INDIA

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume III, Issue 167, 25 March 1864, Page 3

INDIA

[From the Bombay Gazette, Jau. 14. A bishop pulling down a cross with his own hands in a cathedral church, and casting this symbol of Christianity from him with every symptom of abhorrence, is a spectacle more startling than edifying to the outside world. On the Sunday after Christmas Day, Bishop Harding is reported to have thus acted during divine services at St. Thomas’s Cathedral ; and his conduct in the matter appears to us worthy of praise rather than blame. There is a marked tendency on the part of some of the Bombay clergy to introduce here the formularies, upholstery and other furniture of Puseyism. The Puseyites of the first generation were worthy of all men’s respect, because they represented the most vigorous intsllect, as well as nearly all the.zeal and earnestness, of the church, and to their efforts must be ascribed a real revival of religion in England. Their successors have made Puseyism a mere synonym for symbolism of a most trivial character, which finds favor with none but old women of one sex and young women of the other. Well, the Bombay Puseyites, though quite aware that the bishop has the greatest contempt for all that sort of thing, had the audacity to insult him, when he came to preach at the cathedral, by sticking a big cross over his chair, and sewing a smaller cross upon the cross of the communion table. In the circumstances, the bishop was, we think, right in shewing openly his indignation at the impertinence of his clergy by defacing one cross and tearing away the other. There are some who speak of the act as irreverent, but they forget that the cross which offended the bishop’s eye was not the symbol of the Christian religion, but the badge of a party in the Church. The wife of a Brahmin in Meywar, unwilling to go through the religious sacrifice of suttee, on the death of her husband, was seized violently by her relations, and tortured and burned. The parties were seized and sentenced by Mr. Eden, the political agent, to transportation for periods of two and three years. The Marion Moor has arrived with 175 miles of the Pursian Gulf submarine cable. On the evening of Wednesday, the 23rd ult., the Lord Bishop of Bombay delivered an address to a crowded audience, chiefly of educated natives, in the hall of the Money Institution, on the untenableness of pure theism. The Honorable Rustomjee Jamjetjee Jeejeeboy has made a donation of 150,000 rupees, <£15,000, to enable five natives of India to qualify'themselves in England to practise in this country as barristers-at-law.