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certain occasions. Some of them are of dubious character, and the Hindu saciety feels it and is trying its best to remove the evil, but to call these "priestesses because they are prostitutes" and "prostitutes because they are priestesses" is a statement which differs as much from truth as darkness from light. These women are never allowed to enter the main body of the temple, and as for their being priestesses, there is not one woman priestess from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.
“If the present abuses in India have been produced by the Hindu religion, the same religion had the strength of producing a society which made the Greek historian say: 'No Hindu was ever known to tell an untruth, no Hindu woman ever known to be unchaste.' And even in the present day where is there a more chaste woman or a milder man than in India ? The Oriental bubbles may be pricked, but the very hysterical shrieks sent forth from this platform from time to time show to the world that sometimes bubbles may be heavier than the blated balloons of vanity and self-conceit
“I am very, very sorry for those who criticize the great ones of India, and my only consolation is that all their information about them has come from third-hand, fourth-hand sources, percolating through layers of superstition and bigotry. To those who think that in the refusal of the Hindu to criticize the character of Jesus is a tacit acceptation of the superiority of the fanatical nil admirari cult they represent, I am tempted to quote the old fable of Æsop, and tell them: 'Not to you I bend the knee,
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