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OF THE HINDUS.
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their fathers. They have not however yet adopted a better. The last description of English scholars is a branch from that just specified, and consists of a few who have read, reflected, reasoned, and believed. One of them, Kristo Mohan Banerji, a young man of very excellent ability and attainments, by birth a Brahman of the most respectable rank, is an ordained minister of the English church in Calcutta.
It is the advantage of those English scholars who halt yet between two opinions, who have no religion at all, that the work to which competition has been invited", is calculated in the first instance to promote. The feeling with which most of them regard Hinduism is favourable to conviction, and it might be supposed, that as they have already disavowed allegiance to it, they require not to be enlightened as to its errors and evils; but this would be a mistake. Their English education has left them no opportunity of native education, and they know almost as little of what they abandon as what they decline to accept. It is not possible to depend upon the durability of impressions, taken up from a wish perhaps to get rid of inconvenient restrictions, or from the vanity of being thought wiser than others, rather than from a rational estimate of the defects of a system grounded
* [In a Convocation, holden on Thursday the 13th of February 1840, the University of Oxford accepted the proposal of a prize of £ 200, made through the Bishop of Calcutta, "for the best refutation of Hinduisın in its main systems, both exoteric and esoteric”.]
