hold.  In a letter from a village youth to his father, informing him how he had proceeded upon his arrival at Calcutta, whither he had gone for the University Matriculation Examination, he reports that he has offered a goat in sacrifice in order to ensure his success.  What he probably does is this.  In a bazaar near the great temple of Kalighat, near Calcutta, the greatest centre of animal sacrifices in the world, he buys a goat or kid, fetches it into the temple court and hands it over to one of the priests whom he has fee’d.  The priest puts a consecrating daub of red lead upon the animal’s head, utters over it some mantra or sacred Sanscrit text, sprinkles water and a few flowers upon it at the actual place of slaughter, and then delivers it over again to the offerer.  Then when the turn of the offerer, whom we are watching, has come, he hands over the animal to the executioner, who fixes its neck within a forked or Y-shaped stick fixed fast in the ground.  With one blow the animal’s head is severed from its body.  The bleeding head is carried off into the shrine to be laid before the image of the goddess, and become the temple perquisite.  The decapitated body is carried off by the offerer to furnish his family with a holiday meal.  With his forehead ceremonially marked with a touch of the blood lying thick upon the ground, the offerer leaves the temple, his sacrifice finished.  Such is animal sacrifice; if the description recalls the slaughter-house, the actual sight is certainly sickening.  Yet, far as a European now feels from worship in such a place, and thankful to Him who has abolished sacrifice once for all, there is no doubt religious gratification to those who go through what I have described.  Our point is that, as Sir M. Monier Williams declares, in such an offering, “there is no idea of effacing guilt or making a vicarious offering for sin."[123]

[Sidenote:  The educated classes and the idea of sin.]

[Sidenote:  The brahma monopoly of nearness to the Deity broken down.]

The educated classes, breathing now a monotheistic atmosphere, although in close contact with polytheism in their homes and with pantheism in their sacred literature, have reached the platform on which the idea of sin may be experienced.  A member of that class, a pantheist no longer, is in the presence of a personal God, a Moral Being, and is himself a responsible person, with the instincts of a child of that Supreme Moral Being, our Father.  With his education, he knows himself to be independent of brahmanical mediation in his intercourse with that Being.  As confirmation, it is noteworthy how many of the religious leaders of modern times, like Buddha of old, are other than brahman by caste.  In a previous chapter the names of a number of these non-brahman leaders were given.  Even the Hindu ascetics of these latter days are more numerously non-brahman than of old, for in theory only brahmans have reached the ascetical stage of religious development.  Whatever the reason, the brahmanical monopoly of access to and inspiration from the Deity is no longer recognised by new-educated India.