DEIFYING THE QUEEN.

Greymouth Evening Star, Volume XXXI, 6 September 1901, Page 3

DEIFYING THE QUEEN.

The “New Gibbon,” if he were still alive to draw his ingenious parallels, might find a fresh point of resemblance between Borne its apotheosis of the Boman Emperors and modern England with its honors paid to the monuments of the late Queen Victoria after her death. Our Puritan ancestors would no doubt have considered the funeral procession to a statue or picture, and the offerings laid beside it as rank pagan idolatry, though to most modern Britons these expressions of respect and admiration now seem natural enough, In India, however, there has been something like an actual elevation of the Kaiser-i-Hind to the rank of one of the Hindu divinities. In a few small towns the ritual ceremony has been performed, and we are assured that when once public statues of the Queen are erected in the large cities, divine honours will certainly be paid to them. In Delhi a missionary was the means of preventmg, or, at least, of postponing, a solemn reception of the Protestant monarch into the Hindu Pantheon. On the Friday before the Royal funeral one religious community, the Kshatri, held a meeting, and decided to carry a large portrait of Queen Victoria in funeral procession, followed by thousands of natives, and bearing it through the streets of the city to the river Jumna, there to burn it according to their ritual with the honors due to a goddess. But as these Hindus were not sure how the Commissioner might favor their idea, they called upon the missionary, Mr Thomas, for his opinion, and he, though praising their zeal, pointed out that the Cliristain Queen could not well receive such unsuitable homage. The episode, brings before our eyes with peculiar vividness, the union of East and West, ancient and modern, under the great British Empire