when business is not tempered by the Christian spirit, it is as pagan as any cow temple.

In these mills was a possible market for certain sorts of Cummings goods, as J.W. learned in the business quarter of the city.  He wanted more opportunity to see how the goods he dealt in could be used, and, having by now learned the path of least resistance, he appealed to a missionary.  It was specially fortunate that he did, for the missionary introduced him to the secretary of the largest mills in the city, an Indian Christian with a history.

Now, this is a hint at the story of—­well, let us call him Abraham.  His own is another Bible name, of more humble associations, but he deserves to be called Abraham.  Thirty years ago a missionary first evangelized and then baptized some two hundred villagers—­outcasts, untouchables, social lepers.  Being newly become Christians, they deposed their old village god.  The landlord beat them and berated them, but they were done with the idol.  Now, that was no easy adventure of faith, and those who thus adventured could not hope for material gain.  They were more despised than ever.

Yet inevitably they began to rise in the human scale.  The missionary found one of them a young man of parts.  Him he took and taught to read, to write, to know the Scriptures.  He began to be an exhorter; then a local preacher; and at last he joined the Conference as a Methodist itinerant at six dollars a month.  Now this boy was the father of Abraham.