Chapter II. Child Marriage.
We remember how, on one occasion, a Hindu friend called upon us, and took our little girl upon his knee. He wanted to say something to her suitable for a child, and he said the first thing he would naturally have said to a little Hindu girl. He looked her in the face, and said in a laughing way, "Well, when are you going to get married?" Our little maid looked at him with great wondering eyes, and a confused silence fell over the room, until the subject was changed. The little lass soon forgot the query, but we never did; and many a time as we tucked her in her bed at night, or watched her eager enthusiasm over her studies, or noticed her guardianship over her brother, or felt her loving care that saved us some burden, have we thanked God that no iron custom had power to take her from our sheltering love and care, until she was able to stand alone, or choose for herself. ...
Knowing the heart of the parent, we often wonder how Hindu mothers feel when they send a winning little girl of eight away from their care and love to a strange home, to take the risk of an unkind mother-in-law or a wore husband. And as they tell her never to forsake her husband's home and return to them save as a dead body, we wonder that the very words do not freeze on their lips. What loneliness must fill a child-wife's heart, when sent away from play with happy brothers and sisters, away from a loving mother's care and sympathy, as she takes up her life in her new home with the companionship of a grave husband of perhaps thirty-five or forty in a household of elderly women, and perhaps with stepchildren older than herself! We have tried to picture our own child in such a position, and instinctively we have covered our eyes with our hands to shutout the awful scene and have said: "Impossible!"

Chapter IV: Widowhood
It is left to the Hindu to excel in wronging and oppressing the widow. In the Old Testament tender provision is made for widows. They were permitted to remarry. God charged the people; "Ye shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child" (Ex. xxii. 22), and then follows the solemn warning, coupled with a promise: "If thou afflict them in anywise and they cry at all to Me, I will surely hear their cry; and My wrath will wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword; and your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless." What balm these words have been in times of bereavement to many hearts in Christian lands.

We well remember the night that our own family circle, sobbing and shaken with grief, knelt in the room where a loved father had just passed away, and a neighbor solemnly and tenderly addressed God in prayer as "The Father of the fatherless and the widow's God." The words stood out with new light because for the first time they covered our need. How many times that scene and those words have returned to us as we have beheld the sad face and shaven head of some Indian widow, and made us long to lead her to trust in the same God. In the light of these tender promises, this loving care, these solemn warnings, how awful the treatment of Hindu widows appears!

A Braham convert to Christ said to us very earnestly a few years ago: "I used to feel very angry toward the English government over what I feel are our wrongs. But when I came to know God, and read the Bible, I understood. I saw God was letting the English make return to us for our long neglect and down-treading of the low castes, and of our oppression of the widow." In 1829, Lord William Bentinck enacted the now famous law that prohibited the Suttee-rite within British dominions whereby a wife could ascend the funeral-pyre of her husband and perish in the flames with the dead body.

For more than two thousand years this custom had been in vogue, in which countless lives had been destroyed. lt was not compulsory, but optional; though no doubt great pressure was brought upon the widow to do it, and it was considered sublimely meritorious by all classes. But once the vow was taken to do it, there was no retreat. If her courage failed her at the last, or as the flames folded about her; or if she managed to escape; she could never be reinstated into her family or caste. As a precaution against a failure of courage, women were often drugged, or the wood was tied down upon the body so that escape would be impossible. An eyewitness to a Suttee tells how as the burning woman fled from the pyre, the bystanders--among whom were the dead man's brothers--shouted out: "Cut her down: knock her down with a bamboo; tie her hand and foot and throw her in again." And this would have been done, had not a humane magistrate interfered. The woman fled into the river, and the judge had her carried to the hospital, assuring her, that as she would now be cast off by her people, she should be the ward of the state.

Other widows approached the pyre with the greatest heroism and with the lofty idea of all it would mean. Had not their later law-books promised that "every woman who thus burns herself shall remain in Paradise with her husband 350,000,000 years by destiny," also that she would secure salvation to herself, her husband, and to their families of the seventh generation ? And there is no doubt that many preferred it to widowhood. One writer says, "The momentary agony of suffocation in the flames was nothing compared to her lot as a widow; " and others have affirmed that, were the hand of law once removed, many would be glad to return to the custom. The [Indian] priesthood introduced the custom, and later writers sanctioned it. The early missionaries to India petitioned government to abolish the crime; but they were told "that the social and religious customs of the people constituted no part of the business of the government and that their rule in India might be endangered by such interference."

Matters went on like this till in the early part of this century, when Lord William Bentinck, who was Governor-General of India, had the courage to enact the law referred to above, which rendered the Suttee a case of culpable homicide and threatened with severe penalties all who encouraged or in any way assisted at the ceremony. A petition was sent in to the Privy Council, signed by eighteen thousand people, many of whom represented the best families of Calcutta, asking that this practice might be allowed to continue; and although this law was enacted in 1829, it did not take full effect till 1844. In some of the native states it lingered on much longer. Wilkins in his book on " Modern Hinduism," records the last case he had heard of, as occurring in 1880.